
Cargo Cult Science (1974) - fipar
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
======
killjoywashere
> there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes,
> and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very
> interesting one.

Has anyone found this paper? I searched a few years ago and couldn't find
anything.

~~~
bborud
Me neither, and for this reason I tend to use this paper to see who pays
attention. Best case: someone tracks down the missing paper(s).

I suspect it may be a joke Feynman played on us to prove a point. :)

Good catch.

~~~
bborud
As for "good catch": I think it took me at least 6 months from I first read
the paper before I actually tried to find the research in question. Not
finding even a single credible reference was a humiliating and humbling
experience. I've looked for it several times over the year since and stille
come up empty-handed.

I was giving a talk where I was going to refer to Feynman's speech and I felt
I needed to fact-check it.

(I ended up using the speech in the talk I was giving, but I did give a hint
at the end that perhaps this speech might possibly contain a joke at our
expense, or something along those lines. So as to not look like a total idiot
if someone else did a better job of checking the speech faster than I had done
:-))

So kudos to you @killjoywashere :-)

------
seibelj
Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s
imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that
you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable
chemical changes happen that improve your abilities.

The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a
bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basically rode
that to success in her professional and public life.[1]

All of this came crashing down when no one could replicate her experiments.
It’s absolutely incredible that things got this far in science, or at least
the soft sciences. Shameful

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Cuddy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Cuddy)

~~~
aspaceman
I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about
the field, the journal, or the community.

People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that
makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are
soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post,
when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard"
scientific research (and vice-versa).

~~~
seibelj
Mathematics is "hard" because there is a provably right and wrong answer.
Moving away from mathematics, subjects become much more malleable and open to
interpretation. For example the fuzziness of psychology allows something like
the "Power Pose" to exist, while in math there would be no "Power Matrix" or
some such.

~~~
brians
You tell that to the geometers.

------
harry8
Optimising software has frequently been very cargo cult-ish. No measurements
at all or measurements that tell you nothing have been pretty common. It seems
it's more common to take it seriously now, also tools are better and
techniques get written up on blogs and shared, some of the good ones catch on,
some of the bad ones eventually fall over. "If experiment doesn't match theory
the theory is wrong." Feynman has been the source of a good bit of wisdom in
my career and life. Re-post and re-discuss often. If you haven't, "Surely
you're joking..." It's worth your time and will also entertain. I should read
it again, it's been a while.

------
dang
Many previous submissions; the ones with comments:

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004)

2013:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791)

2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571)

2009:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140)

------
umvi
Experiments that attempt to create AGI singularities by just making huge
neural networks strike me as cargo cult science.

~~~
chillacy
I've never seen that before but I have seen businesses:

* Use hadoop/latest distributed computing with data that fits on one machine

* Use way higher variance models than necessary for the problem at hand

And in general just cargo cult what the big players are doing when it's
unnecessarily complex for the size of the business.

~~~
throwawayjava
s/businesses/engineers looking for resume items for FAANG applications/ and
it's completely rational.

------
bschne
Related: [https://meaningness.com/metablog/upgrade-your-cargo-
cult](https://meaningness.com/metablog/upgrade-your-cargo-cult)

------
jeffdavis
"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."

Not sure that's obvious. Crime has steadily fallen. Particular practices may
not stand up to scrutiny, but I'm guessing a lot of it does kind of work.

~~~
kragen
In the US crime rose steadily from 1960 to 1990, and that's using the official
statistics that don't even try to include things like the Iran–Contra scandal,
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, CREEP, the Kent State murders, and the CIA
protecting crack kingpins. Feynman was speaking in 1974, right in the middle
of this period.

