[HN Gopher] Cargo Cult Science (1974)
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Cargo Cult Science (1974)
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-07-31 06:26 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fermatslibrary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fermatslibrary.com)
| Y_Y wrote:
| This is one of the more influential ideas I've ever come across.
| Not that the actual behaviour of people living on isolated
| islands briefly visited in wartime matters so much, but it's a
| good story. If your take away the concept of
|
| "In trying to emulate success by copying without understanding,
| you may make the error of copying the visible things, rather than
| the relevant ones."
|
| then it's a pattern than can be seen in all walks of life, rather
| than just science (where the difference may be particularly
| stark). I find that many people will now recognise an accusation
| of "cargoculting" (although I have heard this interpreted as
| meaning the worship of a British prince).
| exitb wrote:
| In many cases people are being rewarded based on superficial
| appearances, rather than concrete results. No wonder that's
| what they optimize for.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I think that there is a pernicious impact on many folks
| because they do "all the right things" and still struggle
| mightily with their work and responsibilities because doing
| 80 hard hours of the wrong work doesn't deliver.
| ben_w wrote:
| It's also what a lot of AI are optimising for, which is where
| I think the risk is at the moment: the state of the art in AI
| has gone from "these things don't have any common sense" to
| "when common sense and reality diverge, they often go for
| common sense".
|
| Great for chat, not so great for avoiding surprise botulism
| in home-made garlic oil:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The supremacy of form over function, appearance over
| substance has been a dominant feature of our society for a
| long time. From the mid 90s: """ Just visit
| Los Angeles. Just walk down the walk of stars at one
| o'clock in the morning, and ask yourself "Are these people
| really here, or is this central casting?" And it isn't
| a funny question. And as our society develops in this
| telematic way, it's not going to be funny to ask it
| around the Christmas dinner table about Uncle Henry,
| "Is that Uncle Henry, or is it just someone playing
| Uncle Henry?" The further postmodern insight is: what
| difference does it make! See, that's the thing Reagan's
| handlers understood. It doesn't make any difference!
| They're buying it! """ -- Rick Roderick
| cb321 wrote:
| Some might say this observation/trend/etc. is _much_ older
| than the 1990s, as perhaps exemplified by Oscar Wilde 's
| _The Importance Of Being Earnest_ in 1895 (where literally
| all that matters is some one 's name being "Earnest").
| (Apologies if Shakespeare or the Greek Comedies or other
| got there first - feel free to cite!)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Absolutely. I think it's human nature for some to get
| stuck on superficiality and appearance. Thanks for the
| reminder of Wilde.
| tomrod wrote:
| Been that way a long time. Economics ha something called the
| axiom of revealed preferences. Behavior only shows you what
| the person decided among their available options.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Quite right, and I'd say this could be considered an instance
| of the phenomenon known as (among other names), Goodhart's
| Law. If we consider superficial appearance of success to be a
| good proxy for success and hence a good metric to optimize
| for then we necessarily end up moving away from our original
| goal.
| superfish wrote:
| We should add "- Richard Feynman" to the title. I was pleasantly
| surprised to notice that only after clicking the link
| fmajid wrote:
| Also included in his memoirs starting with "Surely you must be
| joking, Mr Feynman!", well worth reading if you can get over
| the occasional sexist bits.
| pvg wrote:
| HN titles are mostly kept as titles rather than
| summaries/additional metadata in part for a feynmanly reason -
| the pleasure of finding things out.
| lutusp wrote:
| Here's a better copy of this classic Richard Feynman address,
| rendered in text instead of graphics (meaning it can be copied in
| whole or in part), without any advertising:
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I love this article as it speaks to one of the most overlooked
| aspects of modern life: There are a lot of fundamental things
| that we take for granted and practice every day - a lot of things
| with lots of experts and powerful institutions around them - that
| simply do not work.
|
| And once you have such a thing, and you've build your reputation,
| your power base, your institution around it, it is absolutely
| paramount to carry on with it, deepen it, and extend it -
| regardless of whether it works or not.
|
| But continuing the thing that doesn't work doesn't require some
| malicious intent or ulterior motive. Quite often, it's just a
| question of "well, what else would we do?". And the answer to
| that is often "nothing" - or "we don't know" - so it's better to
| do something and feel like we have agency and are doing something
| about it than just carrying on with our lives.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I'm not sure that "education" as the article states is one of
| them. But the war on drugs certainly is.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| For me, the word "education" does not appear in the article
| hosted at the URL https://fermatslibrary.com/s/cargo-cult-
| science
|
| Maybe fermatslibrary.com is a badly designed website that
| returns SEO spam like content depending on such things as IP
| address, browser or some other factors.
|
| It's interesting that a URL is no ground truth, and that my
| comments below are discussing an entirely different text.
