Richard Feynman : Cargo Cult Science

Was listening to the venerable scientist's speech at Caltech 1974.
Amongst so many things, the part about integrity of scientists and scientific exploration was what really impressed me.
Cargo Cult Science as he draws a parallel to , which I read later to educate myself further

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science

Here's the relevant excerpt

"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life, and gave examples from advertising, politics, and psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science. Feynman cautioned,[3]

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

An example of cargo cult science is an experiment that uses another researcher's results in lieu of an experimental control. Since the other researcher's conditions might differ from those of the present experiment in unknown ways, differences in the outcome might have no relation to the independent variable under consideration. Other examples, given by Feynman, are from educational research, psychology (particularly parapsychology), and physics. He also mentions other kinds of dishonesty, for example, falsely promoting one's research to secure funding. Feynman believed a scientist of integrity must attempt to give out as much information as possible about their experiments so others could accurately appraise their contribution."

The more I read this , the more I can enjoy the sheer entertainment derived out of the reviews of a certain site that likes to call itself science or evidence driven by measuring only frequency domain steady state tones .

 

Feynman fans? Count me in!

So powerful, are the words spoken by him, when talking about some of the "disciplines" that call themselves sciences: "I know how hard it is to know something."

 

Another Feynman fan here! He identified the problem with so much of today's "junk science". BTW, gave up on that other site long ago, no science there.

 

Back in the late 1980s there were several of us at work who were arguing about a conjectural physics problem. We were getting nowhere so one of us looked up Feynman's number in the phone book and cold-called him. He spent about 20 minutes with us on the phone working through the problem.