During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a
piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency.
Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one
[idea] to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method
became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that
we are now in the scientific age.
It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding
how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very
little of it did.
[Now] ... I meet lots of people who ... get me into a conversation about UFOs,
or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of
awareness, ESP, and so forth.
And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world [after all].
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why
they did. ...
[And] I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed.
First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic
experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations,
so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of
this kind of thought.... Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was. ...
I also look into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest
craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by
rubbing them with his finger. [Geller couldn't read Feynman's mind, nor could Geller bend any of Feynman's
keys.]
... then I began to think, what else is there that we believe?
... So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There
are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but
if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going
up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve
the methods.
There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do
they know that their methods should work?
Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress
-- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the amount of crime by the
method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them.
And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience.
A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced
by the school system to do it some other way -- or is even fooled by the school
system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one.
Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels
guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing,"
according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
... the educational and psychological studies I mentioned [above] are examples
of what I would like to call cargo cult science.
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.
During the war [World War II] they saw airplanes land with lots of good
materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.
So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides
of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden
pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like
antennas -- he's the [air traffic] controller -- and they wait for the
airplanes to land.
They're doing everything right.
The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before.
But it doesn't work.
No airplanes land.
So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific
investigation, but they're missing something essential ....
... there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the
idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school -- we
never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the
examples of scientific investigation.
... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that
corresponds to a kind of utter honesty ....
... if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: [but] other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that
you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure
the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best
you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. ...
In summary, the idea is to try to give ALL of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another. ...
... it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult
science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject
and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. ...
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. ... But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in
any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the
easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You
just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but
something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when
you're talking as a scientist. ... I am talking about a specific, extra type of
integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're
maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist.
And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists,
and I think to laymen.
-- Richard P. Feynman [adapted], in
'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!'
[sub-title: "Adventures of a Curious Character"],
(1985)
as told to Ralph Leighton,
edited by Edward Hutchings
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