| in_a_hole wrote:
| Education is mentioned on the first page in the 6th
| paragraph.
|
| Upon reading your other comment, it's possible that
| whatever you are viewing the page on is not rendering the
| pdf containing the actual text and you are only seeing the
| annotations.
| from-nibly wrote:
| Education is definitely one of them. Kids learn at public
| schools by accident. Utah has some of the lowest spending on
| education in the nation and yet it has some of the highest
| standardized testing scores. Similar to the war on drugs
| sometimes public education correlates with actual learning,
| but sometimes arresting people who have drugs lowers drug
| usage. In both cases we don't actually understand what we're
| doing.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > a lot of things with lots of experts and powerful
| institutions around them - that simply do not work.
|
| Part of what's going on is that "does not work" is usually a
| vague moving target.
|
| "Does not work" can be said about any gap between the goal and
| where we are currently. If you have a system that, on average,
| closes that gap over time, then the system "does not work" for
| the entire time it's running. After all there's a still a gap.
|
| Chesterton's Fence is a kind of inverse impulse to what you're
| describing. It may be that we think our current systems are
| nonsensical, but when we change them we realize we've created
| new problems that the old systems were solving.
|
| And then there's often disagreement about what the goal should
| be. He mentions decreasing the amount of crime by how we handle
| criminals. Not everyone agrees that's the goal of the criminal
| system. Some people very strongly believe that criminals need
| to be punished or harmed, and those people vote. But punishment
| and crime reduction are different goals and they may compete. A
| solution that reduces crime may not harm criminals enough for
| the blood thirsty voters, and vice versa.
|
| So my reading on all this is that, yes we have gaps in our
| understandings of a lot of things. But many of those will not
| be fixed until there's more agreement about what the goals are.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I agree with that - but in many cases, I think I'd at least
| define "works" as "is a benefit towards the set aim, rather
| than a detriment". Although in many cases, it'd be fairer to
| define it as "is a net benefit towards the set aim when
| taking all costs and externalities into account".
|
| In this way, I would argue e.g. that
|
| - the war on drugs is a detriment, having significantly
| increased the price and thus the profitability of drugs and
| fostered a cartel ecosystem that is now a large percentage of
| the economy (and often the government) of many countries.
|
| - the war on terror or the prison system might be a net
| benefit towards the aim of reducing terror or crime
| respectively, but is a net detriment when taking its costs
| (monetary, social, freedom etc.) into account.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Aren't those examples pretty well understood to have true
| motivations that differ from their "marketed" motivations?
| Those detriments are actually part of the hidden set goal
| that led to those programs existing in the first place.
|
| * The war on drugs was motivated by racism and marketed on
| morality and harm.
|
| * The war on terror was motivated by power & military-
| industrial-profits and marketed on fear.
|
| * The prison system was motivated by punishment & revenge
| and marketed on lower crime.
|
| It's the social equivalent of WONTFIX: Working as intended
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Crowstrike.....
|
| But anyway, there's a famous phrase: "The goal of a system
| is what it does"
|
| Once you have more than 1 person, any idea that involves
| "goal", "aim", or a related concept is meaningless. Those
| things simply do not exist.
| sevnin wrote:
| That's simply not true, goal of most businesses is to
| make money. You can clearly deduce this goal much more
| the bigger the company gets. What you say only makes
| sense if you are confusing the stated publicly goal, the
| appearance that company maintains and its true goal which
| is pursued by the executives (the capital).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| How many people in a company have the one goal "make
| money for the company"? How many have that goal at all?
|
| Companies don't have a goal. They are just a bunch of
| people.
| sevnin wrote:
| Yes but the overarching structure they participate in is
| designed to pursue the goal of making money. If not every
| single person has the same idea then we cant deduce
| anything from the group as a whole? When you look at the
| heap of sand you also start saying things like this is
| not a heap of sand its just a bunch of sand grains?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Do you attribute intent to the sand? Where are you going
| with that metaphor?
| worstspotgain wrote:
| "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you
| are the easiest person to fool."
| pkoird wrote:
| > You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all
| wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it.
|
| I can imagine a frustrated researcher reading this and muttering,
| "and what? Risk publication?". Scientific integrity, of which
| Feynman talks is much more difficult to maintain if the said
| integrity leads to a substantial decrease in the quality of life.
| As is known, research is a hit or miss and there will never
| always be groundbreaking results. But if you are only rewarded
| for such groundbreaking results, you are then incentivized to
| package the most interesting aspect of your study while burying
| away the rest of it.
|
| So long as honesty, not success, is not properly incentivized,
| science and scientific methods will never prosper to the heights
| that Feynman talks about.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder how much of a role did the academic conditions play
| back in those decades. What does a Feynman do in 2020? Probably
| not compete for tenure.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| And this is what a lot of developers do: copying superficial
| patterns without understanding. It used to be junior (and not so
| junior) programmers using unnecessarily complex design patterns
| without understanding what problems they were about to solve.
