17 ms·

Cargo cult science (1974)

174 points by sherilm 4y ago

debacle 4y ago
Humans are innately imaginative outside of the bounds of reality. Most people I know believe in things that aren't real, whether it be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random mythologies about random things. Most interestingly, these are generally weak beliefs strongly held. You'll never convince these people that they've divorced themselves from reality, and you have nearly nothing to gain from trying. Psychologists, doctors, lawyers, sitting congresspeople, etc. This isn't something that Facebook moms have a monopoly on. We are really bad at recognizing our own flights of fancy (and, of course, recognizing what we're really bad at).
- orgels_revenge 4y ago
  Well said. For me, a person who admittedly has some pretty far-out beliefs/theories, it’s because there is generally no penalty for having these beliefs. Sure, at work where things count, I make sure my theories adhere to reality. But when I’m out chilling in nature? My goal then is to have fun, and entertaining crazy ideas is my idea of a good time. People who have to be correct all the time are kind of missing out and expending a lot of useless energy. Plus, the universe is so wild that even modern science probably doesn’t cut as deep as we think it does.
  - anonymous_sorry 4y ago
    But surely there's a difference between entertaining crazy ideas, which can be fun and an exercise in creativity, and elevating them to beliefs? I wonder if it stems from discomfort at the admitting, even to ourselves, that there are things we don't know. For me, it's not so much about being correct all the time, as just avoiding being wrong.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    I noticed that generally, people who describe themselves like you don't use the "believe/not believe" phrasing, at least not with so much intensity. At the same time, a lot of cargo cultists are looking to relax and turn on the "just believe in something whole-hog" autopilot. They don't even like exploring details that are interesting, because it muddies the waters around the big Belief question.
- derwiki 4y ago
  I thought essential oils were just concentrated versions of the original? Eg I use orange essential oil to make my own air freshener spray.
  - TOMDM 4y ago
    When people talk about essential oils in contexts like these, they're most likely referring to some people having the belief that they have medicinal properties; can cure autism etc.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      Lots of people believe essential oils can cure cancer. Any big oncology center has stories about people who show up presenting horrible symptoms well beyond what's normally seen. They spent 2 years just doing essential oils or whatever (often encouraged by some a quack) on some readily treatable thing and when they do finally give in and come to the ER it's basically too late.
      - TOMDM 4y ago
        Tragedies like these make me very hesitant about "harmless" falsehoods. I also wonder what cancer survival rates look like if you filter people who self select out of conventional healthcare for a period of time like your example above.
        Jensson 4y ago
        I wonder if belief in alternate medicine correlates with unaffordable healthcare. It is much easier to believe that there is a better way if the correct procedure would ruin you financially.
        suction 4y ago
        [dead]
      - 4y ago
- amelius 4y ago
  Uh, placebos work, and different placebos may work better for different people!
  - Jensson 4y ago
    So we hook up ChatGPT to procedurally generate medicine sounding names to sugar pills, and then figure out which name gives the best placebo effect in patients? Then we just rotate some of the better ones in patients to maximize the placebo effect, when they say the effect wears off they get a new name on the pill they take.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    Yep. And given a significant problem and a placebo, would you rather: 1) Not use the placebo, because even though it seems to work for you, it's been scientifically shown in trials to do nothing 2) Use the placebo, because it seems to work; somehow get good results A huge number of people will choose #1. They are extremely close to cargo cult without even realizing it. I'd say that if there's a pos/neg polarization to cargo cult, they are on the negative side, looking for things to reject in culty ways. But whether you're consuming product or rejecting it, the same shaky mindsets apply.
    - CrazyStat 4y ago
      > 1) Not use the placebo, because even though it seems to work for you, it's been scientifically shown in trials to do nothing This is the opposite of a placebo. A placebo is a treatment that has been scientifically shown in trials to do something even though it shouldn't. For example, taking a pill or drinking a cup of "medicine" might make your headache feel better even though the pill is just sugar and the medicine is just colored water, and just eating a spoonful of sugar or drinking the same amount of water doesn't have the same effect if you don't believe it's medicine. We use placebos as the comparison in clinical trials precisely because placebos do something, and we want to show that taking the pill with the actual medicine does more than just taking a sugar pill does. Because of it doesn't--might as well just take the sugar pill. Placebos do something, and if that something is beneficial then by all means take them. If I can take a sugar pill that makes me feel better I don't really care whether it's psychosomatic or pharmacological. The FDA cares, because they want to encourage real treatments and discourage quackery.
- narag 4y ago
  Most people I know believe in things that aren't real, whether it be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random mythologies about random things. You're using known pseudo-science, magic examples. Do you want to have real fun? Try using computer science fads or political ideologies. For every new age belief, there's an even more ridiculous one, based on the same evidence (none) and hurting people and businesses. Compared to those, crystals are harmless.
- shagmin 4y ago
  In the book Sapiens it builds on this idea for myths lots of people believe in, or "shared fictions" or artificial truths or whatever you want to call it. Like money for example, it's only worth anything as long as people believe it has purchasing power, even if really it's just collections of 0s and 1s or symbols printed on textiles. Extrapolate that idea to many other things people collectively believe in, and that let's us build stable societies.
- lambdatronics 4y ago
  But they're generally not actually beliefs, in the sense that they wouldn't stake any substantial value on them. They are "performative" beliefs that are indicative of belonging to a certain subculture. What's interesting is when those performative beliefs collide with factual consequences (eg, COVID deniers dying of COVID). Nobody has died of "belief" in astrology as far as I know. I imagine most astrology fans would cop out if there were real consequences involved.
bjornsing 4y ago
I find myself thinking of this speech more and more often. It seems to apply to more and more of society, as I see it. The scariest versions I’ve personally come across is Cargo Cult Medicine and Cargo Cult Courts…
- Loquebantur 4y ago
  The central problem is the methodology of science not being taught explicitly anywhere. It should be part of the school curriculum, instead a scientism-version is part of folklore.
  - staunton 4y ago
    There isn't even such a thing as "the methodology of science". People disagree about it and it is constantly evolving. Who should write that curriculum? Sure, there's a lot of common ground that could be taught (and it is taught in some places, we read some Popper in high school). But it's also very abstract, difficult to teach without extensive examples and of very limited use in most jobs. Hardly "the central problem".
    - caddemon 4y ago
