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Cargo Cult Science (1974)
- Y_Y 2y agoThis 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 2y agoIn many cases people are being rewarded based on superficial appearances, rather than concrete results. No wonder that's what they optimize for.
- sgt101 2y agoI 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 2y agoIt'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283
- nonrandomstring 2y agoThe 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 2y agoSome 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 2y agoAbsolutely. I think it's human nature for some to get stuck on superficiality and appearance. Thanks for the reminder of Wilde.
- tomrod 2y agoBeen 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 2y agoQuite 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 2y agoWe should add “- Richard Feynman” to the title. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that only after clicking the link
- fmajid 2y agoAlso 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pvg 2y agoHN titles are mostly kept as titles rather than summaries/additional metadata in part for a feynmanly reason - the pleasure of finding things out.
- dredmorbius 2y agoA justification by dang some time back: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7518157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7518157>
- superfish 2y agoThanks for the link. > It's a trick I learned from pg for keeping the focus on content rather than personalities. IMO none of us would’ve bothered reading this if it were just some random person’s commencement address. I personally would’ve been bummed if I skipped this post just because I didn’t find the nonsense title (nonsense unless you read the article) interesting enough.
- dredmorbius 2y agoA number of people would likely have recognised the title and publication date and inferred authorship. The piece is well-known. I don't fully agree with HN's views on authorship. It's often inferrable through domain names (which serve as something of an authorship proxy, and are often weighted internally to HN's ranking algorithm). I'd much prefer there was more metadata on articles, and remember Slashdot's practice of providing a brief summary blurb with some fondness. (Slashdot itself is sadly largely irrelevant, at least for discussion. As an article aggregator it has ... some uses.)
- lutusp 2y agoHere'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 https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
- nonrandomstring 2y ago[flagged]
- bumpjammy 2y agoYou do realise that said author is... Richard P Feynman, right?
- nonrandomstring 2y agoNo I didn't realise that. Which is good, because I was not awed by the author's name. I think very highly of Feynman and might have been swayed to doubt my judgement rather than my experience. Guess this is why blind peer review is an awesome thing. Of course I'm possibly too dumb to appreciate majestic poetry. Or it worked in 1974 in a way that fails now. Or we read different articles. It's actually a writing style I use myself - fragmented but with purposeful "abductive" reasoning. But to pull it off you have to deliver a cadence. A bit of bad writing in no way diminishes my opinion of someone I respect as a scientist and teacher, but humanises him more. I see him as an very authentic person and it brings me a smile to think of Richard Feynman penning this and, as we all do, reading it back a few weeks later and saying "WTF was I thinking?". Smart people are capable of missing the mark.
- anon46327826 2y agoIt was not written as an article, it's a transcript of a speech (Caltech’s 1974 commencement address, if you read the introduction), that's why it all over the place.
- krger 2y ago>that's why it all over the place. The last sentence explains why it's all over the place quite succinctly.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoSolved. We read different articles! lutusp posted this copy of the actual article https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm The one at https://fermatslibrary.com/s/cargo-cult-science https://fermatslibrary.com/s/cargo-cult-science is junk - a disordered mish-mash of extracts from the real article.
- wolframhempel 2y agoI 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 2y agoI'm not sure that "education" as the article states is one of them. But the war on drugs certainly is.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoFor me, the word "education" does not appear in the article hosted at the URL https://fermatslibrary.com/s/cargo-cult-science 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 2y agoEducation 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 2y agoEducation 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.
- worstspotgain 2y ago"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."
- pkoird 2y ago> 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.
- bazoom42 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Ma8ee 2y agoAnd 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- trashtester 2y agoThat's how cargo cults start. They way they are propagated, though (in tech), is when devs become old enough to become "senior" without yet having grasped how and when to use patterns, and then proceed to teach them to juniors as mystical, holy imperatives that must be repeated without questioning. Plenty of businesses have a life cycle like this: 1. A group of devs strike on some effective patterns through some combination of luck and deep insight. 2. Juniors get hired and are taught the patterns, but not the WHY of the patterns. 3. The founders leave, and the first hires become the leads. 4. The business has now lost the ability to create anything innovative, as everyone are now slaves to the original patterns. 5. Gradually the business loses the ability to recreate even the original patterns, as some details are lost every time they are handed over.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 2y agoThe vast majority of us live in a secondhand reality. A kind of culturally secreted dream. It ain't real but it's useful.
- cb321 2y agoWhile, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
- dang 2y agoRelated: Cargo Cult Science (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37107817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37107817 - Aug 2023 (136 comments) Cargo cult science (1974) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041549 - March 2023 (156 comments) 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 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)
- gwern 2y agoAlso related are submissions of https://gwern.net/maze https://gwern.net/maze which is about finding the sources for the psychology anecdote towards the end.
- dang 2y agoThanks! I found: Feynman’s Maze-Running Story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35798239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35798239 - May 2023 (46 comments)
- tcj_phx 2y agoModern 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/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/06/cargo-cult-psychiatry/
- seydor 2y agoYeah , cargo cult science doesn't work but Cargo Cult Entrepreneurship (CCE™) can make you rich. Subscribe to my newsletter
- qwerty456127 2y ago> 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 2y agoIn 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 2y ago> 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 voilà : science ! [1] https://hpmor.com/ https://hpmor.com/
- EricE 2y agoFeynman would have had a field day with the idiots proclaiming "The Science is Settled!"