
Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - joubert
http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
======
md224
> In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to
> judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to
> judgement in one particular direction or another.

Sometimes I think if we could extend this principle to human communication in
general, we'd end up with a lot less misinformation.

I try to communicate doubts or possible weaknesses in my arguments when I can,
though it's difficult and I'm sure I've failed to do so on numerous occasions.
It occurs to me that perhaps we simply don't have the cognitive capacity to
include that level of information in our everyday communications. Still, I
wonder if perhaps this should be an ideal to strive for. Information travels
so fast now, and it seems like most people aren't very mindful of how they
participate in this transmission.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
For the general audience total confidence always beats the person who delivers
a confidence interval.

Hedgehogs also beat foxes, despite the obvious difference in prediction
accuracy in favor of foxes.

~~~
wging
Perhaps the answer is a kind of confident non-confidence. "I have studied this
problem and am about 70% confident that the answer is this, and I am confident
there's not enough information available to be more certain than that. If
anyone tells you they know the answer for certain, they are probably trying to
sell you something."

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I think this is a really valuable approach to try, thank you.

------
sarreph
_Surely You 're Joking, Mr Feynman_ is a brilliant read. My high school
Physics teacher lent it to me a few years ago; it really opened my eyes and
increased my love for the subject.

~~~
valisystem
I just happened to finish it today. I already knew throughout the book that it
would be a very important read, in several aspects. The very end is about the
cargo cult in science, and it looks like he put this collection of anecdotes
of his life in the sole point of illustrating the cargo cult problem, only
exposed in the end. It's almost the sole time he talks extensively about
science in this book (and it's why it's so awesome). Cargo cult is the result
of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in. We all know or knew
at some point how to avoid the trap, but it gets another perspective when
reading about someone that put it in practice his entire life.

Question everything, discover everything, take nothing for granted.

If it's seems unrealistic, just read the book, it'll just teach you how it
happens. If it's intimidating, it's by its ruthless simplicity.

~~~
antimagic
_Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to
fall in._

Yeah, tell me about it. I fell into the trap a couple of months ago. I was
tasked with porting my company's browser's 2D graphics backend onto Android
OpenGL. My first attempt allowed the browser to draw into graphics buffers
that I would load into a texture using glTexImage2D.

A few co-workers felt that this was less efficient than the old 2D APIs, where
we would draw into a buffer that would be directly read by the blitter
hardware, without having to do a load step. I agreed - on the face of it, if
we could arrange things to draw into the texture buffer directly we could save
memory and processor cycles, so I started hunting on the Internet to see if
anyone else had come to the same conclusion.

It turns out that the guys that were developing Firefox for Android had had
exactly the same problem, and they hacked together a solution where they used
some internal Android APIs for graphic buffers, that they accessed through
dlopen/dlsym. They then linked the buffer to an eglImage, and created a
texture from the eglImage. I figured that hey, if the Firefox guys are doing
it, then it's probably not to bad an idea.

Unfortunately I should have taken the next step in my investigations, and ask
myself exactly what that code that created an eglImage and linked it to a
texture was actually doing. If I had investigated that more closely, I would
have realised that behind the scenes there's an implicit equivalent of
glTexImage2D being done - the problem being that the internal format of a
texture is not a simple bitmap. The image is tiled so that OpenGL can draw a
texture to the screen with any rotation and have roughly the same performance
- if you use a standard bitmap layout, memory paging makes drawing tall thin
rectangles much slower than drawing wide short rectangles. So, for OpenGL (or
at least OpenGL ES) to be able to draw the texture to the screen, it first
reads the data in from the eglImage, tiling it as it goes. This is exactly the
same workload that you have in glTexImage2D, and it requires you to keep two
copies of the buffer - the one you draw into, and the one that has been tiled
for OpenGL.

Anyway, it took me about a month to get the eglImage solution to work (apart
from everything else, you are exposed to odd behaviour by the graphics
libraries of each Android tablet that your code runs on, that you have to
write special code to handle, ie it's not very portable as a solution). Once I
realised that I wasn't actually gaining anything from the exercise, I had to
go and rip out all of that native graphic buffer code, and put back in the
original standard texture code. I probably wasted 6 weeks stuffing around with
all of this.

Lesson learned - if you are worrying about optimising code, you need to
understand what is being done by the compiler / hardware, and it is pointless
changing code until you _have_ that understanding. Don't just accept stuff
that you read on the Internet, where possible you need to go and look at
source code, or official documentation. Anything else is running the risk of
cargo-culting.

------
justarandomanon
Excellent read. Maintaining integrity in daily life has been a constant
struggle. For many people, myself included, paying bills or taking care of
people that depend on you can get in the way of integrity and it's a shame. Mr
Feynman is lucky in that his skills will allow him to have his cake and eat it
so to speak, not to discredit his message.

