7 ms·

Feynman's concept of scientific integrity

73 points by parasubvert 11y ago

itistoday2 11y ago
Some of my favorite HN articles are the ones that have no comments on them. Insightful, relevant, beyond repute. I apologize for spoiling this one. Just wanted to make that observation out loud. Side question: this is driving me crazy and Googleing isn't helping. Is it "beyond repute" or "beyond reproach"? Are both OK in this context?
- jeffsco 11y ago
  Repute is what people think of you in the aggregate. It doesn't make sense (at least to me) to say "beyond repute." On the other hand to say that something is "beyond reproach" is a standard phrase indicating that no reasonable person can find anything to disapprove about the thing. Perhaps you're thinking of "beyond dispute."
- dang 11y ago
  > Some of my favorite HN articles are the ones that have no comments on them. Others have said this too. It may be that more substantive stories demand reflection before comments arise. Conversely, shallower posts often trigger a flood of comments in a few minutes. That's usually bad because such reactions are more reflexive than reflective, typically served from cache with little attention to whatever is specific about this story. The difference in reaction times is noticeable, like a timing attack on the brain. Hmm... we could measure this. One can sum up everything we're striving for on HN as s/reflexive/reflective/.
  - eevilspock 11y ago
    You also might want to sum it up in the same way Paul Romer sums it up in the title of his third post, "Stigler Conviction vs. Feynman Integrity", or as he puts it in his first post: "This evidence strengthens my belief that the fundamental divide here is between the norms of political discourse and the norms of scientific discourse. Lawyers and politicians both engage in a version of the adversarial method" In law there is a case to be made for the adversarial method (Though the disparities in what each side can afford in legal counsel undermine it almost entirely), but I question whether it is good for politics. We are so polarized and reflexive in all debates. Libertarians refuse to concede any flaws in their model of how things work, and the same is true for those who want the government and laws to take over. The question is, has social progress mostly come about through political war, where each side employs any means necessary to win, including dishonest ones, or through honest discourse, where we arrive at truth not through attrition but through reason? I want it to be the latter but most of the world acts like it's the former. And quite often the appalling injustices and suffering that continue in the world cause me wonder whether I should give up idealism and grab a musket.
  - 1arity 11y ago
    It would be interesting to explore the idea of reaction delay as a ranking signal. Perhaps by blind testing it against some of your other established signals of quality, and by seeing how well reaction delay can predict these and possibly other ( say, subjective ) signals of quality.
mathattack 11y ago
It will be VERY VERY hard for economics (or any other social science) to have the kind of scientific integrity of Physics. The math is much looser, and many more assumptions need to be made.
- obrero 11y ago
  Also, pretty much all physicists want to know things such as, why there is more matter than anti-matter, if a good explanation for that can be found. If someone came up with a relatively solid answer to that question, the physics community would rally together. Everyone has the same goal - what is the truth? Whereas in economics, where the data is fuzzier, and you have questions like, how should the pie be divided up, people are not united together in the pursuit of a universal truth, things are more dialectic. Even the name economics is part of this agenda-pushing, as is the B.S. "Nobel Prize for Economics" and so forth - in the early days, "economics" was called by its proper name "studies of political economy". Nothing was more political than dropping the word political from the field.
- ddingus 11y ago
  Romer is not trying to raise the bar that high. We lack the means to experiment for it to make sense anyway. However, we do have the benefit of observation and can confirm predictions through ongoing data collection. There is enough there to qualify models and inferences made to justify a Feynman style of integrity.
- noobermin 11y ago
  Economics is "softer" than Physics and the math is looser, but the example the author gives about the support of a model's function is not a loose concept. The softness of the science may make predictability of a such a model suspect, but how the scientist omitted details about the behavior of a function is not due to the softness of the study, but due to the "adversarial equilibrium" the author comments on.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  He's not talking about the integrity of the field (whatever that might mean). He's talking about the honesty of the researchers, for example, giving a correct interpretation of the mathematics that they're using. If there are limits to your results, you need to be open about them.