      I don't see it as a general public problem but I actually do see it as an ongoing scientific training problem. Biology PhD programs these days spend a lot more time teaching prior biology results than they do having students engage with what it means to be a scientist, in the limited time that they teach at all. "Students" are then sorted into a lab where they learn the specific scientific cookbook of the subfield and in some cases never even try to apply it truly on their own before graduating, because they are used as a lab monkey for 4+ years. Collaborative side projects or substantial additional course work are rare, so students are often functionally the same as a lab employee. The lab has minimal external incentive to train the person to become a good scientist, and there isn't much cultural pressure either, so the training focus is instead to become a good [hyperspecific topic] lab member. To graduate a student needs a deep understanding of what was previously shown in their niche, but they really do not need to engage with much at all to do with meta science, and it is wholly possible to graduate without ever demonstrating the ability to ask good scientific questions from the genesis of a project through to it's completion, even in the context of the norms of said niche subfield. Student experiences of course vary widely, and even for those that do the menial slog version of a bio PhD, the attitude surrounding it varies. Some seem to be happy for the guidance when their advisor is like this while others resent the lack of intellectual freedom. Regardless, I find this to be pervasive in the environments I've been able to observe, even at a few of the supposedly top life sciences PhD programs in the US. To think deeply about meta science in any official capacity as part of PhD training requires you to go out of your way. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum it is possible to receive a "top" PhD and stay in academia for quite a long time through only a combination of hard work and learning the experimental best practices of the field as if it were a trade (and that might be underrating the nuance in the trades honestly, I don't know enough to say). I do think it is a difficult problem to avoid to at least some extent, because open questions in biology increase in complexity quite a lot over time, with a big time and financial commitment required to do a number of projects these days. Without radical changes in labor sources for wet lab work I'm not sure the issue can be sufficiently addressed. I also imagine that even in less expensive/slow fields there is an increasingly unapproachable body of prior knowledge to learn, and people don't want to be trainees forever. So I believe a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too. I'd love to see multiple different types of PhDs introduced with different graduation requirements, funding structures, and intended postgrad career paths, while maintaining the core thesis writing experience across the board.
poszlem 4y ago
In my opinion, we have deviated from the true essence of "Science" by using it to determine "what ought to be" instead of focusing on answering the fundamental question of "what is." I know that this is not particularly in vogue now to say, but social sciences especially did a whole lot to discredit the idea of science being something that is objective. They pretend to "do science" but instead use it to either "Launder Ideas" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492 https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-115...) or pure activism (for example, a paper published in Hipatia suggested that male students should be trained to propagate the feminist message, much like the way viruses spread https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315583936_Women's_Studies_as_Virus_Institutional_Feminism_Affect_and_the_Projection_of_Danger) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315583936_Women's_S.... Not even going to mention the Grievance studies affair. I have embraced accelerationism and hope that "science" (and academia specifically) fails quickly so that it can rise again with greater resilience and the ability to withstand pressure from activist organizations. Let's hope the hard sciences renaissance is nigh.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  [flagged]
- caddemon 4y ago
  The social sciences indeed have the politically charged element, but I think you've hit on a broader point here. Investigating "what is" needs to involve to at least some extent a true curiosity and an adaptable plan. Modern science is so formalized that I find these ingredients to take way too much of a back seat - at least in what I've observed of modern biology. I swear more often than not the way proposed experiments are framed reeks of a "what ought to be" perspective. Not because it's wishful thinking or an externally incentivized conclusion, but just because questions are often both incremental and kinda binary. So it is reasonably likely that what they've proposed to check will turn out about how they expected, and if it doesn't it may not be publishable at all. By crafting the proposal in a particular (fairly common) style, they've inadvertently turned it into "what ought to be". By contrast, I loved talking to my really old professors because there were some awesome ones that you could tell spent a decent amount of time in their day just absolutely fucking around. Should that be the universal model of science? No, but I do believe you need those types, and I've struggled to find much of a modern equivalent. The tight job market doesn't help. Of course with fewer low hanging fruit over time as well as greater experimental costs, it is indeed more difficult to effectively spitball now. And sure there are fewer random novel observations that would be worth a fun off the cuff paper for others to follow-up on. But I still can't shake the feeling that the scientific system has partially self-imposed the eradication of this style of curiosity, in a misguided attempt to formalize science. From my perspective, there seems to be a massive underlying assumption throughout the system that scientific outputs should stand as nearly atomic units, with little chance for "unscientific" pieces of work to contribute to an eventually formalized scientific result. That clashes awfully with the ever increasing scale of open questions, and it doesn't play well with the individualistic academic ego stroking credit model either.
sebstefan 4y ago
If you stumble upon a website that makes the stylistic choice that text should take the whole width of your whole screen, you can toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back into a more usual format (F9 on Windows). If you use Chrome-based browsers, there's bookmarklets (bookmarks with a `javascript:` URI) javascript:(function(){var bod = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; bod.style.margin = "40px auto"; bod.style.maxWidth = "40vw"; bod.style.lineHeight = "1.6"; bod.style.fontSize = "18px"; bod.style.color = "#444"; bod.style.padding = "0 10px"; })();
- roelschroeven 4y ago
  Those websites use the full width of your browser window, not your whole screen (on desktop at least; on mobile the story is different). That means that you, who has control over your window, have full control over how wide you want the text to be.
- teddyh 4y ago
  > toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back into a more usual format (F9 on Windows). Ctrl-Alt-R on Linux.
- kken 4y ago
  Stylistic choice? Isn’t that literally basic html the way it was meant to be used? I think you were supposed to display it in an actual browser window.
  - sebstefan 4y ago
    That's great, you should do that
weberer 4y ago
>I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would he better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice. We saw this just recently when the EU tried to hide a study that showed piracy actually increased game sales. I wonder what other studies are being suppressed because they don't fit the narrative. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/22/inconvenient-eu-piracy-study-kept-hidden-for-years/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/22/inconvenient-eu-piracy-stu...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I love that observation. Science without transparency is just politics.
- nextos 4y ago
  > I wonder what other studies are being suppressed because they don't fit the narrative In Nature / Science / Cell, your article submissions are likely to be rejected if they go against the ideas supported by highly cited researchers in your particular subfield, as these will be the reviewers. Just see what happened in case of e.g. Alzheimer's disease [1]. Eventually, new ideas push through, but it takes too long due to the issue I mentioned above. [1] https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...
college_physics 4y ago
Cargo cult tech: visit Silicon Valley, copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet and hope that you will "eat the world" somehow.
- narag 4y ago
  Oh, the classic we're going to create Europe's SV in ___ you know.
  - bjornsing 4y ago
    But those only copy the cultural aspects that favor those doing the copying, and since it’s conventional-minded people that copy and the “secret” SV ingredient is putting independent-minded people in charge the whole process is forever doomed to failure… But it keeps a lot of bureaucrats busy, and (very) gainfully employed.
    - narag 4y ago
      I enjoyed very much this blog series and the video: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Unfortunately some people tends to cherry pick their favourite details. In my country there's a politician that says that the iPhone development was paid by US government.
- seydor 4y ago
  It seems like VCs are doing a lot of cargo cult tech. Cargo cults work if you have enough money. Throw it to the wall with adequate speed for large enough amount of time and some very few will stick. Then you can rest on the laurels that Fortuna gave you. This is why Silicon Valley cannot be replicated elsewhere, except perhaps Switzerland or some filthy-rich Petrocountry.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet If only they did. Entrepreneurship, Great Universities, celebration of failures (having 2 failed startups is seen as a badge of honor to VCs) and privately administered capital (low tax rate!) willing to take risk. These are the elements vital to any potential foreign Silicon Valley competitors and they only exist here in America. All of the "Silicon Valley of X" initiatives I've seen were either led by bureaucrats with no ties to the valley or by who had little to no understanding of these fundamental traits. It was beanbag chairs and people writing JS on MacBooks (for 1/3 of what people who actually came to the valley made).