~~~
robbiep
Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan
project) in 1989.

This article seems to appear every couple of months. Still enjoyable and
useful however.

~~~
gwern
> Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan
> project) in 1989.

Something like a fifth of the American population will die of cancer, without
ever having worked on the Manhattan population.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
"worked on the Manhattan population" is an interesting linguistic slip.
[saving for AI research]

------
jnotarstefano
I love this speech so much I wrote an italian translation for my blog. Which
other speeches in science do you think are worth a translation?

~~~
euoia
Randy Pausch: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

~~~
jnotarstefano
I loved that. But I fear a blog post can't do justice to Pausch's excellent
delivery.

------
auctiontheory
Not to distract from the Important Scientific Discussion, but Esalen is as
wonderful today as it was back then. The hot tubs and showers have been
rebuilt, and the scenery is just as striking. Out of this world.

If you're there over Thanksgiving, say hi.

~~~
peterwwillis
How does it compare to Harbin? I was just there and it was also lovely (a bit
too much like a resort than i'd prefer, though)

Also off of the scientific tangent: If you find yourself in a hot tub with a
beautiful nude and no idea what to say, compare poetry to liquid
thermodynamics. "Rock Star" doesn't begin to cover it.

~~~
auctiontheory
Very different vibe from Harbin, plus of course the ocean. Much more of a
sense of "community" at Esalen, while at Harbin you generally interact with
the people you came with, if any.

------
triplesec
This story has been particularly sccessful on HN recently partly because of
this year's Burning Man festival's theme being "cargo cult". Quite happy to
see this pop up again. Feynman never goes out of style.

~~~
mhartl
This year at Burning Man, I happened to notice a car with the California state
license plate "TUVA". I recognized it as belonging to Ralph Leighton,
Feynman's close friend and author of _Surely You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_.
(The plate is a reference to the story recounted in [ _Tuva or Bust!_
]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva_or_Bust!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva_or_Bust!)).)
I reached out to Ralph, and it turns out he wasn't there but his son was. I
thought it was a fun coincidence given the theme of the burn.

------
alrs
That this story can thrive on HN every few months is a strong indicator that a
nontrivial chunk of the userbase is 16.

~~~
mikeash
Why, do only 16-year-olds read interesting stories from famous physicists?

~~~
alrs
It's a great speech.

Having never seen this before is perfectly reasonable if you're new.

~~~
mikeash
And it's unreasonable to have never seen this if you're older?? I don't know
about you, but I still discover new things despite being twice the quoted age.

[http://xkcd.com/1053/](http://xkcd.com/1053/)

~~~
alrs
[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=cargo+...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=cargo+cult&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

~~~
mikeash
I don't understand your point. Or you don't understand mine.

My point is that age is irrelevant. "Newness" may be, but that doesn't imply
age.

~~~
sliverstorm
His point is something along the lines of, the older you are the more likely
that you've heard of it, especially if you have a history of reading HN much.

~~~
mikeash
"More likely" is a far cry from "there's a lot of 16-year-olds around here"
(paraphrased). There's no reason to think that's the cause rather than the
alternate theory that there are new people joining HN all the time (as you
suggest), or simply that even people who have seen this thing before still
upvote it.

~~~
sliverstorm
And you are correct. I do not disagree with you.

------
dschiptsov
Yeah, yeah. _Java - the planes don 't land._

------
dlsx
I didn't truly respect and understand Feynman until I read _American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer_ And it really
shows how important Mr. Feynman was to not only making the first computerized
filing system for the manhattan project, but also in solving some of the
crucial challenges they faced. He had such a unique way of approaching physics
that I think a lot of his contemporaries admired.

~~~
MikeCapone
That was a great biography. Oppenheimer is fascinating in his own right.