ubasu 11y ago
Here's Krugman's commentary on this discussion: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/freshwaters-wrong-turn-wonkish/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/freshwaters-wron...
pjmorris 11y ago
I'd wager Feynman would have objected to the term 'Feynman Integrity', preferring, perhaps, 'scientific integrity'. 'For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.' - Richard P. Feynman [1] [1] - http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...
- gertef 11y ago
  > I'd wager Feynman would have objected to the term 'Feynman Integrity', That ship has sailed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Richard_Feynman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Ric...
  - hn9780470248775 11y ago
    "Feynman integrity" is not on that list. It appears that the ship is, in fact, still in port.
    - markmassie 11y ago
      Until measured by a classical observer, the ship has sailed without ever leaving port.
- conistonwater 11y ago
  The follow-up post "Stigler Conviction vs. Feynman Integrity " I think explains what effect he was aiming for with that title. I don't think he wanted to say anything specific about Feynman per se. http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/ http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity...
- dang 11y ago
  That's a reasonable point. We've changed the title to make it more neutral.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
JackFr 11y ago
Th irony of this piece is that this post is itself pure academic posturing and politics.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Why is this “ironic”? Romer thinks the reputation of his whole field is at stake if they don’t agree to some common norms about the purpose being to seek the truth, and he’s therefore calling out economists who he thinks don’t abide by the norms he prefers. Of course it’s “politics”, in the same way it’s “politics” when an experimental physicist calls out string theory for being unfalsifiable.
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    > Of course it’s “politics”, in the same way it’s “politics” when an experimental physicist calls out string theory for being unfalsifiable. Not really. It's as though he's calling out someone for presenting results that show the Earth rotates around the sun, but then in the text of the paper says the results show the opposite.
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      It’s not literally an identical criticism, that’s just an analogy. The point is that both epistemic critiques are similarly “political”, in the sense that they are about professional norms and goals and are abstracted from the precise details of the work in question. Anyway, his primary point isn’t about “mathiness” per se, but rather about the way (he claims) a particular group of economists refuse to admit that their theory turned out to be wrong when put to real-world tests. The “mathiness” part is just one of the ways he thinks they try to deflect criticism through confusion/obscurity. (Note, in my comments here I’m not judging the validity of any of these arguments one way or the other.)
niels_olson 11y ago
This seems to me a different facet of the same division that motivated the post-autistic economics movement. If so, would the camps recognize their common enemy and ally?
- kijin 11y ago
  What's post-autistic economics?
  - na85 11y ago
    LMGTFY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- eevilspock 11y ago
  Thank you for introducing me to this movement! I just read A Brief History of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement (http://www.paecon.net/HistoryPAE.htm http://www.paecon.net/HistoryPAE.htm). I'm a card-carrying member of this movement and I didn't even know it existed.
- johnmorrow 11y ago
  Reading the PAE manifesto and Romer's posts, it seems clear that in this case, the enemy of an enemy is not a friend
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
tl;dr Lucas and a group of economists are pushing a model that has questionable assumptions and fighting criticism with Ad hominem retorts. Krugman et al respond with ad hominem and it all get dirty. Paul Romer is trying to persuade everyone to calm down and have a cup of tea, and puts Feynmans definition of "bending over backwards to critique ones own work" as a standard for all
agnes49 11y ago
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Animats 11y ago
The trouble with macroeconomics as a science is that its predictive power is terribly weak. There's lots of math based on unrealistic assumptions. Science is prediction, not explanation, wrote Fred Hoyle. A theory without predictive capability cannot lead to an engineering discipline or a control strategy. Yet economists would like their theories to affect public policy. Whether there needs to be an intuitive model behind a theory is another matter entirely. If a theory has predictive power, it's in some sense good, although it may not be doing what you think it's doing. Artificial neural nets have the same problem - they can work, but there's no understandable model of what they're doing.