RobotToaster 4y ago
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" - Richard Feynman
- lisper 4y ago
  You do realize that was intended to be humorous, yes? It's true that one should not defer blindly to authority, but experts nonetheless know some things that non-experts don't. That's what makes them experts.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Exactly. And it was about experts questioning the beliefs of other experts, particularly experts in the past. Galileo questioning Aristotle. Einstein questioning Newton. Not about random quacks thinking they have opinions equal to the experts.
    - caddemon 4y ago
      There's a huge set of potentially politically fraught middle grounds that exist between Einstein -> Newton and random quack -> some modern distinguished scientist. And by politically fraught I mean career politics that directly impact the scientific landscape, not "politics". It is my impression that back in the day it was more common for academics with differing opinions to banter or at times straight up disrespect each other semi-publicly. This could be historical survivorship bias, but it is a fact that aspiring scientists had a much greater likelihood of becoming a tenured PI in previous generations, and usually reached that status much earlier in their lives. I fear that with the state of the academic job market along with present cultural norms, it is less common now for an early career investigator to question the quality of an established PI's work, or even for PIs to meaningfully criticize each other in scientifically accessible formats. Besides, questioning the work of past scientists is implicitly questioning the research of many modern scientists, at least if that questioning is to be considered remotely novel. There are socially acceptable avenues to question past science, but there are also cases where modern PIs of influence have built so much on an assumption from prior results, such that the impact of their work would indeed be threatened by questions of the foundation. It is important that the latter situation is handled in a manner consistent with scientific ideals. I don't know what Feynman was exactly referring to with his quote, but I'd be surprised if he was focused on the behavior of random lay people. Someone immersed in science is probably going to be most concerned with the behavior of fellow scientists and emerging trainees.
hinkley 4y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science wrong. Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy levels, just in the unexplored ones. Then when people get funding to look into these frontiers/gaps, and find that everything looks the same, they adjust their theories to push them out into the gaps. That's not Science, she emphatically states. For myself it sounds like saying, "well you don't know Unicorns don't exist because we haven't looked everywhere, what if they're in <unexplored forests in the Congo>?" Then the Congo gets explored and they say, "well maybe they're in Antarctica".
- HPsquared 4y ago
  If thousands of people have careers in unicorn-hunting, that's what will happen.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    While watching her complain I kept thinking, "publish or die".
    - js8 4y ago
      Publish (in a scientific journal) or publish (on Youtube). No hiding from the invisible freedom of the market.
    - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
      I don’t get that complaint. It’s like hearing a software engineer complaining “write code or get fired”, yeah, well, that’s your literal job?
      - hinkley 4y ago
        Have you been reading the threads about the reproducibility crisis that pop up here regularly? Essentially some people worry we have more people who need to write papers than we can sustain with our current research horizon, and people are making shit up or at least being overly optimistic. As Feynman used to say, "The most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool."
photochemsyn 4y ago
Claiming that new drugs with exclusive patents are always more effective than out-of-patent drugs is another cargo cult theme promoted in many highly corporatized biomedical research centers. Demonstrating that the drug discovered by your colleagues down the hall (who are pushing for their little startup biotech outfit to be acquired by Pfizer or Merck or Gilead, in an effort backed by the institution's IP office and administration) is less effective for a given condition than a drug discovered 50 years ago would be considered impolite, and would lessen your chances of getting tenure and having a successful career. For example, molnupiravir and nirmatrelvir (aka Paxlovid), heavily promoted for COVID treatment, may be no more effective than older out-of-patent anti-histamine drugs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903129/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903129/ > "Since antihistamines seems to hold a crucial prognostic role in the management of Covid‐19, there is a need to identify and repurpose some potential antihistamine drugs. One study suggested diphenhydramine, hydroxyzine, and azelastine to be considered in repositioning, then further research in them. 17 Due to its potent, less side effects, rapid onset of action, specificity, antiallergic, and anti‐inflammatory properties, 24 Cetirizine might be an important drug of consideration in managing Covid‐19 patients at the moment compared to other antihistamines or histamine receptors (H2, H3, and H4)." Corporatization and the profit motive have an undeniably corrupting effect on scientific integrity, that's clear enough.
- youainti 4y ago
  One of the issues here is how intellectual property works for pharmaceuticals. A new drug is patentable. An old drug already has generic competitors. We allow doctors to prescribe a drug for just about any reason (off-label use is legal), but only the new ones get investigated for effectiveness (because they are the most profitable as there is less competition). No idea what the best approach would be.
  - ggm 4y ago
    No idea what the best approach would be. Recognition of the massive IPR imbalances, and adoption of national-strategic funding for drug development with no IPR. If the corporates are now gaming the system, then return it to a public utility function, and pay for drug development out of the state. It is arguably true that we'd plateau at "good enough" drugs and for things like Insulin, maybe not push hard for the increadible advances rapid-action Insulin has, over reliable, understood, cheap ubiquitous insulin. So I can see there are downsides, but its fundamentally health-economics: If you want to argue for the IPR justifying $1000+ per month Insulin shots to motivate making the best insulin out there, I think you're also arguing for a really bad outcome, like my former Hypertension drug which was an isomer twist of a well understood Cox inhibitor, to get the IPR renewed. Somebody really had to work hard on that one.
superkuh 4y ago
You see this constantly in information technology contexts as well. People who at work, when required to work with many other people on the same project which itself is of a larger scale, then bring kubernetes style containers and ideas about "deployment" home to their personal webserver. And this would be fine, silly, recreation if only they didn't write up articles on "How to host from home" that described their k8/etc/etc setup like it was required in this new context. Basically any time you see the word "deployal" outside of a business or institutional IT context you're looking at cargo cult behavior.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  But it is not only people cargo culting at home. It is also people doing that on the job. Instead of looking at various alternatives and truly evaluating them, looking at benefit and downsides each brings, people jump to whatever is the current hype or what is fashionable and then justify it with a circular argument of popularity. Instead of immediately when the talk is about clusters jumping to kubernetes, people should think about whether the conceptual overhead is actually worth it. They should think about, whether the Google scale tool is truly appropriate for what they want to do. Similar situation of course with all the hyped JS frameworks, when a simple statically rendered website/page would do. Basically it is not engineering any longer, but cargo cult and hype. And that is how shitty products are made.
deleted 4y ago
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dang 4y ago
Related: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 - March 2021 (69 comments) Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 - Sept 2019 (33 comments) Cargo cult data science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919263 - Aug 2017 (40 comments) Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 - Dec 2016 (37 comments) Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 - May 2016 (38 comments) Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 - Oct 2013 (62 comments) Feynman's Cargo Cult Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140 - July 2009 (17 comments)
