Rereading an excerpt from Richard Feynmans famous Cargo Cult Science speech at Caltech. Its about having integrity. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. Its a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if youre doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that youve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. 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. [ . . . ] Weve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Natures phenomena will agree or theyll 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 havent tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And its 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. [ . . . ] The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After youve not fooled yourself, its easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 17:58:01 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015