73 points by parasubvert 11y ago

Some of my favorite HN articles are the ones that have no comments on them. Insightful, relevant, beyond repute. I apologize for spoiling this one. Just wanted to make that observation out loud. Side question: this is driving me crazy and Googleing isn't helping. Is it "beyond repute" or "beyond reproach"? Are both OK in this context?

jeffsco 11y ago
Repute is what people think of you in the aggregate. It doesn't make sense (at least to me) to say "beyond repute." On the other hand to say that something is "beyond reproach" is a standard phrase indicating that no reasonable person can find anything to disapprove about the thing. Perhaps you're thinking of "beyond dispute."
dang 11y ago
> Some of my favorite HN articles are the ones that have no comments on them. Others have said this too. It may be that more substantive stories demand reflection before comments arise. Conversely, shallower posts often trigger a flood of comments in a few minutes. That's usually bad because such reactions are more reflexive than reflective, typically served from cache with little attention to whatever is specific about this story. The difference in reaction times is noticeable, like a timing attack on the brain. Hmm... we could measure this. One can sum up everything we're striving for on HN as s/reflexive/reflective/.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  You also might want to sum it up in the same way Paul Romer sums it up in the title of his third post, "Stigler Conviction vs. Feynman Integrity", or as he puts it in his first post: "This evidence strengthens my belief that the fundamental divide here is between the norms of political discourse and the norms of scientific discourse. Lawyers and politicians both engage in a version of the adversarial method" In law there is a case to be made for the adversarial method (Though the disparities in what each side can afford in legal counsel undermine it almost entirely), but I question whether it is good for politics. We are so polarized and reflexive in all debates. Libertarians refuse to concede any flaws in their model of how things work, and the same is true for those who want the government and laws to take over. The question is, has social progress mostly come about through political war, where each side employs any means necessary to win, including dishonest ones, or through honest discourse, where we arrive at truth not through attrition but through reason? I want it to be the latter but most of the world acts like it's the former. And quite often the appalling injustices and suffering that continue in the world cause me wonder whether I should give up idealism and grab a musket.
- 1arity 11y ago
  It would be interesting to explore the idea of reaction delay as a ranking signal. Perhaps by blind testing it against some of your other established signals of quality, and by seeing how well reaction delay can predict these and possibly other ( say, subjective ) signals of quality.

mathattack 11y ago

It will be VERY VERY hard for economics (or any other social science) to have the kind of scientific integrity of Physics. The math is much looser, and many more assumptions need to be made.

obrero 11y ago
Also, pretty much all physicists want to know things such as, why there is more matter than anti-matter, if a good explanation for that can be found. If someone came up with a relatively solid answer to that question, the physics community would rally together. Everyone has the same goal - what is the truth? Whereas in economics, where the data is fuzzier, and you have questions like, how should the pie be divided up, people are not united together in the pursuit of a universal truth, things are more dialectic. Even the name economics is part of this agenda-pushing, as is the B.S. "Nobel Prize for Economics" and so forth - in the early days, "economics" was called by its proper name "studies of political economy". Nothing was more political than dropping the word political from the field.
ddingus 11y ago
Romer is not trying to raise the bar that high. We lack the means to experiment for it to make sense anyway. However, we do have the benefit of observation and can confirm predictions through ongoing data collection. There is enough there to qualify models and inferences made to justify a Feynman style of integrity.
noobermin 11y ago
Economics is "softer" than Physics and the math is looser, but the example the author gives about the support of a model's function is not a loose concept. The softness of the science may make predictability of a such a model suspect, but how the scientist omitted details about the behavior of a function is not due to the softness of the study, but due to the "adversarial equilibrium" the author comments on.
bachmeier 11y ago
He's not talking about the integrity of the field (whatever that might mean). He's talking about the honesty of the researchers, for example, giving a correct interpretation of the mathematics that they're using. If there are limits to your results, you need to be open about them.