low_tech_love 4y ago
His analogy of teaching resonated too much with me. I have been feeling exactly that for a couple of years, and it feels scarily like when I abandoned the belief in god many years ago. There is that nagging feeling I can’t shake that, no matter how I look at it, I can’t negate the null hypothesis that organized education is basically useless. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think educational institutions shouldn’t exist; surely smart people need a place to go and do things and get together and work. The point to me is that, whatever it is that smart people are doing, they’d mostly do that anyway no matter what kind of education they’re getting. Whenever I bring it up with colleagues, I usually get into heated arguments where I become the 1 in an invariably N-to-1 aggressive debate. Plus, my wife is a primary school teacher with a Master degree in Education who loves teaching, so obviously that is a very delicate subject to bring up at home. I have noticed that people like her, who love teaching, usually have a very emotional attachment to it from their own personal experiences and how they see education as transformative, and that makes any kind of objective research on teaching become very hard to do. It’s almost like teaching is such a holy subject that any teaching has to be good, and criticizing it is like defending imperialism or capitalism or rich people or something like that (it doesn’t help that my wife came from a very poor background and got out of that through education practice, and has teached most of her career in poor neighborhoods; that makes a delicate subject even more touchy). My personal opinion is that I am only human and seeing myself as some kind of ”savior through teaching” is unfair, to me and to others (yes, I do some teaching too). Most of the time I focus on trying to give smart students a platform to grow, and while I also try to motivate the other students as much as I can (I do believe you can ”fish” some of them out of the pool), I don’t usually pull my hair or lose sleep over them. One, because I don’t feel like I have the right to keep patronizing people as if I know what’s objectively better for them; lots of people out there are doing much better than me without formal education. Second, because I do not have the illusion that I (or most other teachers) know a really good teaching method that can make a significant difference. It would be like losing sleep because a glass of holy water that I blessed did not save a cancer patient.
- smogcutter 4y ago
  This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to a pretty banal HN greatest hit: “intelligent” people don’t really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
Corollary : When you don't understand something, and are not inclined to take the time to understand it, you just label it as cargo cult science, or pseudoscience.
- caddemon 4y ago
  Ironically, scientists love to do this! Take a new area with promising results, hype the shit out of it until the worst and/or least ethical scientists truly create a pseudoscientific tangent out of it, and then drop the area entirely for a decade because now anything vaguely associated with it is taboo. Labeling real science as cargo cult science sounds to me like cargo cult science with extra steps. Granted such a violent burst doesn't always happen when an academic bubble is created. But at times I've found academic backlash to be shockingly irrational in its breadth. I think the most common factor is when the pseudoscience makes it to the point of having an impact on actual humans. But it is still sad to see a state when even tenured faculty will shy away from public discussion of certain questions because of vague associations, as it feels entirely unscientific to me. The funniest part is when the area reemerges with a new name, as if extremely surface level branding is actually important to receiving grants or publishing papers. Well I suppose it is unfortunately, but this is one of those cases that feels so thinly veiled it might as well be scientific satire. My personal favorite example is the galvanic skin response hype from 50+ years ago, which morphed into more of a fringe science primarily because of flaws with lie detection applications - flaws that should've been extremely obvious concerns to test just based on the OG literature + common scientific sense. In the last decade or so it's been revamped as electrodermal activity and unsurprisingly shown great promise for certain health applications. EDA is presently the main focus of a big group at MIT, it has been included in some Fitbit models, it is used in FDA approved devices for epilepsy monitoring, and overall the relevant publications per year keep trending back up. A far cry from the looks you'd get if you discussed galvanic skin response in certain supposedly scientific circles back in the day. In absolute numbers the rebranded GSR has actually already fully recovered from the couple decades of low research activity, though relative to total academic output now versus then it probably still has some distance to go.
deleted 4y ago
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ggm 4y ago
There's two parts to this problem. One, is his reflections on what is unquestionably outlier belief, like reiki and reflexology and spoon bending. The other is his intense dislike of the low bar p-jacking in social sciences and the lack of rigour, even in his own field. They aren't the same thing. Labeling both of them 'cargo cult' science does the problem space a disservice. Bad science, belief that the proof is 'in' or that low bar experiments prove things against a lack of reliable, reproducible outcomes, isn't the same thing as the implications of funding for space from the Drake Equation, or a lack of funding for VLSI engineering research because the money went on feel-good stats about alternative medicines. What happened with the Shuttle, was false belief in the hierarchy of science and a fear about speaking out. What happened in tertiary education since Feynman died is that peer review has decayed into a game to tenure, and has nothing to do with the real outcome of why scientists exist. During his lifetime in nuclear physics, it was normal for scientists to lodge patent applications. But that said, it wasn't the main game on the Manhattan project and Leo Szilard used his patent rights as a lever to try and get a say in the socialized and politicized outcomes of his discoveries. Now, most scientists who work in a field with fertile IPR are really strongly driven to the IPO implications of that IPR. It's not a tool, a lever, its the main game. Adding 5% efficiency to classic solar cells in a reproducible patent-free manner right now would be transformative for everyone. Adding 5 patents which contribute 0.1% efficiency to classic solar cells might pay back better. Feynman sat to one side of that game. He lived through a time of tenure and a role in science, which nowadays would be very hard to maintain.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
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. Vitamins for convicts could save taxpayers' money https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867 All experiments in psychology... Psychology is really hard to do well. I tend to look for real word data that casts light on a thing because psychological experiments involving humans are so often designed so very poorly. For example, it was found that when women take an interest in a celebrity, they do a search for his marital or relationship status. When men take an interest in a celebrity, they do a search for nude photos of her. This is people in the privacy of their own homes on their own computers looking for something to make themselves hot. They aren't worried about what other people might expect from them, yet male and female strategies differ in ways that fit with historical norms that women are usually looking for a relationship and men are often just looking for sex (at least at first).
mwbajor 4y ago
"When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease." What about dark matter?
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  Astrophysicists are extremely motivated to find alternatives to dark matter. The "problem" is that the evidence for the existence of dark matter, what fraction of the universe it makes up, where it is, and some of its general properties (e.g., temperature) come from many different directions, and they point to the same conclusions. Dark matter is a relatively simple postulate that explains a large number of disparate observations, from the relative abundances of different atomic elements to the amount of gravitational lensing in distant galaxy clusters. It's not that astrophysicists are straining to make everything fit into the dark matter paradigm. It's that everything seems to fit into the paradigm very naturally. That's what overcomes the queasiness over dark matter having never been directly observed in a lab.

