
Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman (1974) - vinutheraj
http://yost.com/misc/cargocult.html
======
lionhearted
I'm just finishing "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" - what a damn good book.

For a few years, I'd read references and anecdotes and cool snippets and meant
to read it, but I never got around to it. And now I'm kicking myself that I
didn't earlier, because it's wonderful and illuminating and my worldview is
greatly expanded.

You, yes YOU, if you haven't read it yet, get your copy and read it. You'll be
happy you did. It reads fast, and you'll learn a lot about society and love
and engineering and science and mixing with people very different than you.
Just an amazing read. It's worth taking a 30 minute break from Hacker News
each day for a month to read it, it's like the essence of Hacker News
distilled into witty, insightful, gorgeous easy-yet-deep reading.

Amazon, no affiliate link (really, add it to your cart and get it with your
next order - no excuse not to, _anyone_ who likes this site will love this
book):

[http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-
Char...](http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-
Character/dp/0393316041)

~~~
Create
I could just hope, that William H. Gates will still have enough income to buy
the right to copy this book, and put it out on Silverlight, out of pure
fascination for science and integrity; so that Amazon will need not meddle
with the freedom of the Right to Read.

Until then, those whom dare to click through and read seem to be in breach of
the law. _May you have that freedom._ Lucky it's not source code with all
those 4 freedoms...

~~~
jacquesm
Why on silverlight, why not on project gutenberg ?

~~~
Create
ask W.H.G. ...if I were to guess, the real answer might have to do something
with _control_ for _power_. Speaking of integrity, power and Gutenberg:
"Understanding Power" is quite a book.

------
10ren
> The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young.

I read this years ago, and it left me with the impression that most science is
cargo cult science (90% of everything?). It's a delight to read people with
ridiculous levels of integrity - like Chomsky or Feynman. It's a shame that
integrity seems to require Socratic heroism.

~~~
Create
Programmers owe far more to the works of Chomsky -- more than most are aware
of, or care to admit. Without his rigorous stance, I am not sure if
compilers(!) and programming languages would exist, the way they do now.

Research has been more openly industrialized in the past few decades; it is
hard to escape pseudoscience due to the sheer mass production. Deprecated
Phd.-s are just a symptom, pseudo-Phd.-s just make matter worse. Cargo-cult is
quite easy to unmask for anybody, pseudoscience is tougher by design.

 _"Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of
pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a
science; they don't do [things] scientifically; they follow the forms -- you
gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they
haven't found out anything.... You see, I have the advantage of having found
out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be
about checking the experiment, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool
yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they
get their information and I can't believe they know it, they haven't done the
work necessary, haven't done the checks necessary, haven't done the care
necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know, that this stuff is
[wrong], and they're intimidating people."_ \-- _The Pleasure of Finding
Things Out_ , by Richard P. Feynman

~~~
abecedarius
"Context-free grammars... are a reinvention of a technique first used by
ancient Indian grammarians... They were reinvented by Noam Chomsky... and
independently by John Backus for the analysis of Algol-58 syntax." (Russell &
Norvig 2nd edition p. 827)

I generally squint at claims like "without so-and-so, X would not exist".
Independent invention is so common it's the opposite that's surprising.
Chomsky did make statistical techniques unfashionable in NLP for a few
decades.

~~~
Create
The way I know the context: after WWII, it was clear for policy makers in the
USA, that internationalization and (seeing the success of) science (as
mentioned above) were key to global dominance relying on technology. There was
a slight hope for the automatic translation of documents [i.e. scientific
papers] from one language to another, and funding was abundant with the '56
landmark paper. The original goal then was not reached, but as with all good
research, the by-products were of great value. Speaking of statistical
techniques, not unlike GOOG's case today, with the UN documents used to train
translate.google.com -- somewhat achieving the "original" dream, having gone
full circle. I would therefore discount the later UNESCO report from Backus as
_independent_ work, it is rather the incarnation of the results of the
_zeitgeist_ [1].

About the influence of Pāṇini it is true. Thanks for drawing my attention to
it: I've learnt something[1]. But I am inclined to think, that the pieces of
today's compilers fell to place as a byproduct of his work at MIT (right time,
right place).

[1] _"Speaking of linguistic law in general is like trying to pin down a
ghost"_ \-- Ferdinand de Saussure

[2] <http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1825/18250150.htm>

_When asked what suggestions he would give to individuals who are trying to
raise questions and challenge conventional doctrines, Chomsky said: "It's the
same advice you'd give to a young scientist. Be honest, be thoughtful, be
creative."_

~~~
abecedarius
Those refs to Panini in Russell & Norvig blew me away a little -- context-free
grammars and knowledge representation in 350 B.C.!

On Backus, here's what Google found at
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Backus_John/Backus_John_1.oral_history.2006.102657970.pdf):

Booch: And giving examples, and stuff like that. I had read you were
influenced by some of the work of Noam Chomsky, that led you to that.

Backus: Yeah, well, that’s a funny story. That’s what I said and what I
believed, and yet… Who was it? Somebody sort of proved that I was wrong about
it, that I hadn’t got it from Noam Chomsky, because the dates were all wrong
somehow. But-- God, who was that?

Unrelated quote on the next page:

Booch: Really! Interesting. So as a programmer, what did you program in most
of the time?

Backus: I never wrote many programs. I was not good at doing that. What kind
of programs was I going to write anyway?

~~~
Create
...an avid TiVo user, or rather Linux that is ;)

------
nebula
<quote> One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting
with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How
am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”

I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, I’m, uh,
studying massage. Could I practice on you? </quote> :)

------
tokenadult
"Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As
various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms
of their own experiments--they improve the techniques so that the effects are
smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the
parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that
you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a
million rats no, it’s people this time they do a lot of things and get a
certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don’t get it any more.
And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a
repeatable experiment. This is science?"

Feynman noticed the scientific procedure problems in parapsychology
"research," and later investigators responded to his suggestion to be better
research by carefully debunking claims about ESP research.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha>