ubasu 11y ago

Here's Krugman's commentary on this discussion: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/freshwaters-wrong-turn-wonkish/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/freshwaters-wron...

pjmorris 11y ago

I'd wager Feynman would have objected to the term 'Feynman Integrity', preferring, perhaps, 'scientific integrity'. 'For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.' - Richard P. Feynman [1] [1] - http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

gertef 11y ago
> I'd wager Feynman would have objected to the term 'Feynman Integrity', That ship has sailed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Richard_Feynman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Ric...
- hn9780470248775 11y ago
  "Feynman integrity" is not on that list. It appears that the ship is, in fact, still in port.
  - markmassie 11y ago
    Until measured by a classical observer, the ship has sailed without ever leaving port.
conistonwater 11y ago
The follow-up post "Stigler Conviction vs. Feynman Integrity " I think explains what effect he was aiming for with that title. I don't think he wanted to say anything specific about Feynman per se. http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/ http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity...
dang 11y ago
That's a reasonable point. We've changed the title to make it more neutral.
BurningFrog 11y ago

JackFr 11y ago

Th irony of this piece is that this post is itself pure academic posturing and politics.

jacobolus 11y ago
Why is this “ironic”? Romer thinks the reputation of his whole field is at stake if they don’t agree to some common norms about the purpose being to seek the truth, and he’s therefore calling out economists who he thinks don’t abide by the norms he prefers. Of course it’s “politics”, in the same way it’s “politics” when an experimental physicist calls out string theory for being unfalsifiable.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  > Of course it’s “politics”, in the same way it’s “politics” when an experimental physicist calls out string theory for being unfalsifiable. Not really. It's as though he's calling out someone for presenting results that show the Earth rotates around the sun, but then in the text of the paper says the results show the opposite.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    It’s not literally an identical criticism, that’s just an analogy. The point is that both epistemic critiques are similarly “political”, in the sense that they are about professional norms and goals and are abstracted from the precise details of the work in question. Anyway, his primary point isn’t about “mathiness” per se, but rather about the way (he claims) a particular group of economists refuse to admit that their theory turned out to be wrong when put to real-world tests. The “mathiness” part is just one of the ways he thinks they try to deflect criticism through confusion/obscurity. (Note, in my comments here I’m not judging the validity of any of these arguments one way or the other.)

niels_olson 11y ago

This seems to me a different facet of the same division that motivated the post-autistic economics movement. If so, would the camps recognize their common enemy and ally?

kijin 11y ago
What's post-autistic economics?
- na85 11y ago
  LMGTFY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
eevilspock 11y ago
Thank you for introducing me to this movement! I just read A Brief History of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement (http://www.paecon.net/HistoryPAE.htm http://www.paecon.net/HistoryPAE.htm). I'm a card-carrying member of this movement and I didn't even know it existed.
johnmorrow 11y ago
Reading the PAE manifesto and Romer's posts, it seems clear that in this case, the enemy of an enemy is not a friend

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

tl;dr Lucas and a group of economists are pushing a model that has questionable assumptions and fighting criticism with Ad hominem retorts. Krugman et al respond with ad hominem and it all get dirty. Paul Romer is trying to persuade everyone to calm down and have a cup of tea, and puts Feynmans definition of "bending over backwards to critique ones own work" as a standard for all

agnes49 11y ago

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Animats 11y ago

The trouble with macroeconomics as a science is that its predictive power is terribly weak. There's lots of math based on unrealistic assumptions. Science is prediction, not explanation, wrote Fred Hoyle. A theory without predictive capability cannot lead to an engineering discipline or a control strategy. Yet economists would like their theories to affect public policy. Whether there needs to be an intuitive model behind a theory is another matter entirely. If a theory has predictive power, it's in some sense good, although it may not be doing what you think it's doing. Artificial neural nets have the same problem - they can work, but there's no understandable model of what they're doing.