174 points by sherilm 4y ago

Humans are innately imaginative outside of the bounds of reality. Most people I know believe in things that aren't real, whether it be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random mythologies about random things. Most interestingly, these are generally weak beliefs strongly held. You'll never convince these people that they've divorced themselves from reality, and you have nearly nothing to gain from trying. Psychologists, doctors, lawyers, sitting congresspeople, etc. This isn't something that Facebook moms have a monopoly on. We are really bad at recognizing our own flights of fancy (and, of course, recognizing what we're really bad at).

orgels_revenge 4y ago
Well said. For me, a person who admittedly has some pretty far-out beliefs/theories, it’s because there is generally no penalty for having these beliefs. Sure, at work where things count, I make sure my theories adhere to reality. But when I’m out chilling in nature? My goal then is to have fun, and entertaining crazy ideas is my idea of a good time. People who have to be correct all the time are kind of missing out and expending a lot of useless energy. Plus, the universe is so wild that even modern science probably doesn’t cut as deep as we think it does.
- anonymous_sorry 4y ago
  But surely there's a difference between entertaining crazy ideas, which can be fun and an exercise in creativity, and elevating them to beliefs? I wonder if it stems from discomfort at the admitting, even to ourselves, that there are things we don't know. For me, it's not so much about being correct all the time, as just avoiding being wrong.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  I noticed that generally, people who describe themselves like you don't use the "believe/not believe" phrasing, at least not with so much intensity. At the same time, a lot of cargo cultists are looking to relax and turn on the "just believe in something whole-hog" autopilot. They don't even like exploring details that are interesting, because it muddies the waters around the big Belief question.
derwiki 4y ago
I thought essential oils were just concentrated versions of the original? Eg I use orange essential oil to make my own air freshener spray.
- TOMDM 4y ago
  When people talk about essential oils in contexts like these, they're most likely referring to some people having the belief that they have medicinal properties; can cure autism etc.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Lots of people believe essential oils can cure cancer. Any big oncology center has stories about people who show up presenting horrible symptoms well beyond what's normally seen. They spent 2 years just doing essential oils or whatever (often encouraged by some a quack) on some readily treatable thing and when they do finally give in and come to the ER it's basically too late.
    - TOMDM 4y ago
      Tragedies like these make me very hesitant about "harmless" falsehoods. I also wonder what cancer survival rates look like if you filter people who self select out of conventional healthcare for a period of time like your example above.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        I wonder if belief in alternate medicine correlates with unaffordable healthcare. It is much easier to believe that there is a better way if the correct procedure would ruin you financially.
        suction 4y ago
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    - 4y ago
amelius 4y ago
Uh, placebos work, and different placebos may work better for different people!
- Jensson 4y ago
  So we hook up ChatGPT to procedurally generate medicine sounding names to sugar pills, and then figure out which name gives the best placebo effect in patients? Then we just rotate some of the better ones in patients to maximize the placebo effect, when they say the effect wears off they get a new name on the pill they take.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Yep. And given a significant problem and a placebo, would you rather: 1) Not use the placebo, because even though it seems to work for you, it's been scientifically shown in trials to do nothing 2) Use the placebo, because it seems to work; somehow get good results A huge number of people will choose #1. They are extremely close to cargo cult without even realizing it. I'd say that if there's a pos/neg polarization to cargo cult, they are on the negative side, looking for things to reject in culty ways. But whether you're consuming product or rejecting it, the same shaky mindsets apply.
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    > 1) Not use the placebo, because even though it seems to work for you, it's been scientifically shown in trials to do nothing This is the opposite of a placebo. A placebo is a treatment that has been scientifically shown in trials to do something even though it shouldn't. For example, taking a pill or drinking a cup of "medicine" might make your headache feel better even though the pill is just sugar and the medicine is just colored water, and just eating a spoonful of sugar or drinking the same amount of water doesn't have the same effect if you don't believe it's medicine. We use placebos as the comparison in clinical trials precisely because placebos do something, and we want to show that taking the pill with the actual medicine does more than just taking a sugar pill does. Because of it doesn't--might as well just take the sugar pill. Placebos do something, and if that something is beneficial then by all means take them. If I can take a sugar pill that makes me feel better I don't really care whether it's psychosomatic or pharmacological. The FDA cares, because they want to encourage real treatments and discourage quackery.
narag 4y ago
Most people I know believe in things that aren't real, whether it be crystals, chakras, essential oils, random mythologies about random things. You're using known pseudo-science, magic examples. Do you want to have real fun? Try using computer science fads or political ideologies. For every new age belief, there's an even more ridiculous one, based on the same evidence (none) and hurting people and businesses. Compared to those, crystals are harmless.
shagmin 4y ago
In the book Sapiens it builds on this idea for myths lots of people believe in, or "shared fictions" or artificial truths or whatever you want to call it. Like money for example, it's only worth anything as long as people believe it has purchasing power, even if really it's just collections of 0s and 1s or symbols printed on textiles. Extrapolate that idea to many other things people collectively believe in, and that let's us build stable societies.
lambdatronics 4y ago
But they're generally not actually beliefs, in the sense that they wouldn't stake any substantial value on them. They are "performative" beliefs that are indicative of belonging to a certain subculture. What's interesting is when those performative beliefs collide with factual consequences (eg, COVID deniers dying of COVID). Nobody has died of "belief" in astrology as far as I know. I imagine most astrology fans would cop out if there were real consequences involved.

bjornsing 4y ago

I find myself thinking of this speech more and more often. It seems to apply to more and more of society, as I see it. The scariest versions I’ve personally come across is Cargo Cult Medicine and Cargo Cult Courts…

