The speech is widely posted and Feynman adapted it in his book Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Feynman based the phrase on a concept in anthropology, the cargo cult, which describes how some pre-scientific cultures interpreted technologically advanced visitors as religious or supernatural figures who brought boons of cargo. Later, in an effort to call for a second visit the natives would develop and engage in complex religious rituals, mirroring the previously observed behavior of the visitors manipulating their machines but without understanding the true nature of those tasks. Just as cargo cultists create mock airports that fail to produce airplanes, cargo cult scientists conduct flawed research that superficially resembles the scientific method, but which fails to produce scientifically useful results. The following is an excerpt from a speech (taken from the book). 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 theyve 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--hes the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. Theyre doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesnt 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 theyre missing something essential, because the planes dont 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 behavioral psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science. Feynman cautioned, 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. An example of cargo cult science is an experiment that uses another researchers results in lieu of an experimental control. Since the other researchers 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 ones research to secure funding. ---Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 11:26:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015