| Then it was building systems out of dozens of services to be able
| to scale, because they didn't have any idea of what kind of scale
| they actually needed more than one cpu for.
| swayvil wrote:
| The vast majority of us live in a secondhand reality. A kind of
| culturally secreted dream. It ain't real but it's useful.
| cb321 wrote:
| While, as Feynman describes, "Science" absolutely _aims_ to be
| better, scientists are _also_ human animals and language (or
| maybe more aptly "imitation") instincts run deep throughout the
| animal kingdom.
|
| There are pros & cons. On the one hand mistakes like The Cargo
| Cult propagate. On the other hand, so do skills & shortcuts.
| There are fine lines between imitating & pretending, practice &
| pretension. Nature videos show little predator cubs often doing
| "practice attacks" with siblings... I've no idea what the rate of
| failing to hold back on a bite is, but presumably the "play"
| serves _most_ of them well later on in their lives in real hunts.
|
| In short, and very related to Feynman's essay, it's _also_ very
| easy to fool oneself into thinking one has solved The Demarcation
| Problem [1] without actually doing so in a way portable
| /persuadable to other minds. (But Feynman was surely a true
| genius and would probably have acknowledged the incompleteness of
| his account in what was after all only a brief graduation
| speech!)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37107817 - Aug 2023 (136
| comments)
|
| _Cargo cult science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041549 - March 2023 (156
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 - March 2021 (69
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 - Sept 2019 (33
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 - Dec 2016 (37
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 - May 2016 (38
| comments)
|
| _Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 - Oct 2013 (62
| comments)
|
| _Feynman 's Cargo Cult Science_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571 - Aug 2010 (25
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman (.PDF)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150 - Dec 2009 (4
| comments)
|
| _Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman (1974)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140 - July 2009 (17
| comments)
| gwern wrote:
| Also related are submissions of https://gwern.net/maze which is
| about finding the sources for the psychology anecdote towards
| the end.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! I found:
|
| _Feynman's Maze-Running Story_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35798239 - May 2023 (46
| comments)
| tcj_phx wrote:
| Modern psychiatry is a well-intentioned cargo cult. I borrowed
| from Feynman for my essay at Mad In America: Cargo Cult
| Psychiatry. https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/06/cargo-cult-
| psychiatry/
| seydor wrote:
| Yeah , cargo cult science doesn't work but Cargo Cult
| Entrepreneurship (CCE(tm)) can make you rich.
|
| Subscribe to my newsletter
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > some kind of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of
| awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a
| scientific world.
|
| Something being not scientific doesn't imply it doesn't exist. It
| may instead just be too hard to observe scientifically, sound too
| crazy and appear uninteresting to scientists. Nowadays there
| already is enough credible research in these areas to be
| confident exotic phenomena actually take place in peoples brains
| when they report mystical experiences - thanks to techniques like
| fMRI, EEG, transcranial stimulation etc. People may tend to make
| epic claims and construct wonky ideologies based on what they
| feel, but they don't always make the entire story up. UFOs also
| are known to exist AFAIK - there just is no reason to believe
| that's alien spaceships, that's just flying objects we failed to
| identify and explain. We just need more real scientific
| exploration to decrease need in fairly-tale explanations of the
| phenomena people observe - hasn't this almost always been the
| case with everything since the stone age? The very fact people
| try to discuss "supernatural" phenomena with a scientist suggests
| presence of the demand for more science in this.
| petsfed wrote:
| In the context of the talk/article, I think its clear that
| Feynman is critical here of the "fairly[sic]-tale
| explanations", and not the idea itself.
|
| I've always understood this talk as amounting to "we claim that
| our society respects science, but our society seems unwilling
| to apply the rigor that science demands to sort out fact from
| fiction. See, for instance, all of these erroneous explanations
| for observed phenomenon, explanations that do not hold up to
| rigorous examination".
| boerseth wrote:
| > The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you
| are the easiest person to fool.
|
| This phrase is repeated many, many times in the legendary fan-
| fiction _Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality_ (HPMOR)[1],
| which I 'm sure many here are familiar with already.
|
| It is perplexing to hear people making room for their favourite
| pseudoscience using the excuse that "there are things science
| cannot explain". See, the annoying thing about science is that if
| something can as much as be observed, then it can be observed
| repeatedly, and then reasoned about - effectively allowing us to
| do science on it. That's even the case for magic, if it were
| real, as illustrated in HPMOR.
|
| Even the most absurd and chaotic phenomenon, bereft of any
| discernible pattern or rhyme or reason, can at least be observed
| to behave chaotically and then be described as such. _Et voila :
| science !_
|
| [1] https://hpmor.com/
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