Loquebantur 4y ago
The central problem is the methodology of science not being taught explicitly anywhere. It should be part of the school curriculum, instead a scientism-version is part of folklore.
- staunton 4y ago
  There isn't even such a thing as "the methodology of science". People disagree about it and it is constantly evolving. Who should write that curriculum? Sure, there's a lot of common ground that could be taught (and it is taught in some places, we read some Popper in high school). But it's also very abstract, difficult to teach without extensive examples and of very limited use in most jobs. Hardly "the central problem".
  - caddemon 4y ago
    I don't see it as a general public problem but I actually do see it as an ongoing scientific training problem. Biology PhD programs these days spend a lot more time teaching prior biology results than they do having students engage with what it means to be a scientist, in the limited time that they teach at all. "Students" are then sorted into a lab where they learn the specific scientific cookbook of the subfield and in some cases never even try to apply it truly on their own before graduating, because they are used as a lab monkey for 4+ years. Collaborative side projects or substantial additional course work are rare, so students are often functionally the same as a lab employee. The lab has minimal external incentive to train the person to become a good scientist, and there isn't much cultural pressure either, so the training focus is instead to become a good [hyperspecific topic] lab member. To graduate a student needs a deep understanding of what was previously shown in their niche, but they really do not need to engage with much at all to do with meta science, and it is wholly possible to graduate without ever demonstrating the ability to ask good scientific questions from the genesis of a project through to it's completion, even in the context of the norms of said niche subfield. Student experiences of course vary widely, and even for those that do the menial slog version of a bio PhD, the attitude surrounding it varies. Some seem to be happy for the guidance when their advisor is like this while others resent the lack of intellectual freedom. Regardless, I find this to be pervasive in the environments I've been able to observe, even at a few of the supposedly top life sciences PhD programs in the US. To think deeply about meta science in any official capacity as part of PhD training requires you to go out of your way. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum it is possible to receive a "top" PhD and stay in academia for quite a long time through only a combination of hard work and learning the experimental best practices of the field as if it were a trade (and that might be underrating the nuance in the trades honestly, I don't know enough to say). I do think it is a difficult problem to avoid to at least some extent, because open questions in biology increase in complexity quite a lot over time, with a big time and financial commitment required to do a number of projects these days. Without radical changes in labor sources for wet lab work I'm not sure the issue can be sufficiently addressed. I also imagine that even in less expensive/slow fields there is an increasingly unapproachable body of prior knowledge to learn, and people don't want to be trainees forever. So I believe a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too. I'd love to see multiple different types of PhDs introduced with different graduation requirements, funding structures, and intended postgrad career paths, while maintaining the core thesis writing experience across the board.

poszlem 4y ago

In my opinion, we have deviated from the true essence of "Science" by using it to determine "what ought to be" instead of focusing on answering the fundamental question of "what is." I know that this is not particularly in vogue now to say, but social sciences especially did a whole lot to discredit the idea of science being something that is objective. They pretend to "do science" but instead use it to either "Launder Ideas" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492 https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-115...) or pure activism (for example, a paper published in Hipatia suggested that male students should be trained to propagate the feminist message, much like the way viruses spread https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315583936_Women's_Studies_as_Virus_Institutional_Feminism_Affect_and_the_Projection_of_Danger) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315583936_Women's_S.... Not even going to mention the Grievance studies affair. I have embraced accelerationism and hope that "science" (and academia specifically) fails quickly so that it can rise again with greater resilience and the ability to withstand pressure from activist organizations. Let's hope the hard sciences renaissance is nigh.

kilgnad 4y ago
[flagged]
caddemon 4y ago
The social sciences indeed have the politically charged element, but I think you've hit on a broader point here. Investigating "what is" needs to involve to at least some extent a true curiosity and an adaptable plan. Modern science is so formalized that I find these ingredients to take way too much of a back seat - at least in what I've observed of modern biology. I swear more often than not the way proposed experiments are framed reeks of a "what ought to be" perspective. Not because it's wishful thinking or an externally incentivized conclusion, but just because questions are often both incremental and kinda binary. So it is reasonably likely that what they've proposed to check will turn out about how they expected, and if it doesn't it may not be publishable at all. By crafting the proposal in a particular (fairly common) style, they've inadvertently turned it into "what ought to be". By contrast, I loved talking to my really old professors because there were some awesome ones that you could tell spent a decent amount of time in their day just absolutely fucking around. Should that be the universal model of science? No, but I do believe you need those types, and I've struggled to find much of a modern equivalent. The tight job market doesn't help. Of course with fewer low hanging fruit over time as well as greater experimental costs, it is indeed more difficult to effectively spitball now. And sure there are fewer random novel observations that would be worth a fun off the cuff paper for others to follow-up on. But I still can't shake the feeling that the scientific system has partially self-imposed the eradication of this style of curiosity, in a misguided attempt to formalize science. From my perspective, there seems to be a massive underlying assumption throughout the system that scientific outputs should stand as nearly atomic units, with little chance for "unscientific" pieces of work to contribute to an eventually formalized scientific result. That clashes awfully with the ever increasing scale of open questions, and it doesn't play well with the individualistic academic ego stroking credit model either.

sebstefan 4y ago

If you stumble upon a website that makes the stylistic choice that text should take the whole width of your whole screen, you can toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back into a more usual format (F9 on Windows). If you use Chrome-based browsers, there's bookmarklets (bookmarks with a `javascript:` URI) javascript:(function(){var bod = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; bod.style.margin = "40px auto"; bod.style.maxWidth = "40vw"; bod.style.lineHeight = "1.6"; bod.style.fontSize = "18px"; bod.style.color = "#444"; bod.style.padding = "0 10px"; })();

roelschroeven 4y ago
Those websites use the full width of your browser window, not your whole screen (on desktop at least; on mobile the story is different). That means that you, who has control over your window, have full control over how wide you want the text to be.
teddyh 4y ago
> toggle the "Reader view" feature in Firefox to put it back into a more usual format (F9 on Windows). Ctrl-Alt-R on Linux.
kken 4y ago
Stylistic choice? Isn’t that literally basic html the way it was meant to be used? I think you were supposed to display it in an actual browser window.
- sebstefan 4y ago
  That's great, you should do that

weberer 4y ago

>I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would he better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice. We saw this just recently when the EU tried to hide a study that showed piracy actually increased game sales. I wonder what other studies are being suppressed because they don't fit the narrative. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/22/inconvenient-eu-piracy-study-kept-hidden-for-years/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/22/inconvenient-eu-piracy-stu...

deleted 4y ago
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Waterluvian 4y ago
I love that observation. Science without transparency is just politics.
nextos 4y ago
> I wonder what other studies are being suppressed because they don't fit the narrative In Nature / Science / Cell, your article submissions are likely to be rejected if they go against the ideas supported by highly cited researchers in your particular subfield, as these will be the reviewers. Just see what happened in case of e.g. Alzheimer's disease [1]. Eventually, new ideas push through, but it takes too long due to the issue I mentioned above. [1] https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...

college_physics 4y ago

Cargo cult tech: visit Silicon Valley, copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet and hope that you will "eat the world" somehow.

narag 4y ago
Oh, the classic we're going to create Europe's SV in ___ you know.
- bjornsing 4y ago
  But those only copy the cultural aspects that favor those doing the copying, and since it’s conventional-minded people that copy and the “secret” SV ingredient is putting independent-minded people in charge the whole process is forever doomed to failure… But it keeps a lot of bureaucrats busy, and (very) gainfully employed.
  - narag 4y ago
    I enjoyed very much this blog series and the video: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Unfortunately some people tends to cherry pick their favourite details. In my country there's a politician that says that the iPhone development was paid by US government.
seydor 4y ago
It seems like VCs are doing a lot of cargo cult tech. Cargo cults work if you have enough money. Throw it to the wall with adequate speed for large enough amount of time and some very few will stick. Then you can rest on the laurels that Fortuna gave you. This is why Silicon Valley cannot be replicated elsewhere, except perhaps Switzerland or some filthy-rich Petrocountry.
908B64B197 4y ago
> copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet If only they did. Entrepreneurship, Great Universities, celebration of failures (having 2 failed startups is seen as a badge of honor to VCs) and privately administered capital (low tax rate!) willing to take risk. These are the elements vital to any potential foreign Silicon Valley competitors and they only exist here in America. All of the "Silicon Valley of X" initiatives I've seen were either led by bureaucrats with no ties to the valley or by who had little to no understanding of these fundamental traits. It was beanbag chairs and people writing JS on MacBooks (for 1/3 of what people who actually came to the valley made).

RobotToaster 4y ago

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" - Richard Feynman

lisper 4y ago
You do realize that was intended to be humorous, yes? It's true that one should not defer blindly to authority, but experts nonetheless know some things that non-experts don't. That's what makes them experts.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Exactly. And it was about experts questioning the beliefs of other experts, particularly experts in the past. Galileo questioning Aristotle. Einstein questioning Newton. Not about random quacks thinking they have opinions equal to the experts.
  - caddemon 4y ago
    There's a huge set of potentially politically fraught middle grounds that exist between Einstein -> Newton and random quack -> some modern distinguished scientist. And by politically fraught I mean career politics that directly impact the scientific landscape, not "politics". It is my impression that back in the day it was more common for academics with differing opinions to banter or at times straight up disrespect each other semi-publicly. This could be historical survivorship bias, but it is a fact that aspiring scientists had a much greater likelihood of becoming a tenured PI in previous generations, and usually reached that status much earlier in their lives. I fear that with the state of the academic job market along with present cultural norms, it is less common now for an early career investigator to question the quality of an established PI's work, or even for PIs to meaningfully criticize each other in scientifically accessible formats. Besides, questioning the work of past scientists is implicitly questioning the research of many modern scientists, at least if that questioning is to be considered remotely novel. There are socially acceptable avenues to question past science, but there are also cases where modern PIs of influence have built so much on an assumption from prior results, such that the impact of their work would indeed be threatened by questions of the foundation. It is important that the latter situation is handled in a manner consistent with scientific ideals. I don't know what Feynman was exactly referring to with his quote, but I'd be surprised if he was focused on the behavior of random lay people. Someone immersed in science is probably going to be most concerned with the behavior of fellow scientists and emerging trainees.

hinkley 4y ago

Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science wrong. Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy levels, just in the unexplored ones. Then when people get funding to look into these frontiers/gaps, and find that everything looks the same, they adjust their theories to push them out into the gaps. That's not Science, she emphatically states. For myself it sounds like saying, "well you don't know Unicorns don't exist because we haven't looked everywhere, what if they're in <unexplored forests in the Congo>?" Then the Congo gets explored and they say, "well maybe they're in Antarctica".

HPsquared 4y ago
If thousands of people have careers in unicorn-hunting, that's what will happen.
- hinkley 4y ago
  While watching her complain I kept thinking, "publish or die".
  - js8 4y ago
    Publish (in a scientific journal) or publish (on Youtube). No hiding from the invisible freedom of the market.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    I don’t get that complaint. It’s like hearing a software engineer complaining “write code or get fired”, yeah, well, that’s your literal job?
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Have you been reading the threads about the reproducibility crisis that pop up here regularly? Essentially some people worry we have more people who need to write papers than we can sustain with our current research horizon, and people are making shit up or at least being overly optimistic. As Feynman used to say, "The most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool."

photochemsyn 4y ago

Claiming that new drugs with exclusive patents are always more effective than out-of-patent drugs is another cargo cult theme promoted in many highly corporatized biomedical research centers. Demonstrating that the drug discovered by your colleagues down the hall (who are pushing for their little startup biotech outfit to be acquired by Pfizer or Merck or Gilead, in an effort backed by the institution's IP office and administration) is less effective for a given condition than a drug discovered 50 years ago would be considered impolite, and would lessen your chances of getting tenure and having a successful career. For example, molnupiravir and nirmatrelvir (aka Paxlovid), heavily promoted for COVID treatment, may be no more effective than older out-of-patent anti-histamine drugs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903129/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9903129/ > "Since antihistamines seems to hold a crucial prognostic role in the management of Covid‐19, there is a need to identify and repurpose some potential antihistamine drugs. One study suggested diphenhydramine, hydroxyzine, and azelastine to be considered in repositioning, then further research in them. 17 Due to its potent, less side effects, rapid onset of action, specificity, antiallergic, and anti‐inflammatory properties, 24 Cetirizine might be an important drug of consideration in managing Covid‐19 patients at the moment compared to other antihistamines or histamine receptors (H2, H3, and H4)." Corporatization and the profit motive have an undeniably corrupting effect on scientific integrity, that's clear enough.

youainti 4y ago
One of the issues here is how intellectual property works for pharmaceuticals. A new drug is patentable. An old drug already has generic competitors. We allow doctors to prescribe a drug for just about any reason (off-label use is legal), but only the new ones get investigated for effectiveness (because they are the most profitable as there is less competition). No idea what the best approach would be.
- ggm 4y ago
  No idea what the best approach would be. Recognition of the massive IPR imbalances, and adoption of national-strategic funding for drug development with no IPR. If the corporates are now gaming the system, then return it to a public utility function, and pay for drug development out of the state. It is arguably true that we'd plateau at "good enough" drugs and for things like Insulin, maybe not push hard for the increadible advances rapid-action Insulin has, over reliable, understood, cheap ubiquitous insulin. So I can see there are downsides, but its fundamentally health-economics: If you want to argue for the IPR justifying $1000+ per month Insulin shots to motivate making the best insulin out there, I think you're also arguing for a really bad outcome, like my former Hypertension drug which was an isomer twist of a well understood Cox inhibitor, to get the IPR renewed. Somebody really had to work hard on that one.

superkuh 4y ago

You see this constantly in information technology contexts as well. People who at work, when required to work with many other people on the same project which itself is of a larger scale, then bring kubernetes style containers and ideas about "deployment" home to their personal webserver. And this would be fine, silly, recreation if only they didn't write up articles on "How to host from home" that described their k8/etc/etc setup like it was required in this new context. Basically any time you see the word "deployal" outside of a business or institutional IT context you're looking at cargo cult behavior.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
But it is not only people cargo culting at home. It is also people doing that on the job. Instead of looking at various alternatives and truly evaluating them, looking at benefit and downsides each brings, people jump to whatever is the current hype or what is fashionable and then justify it with a circular argument of popularity. Instead of immediately when the talk is about clusters jumping to kubernetes, people should think about whether the conceptual overhead is actually worth it. They should think about, whether the Google scale tool is truly appropriate for what they want to do. Similar situation of course with all the hyped JS frameworks, when a simple statically rendered website/page would do. Basically it is not engineering any longer, but cargo cult and hype. And that is how shitty products are made.

deleted 4y ago

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dang 4y ago

Related: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563567 - March 2021 (69 comments) Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120637 - Sept 2019 (33 comments) Cargo cult data science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919263 - Aug 2017 (40 comments) Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107 - Dec 2016 (37 comments) Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004 - May 2016 (38 comments) Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 - Oct 2013 (62 comments) Feynman's Cargo Cult Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140 - July 2009 (17 comments)

low_tech_love 4y ago

His analogy of teaching resonated too much with me. I have been feeling exactly that for a couple of years, and it feels scarily like when I abandoned the belief in god many years ago. There is that nagging feeling I can’t shake that, no matter how I look at it, I can’t negate the null hypothesis that organized education is basically useless. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think educational institutions shouldn’t exist; surely smart people need a place to go and do things and get together and work. The point to me is that, whatever it is that smart people are doing, they’d mostly do that anyway no matter what kind of education they’re getting. Whenever I bring it up with colleagues, I usually get into heated arguments where I become the 1 in an invariably N-to-1 aggressive debate. Plus, my wife is a primary school teacher with a Master degree in Education who loves teaching, so obviously that is a very delicate subject to bring up at home. I have noticed that people like her, who love teaching, usually have a very emotional attachment to it from their own personal experiences and how they see education as transformative, and that makes any kind of objective research on teaching become very hard to do. It’s almost like teaching is such a holy subject that any teaching has to be good, and criticizing it is like defending imperialism or capitalism or rich people or something like that (it doesn’t help that my wife came from a very poor background and got out of that through education practice, and has teached most of her career in poor neighborhoods; that makes a delicate subject even more touchy). My personal opinion is that I am only human and seeing myself as some kind of ”savior through teaching” is unfair, to me and to others (yes, I do some teaching too). Most of the time I focus on trying to give smart students a platform to grow, and while I also try to motivate the other students as much as I can (I do believe you can ”fish” some of them out of the pool), I don’t usually pull my hair or lose sleep over them. One, because I don’t feel like I have the right to keep patronizing people as if I know what’s objectively better for them; lots of people out there are doing much better than me without formal education. Second, because I do not have the illusion that I (or most other teachers) know a really good teaching method that can make a significant difference. It would be like losing sleep because a glass of holy water that I blessed did not save a cancer patient.

smogcutter 4y ago
This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to a pretty banal HN greatest hit: “intelligent” people don’t really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

Corollary : When you don't understand something, and are not inclined to take the time to understand it, you just label it as cargo cult science, or pseudoscience.

caddemon 4y ago
Ironically, scientists love to do this! Take a new area with promising results, hype the shit out of it until the worst and/or least ethical scientists truly create a pseudoscientific tangent out of it, and then drop the area entirely for a decade because now anything vaguely associated with it is taboo. Labeling real science as cargo cult science sounds to me like cargo cult science with extra steps. Granted such a violent burst doesn't always happen when an academic bubble is created. But at times I've found academic backlash to be shockingly irrational in its breadth. I think the most common factor is when the pseudoscience makes it to the point of having an impact on actual humans. But it is still sad to see a state when even tenured faculty will shy away from public discussion of certain questions because of vague associations, as it feels entirely unscientific to me. The funniest part is when the area reemerges with a new name, as if extremely surface level branding is actually important to receiving grants or publishing papers. Well I suppose it is unfortunately, but this is one of those cases that feels so thinly veiled it might as well be scientific satire. My personal favorite example is the galvanic skin response hype from 50+ years ago, which morphed into more of a fringe science primarily because of flaws with lie detection applications - flaws that should've been extremely obvious concerns to test just based on the OG literature + common scientific sense. In the last decade or so it's been revamped as electrodermal activity and unsurprisingly shown great promise for certain health applications. EDA is presently the main focus of a big group at MIT, it has been included in some Fitbit models, it is used in FDA approved devices for epilepsy monitoring, and overall the relevant publications per year keep trending back up. A far cry from the looks you'd get if you discussed galvanic skin response in certain supposedly scientific circles back in the day. In absolute numbers the rebranded GSR has actually already fully recovered from the couple decades of low research activity, though relative to total academic output now versus then it probably still has some distance to go.

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ggm 4y ago

There's two parts to this problem. One, is his reflections on what is unquestionably outlier belief, like reiki and reflexology and spoon bending. The other is his intense dislike of the low bar p-jacking in social sciences and the lack of rigour, even in his own field. They aren't the same thing. Labeling both of them 'cargo cult' science does the problem space a disservice. Bad science, belief that the proof is 'in' or that low bar experiments prove things against a lack of reliable, reproducible outcomes, isn't the same thing as the implications of funding for space from the Drake Equation, or a lack of funding for VLSI engineering research because the money went on feel-good stats about alternative medicines. What happened with the Shuttle, was false belief in the hierarchy of science and a fear about speaking out. What happened in tertiary education since Feynman died is that peer review has decayed into a game to tenure, and has nothing to do with the real outcome of why scientists exist. During his lifetime in nuclear physics, it was normal for scientists to lodge patent applications. But that said, it wasn't the main game on the Manhattan project and Leo Szilard used his patent rights as a lever to try and get a say in the socialized and politicized outcomes of his discoveries. Now, most scientists who work in a field with fertile IPR are really strongly driven to the IPO implications of that IPR. It's not a tool, a lever, its the main game. Adding 5% efficiency to classic solar cells in a reproducible patent-free manner right now would be transformative for everyone. Adding 5 patents which contribute 0.1% efficiency to classic solar cells might pay back better. Feynman sat to one side of that game. He lived through a time of tenure and a role in science, which nowadays would be very hard to maintain.

DoreenMichele 4y ago

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. Vitamins for convicts could save taxpayers' money https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867 All experiments in psychology... Psychology is really hard to do well. I tend to look for real word data that casts light on a thing because psychological experiments involving humans are so often designed so very poorly. For example, it was found that when women take an interest in a celebrity, they do a search for his marital or relationship status. When men take an interest in a celebrity, they do a search for nude photos of her. This is people in the privacy of their own homes on their own computers looking for something to make themselves hot. They aren't worried about what other people might expect from them, yet male and female strategies differ in ways that fit with historical norms that women are usually looking for a relationship and men are often just looking for sex (at least at first).

mwbajor 4y ago

"When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease." What about dark matter?

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
Astrophysicists are extremely motivated to find alternatives to dark matter. The "problem" is that the evidence for the existence of dark matter, what fraction of the universe it makes up, where it is, and some of its general properties (e.g., temperature) come from many different directions, and they point to the same conclusions. Dark matter is a relatively simple postulate that explains a large number of disparate observations, from the relative abundances of different atomic elements to the amount of gravitational lensing in distant galaxy clusters. It's not that astrophysicists are straining to make everything fit into the dark matter paradigm. It's that everything seems to fit into the paradigm very naturally. That's what overcomes the queasiness over dark matter having never been directly observed in a lab.