Cargo Cult Science (1974) | Hacker News Reader

Cargo Cult Science (1974)

physics.brocku.ca

78 pointsJumpCrisscross37 comments

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For reference, previously on HN

- 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004

- 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571

- 7 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cargo%20Cult%20Science&sort=by...

And I hope it comes up every year in the future too

> It's 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 you're 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 you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

The problem is that in the current system (based on publishing as much as possible quickly and at prestigious conferences) there are few incentives to do this. Instead people learn to game the system. Academics need to relax a bit, but they can't, since there is so much competition.

After Peter Higgs won his Nobel Prize he said some great stuff on this subject, the idea that he wouldn't be allowed the time to do work like his anymore. Please google at your leisure.

I see this narrative about the current publish-or-perish system quite often.

How is the current system of academic incentives different from the system of a few decades ago?

In my view there are a couple of factors involved. First, it's my impression that it keeps getting more and more competitive. Job security is being whittled away.

Second, we've left the century of physics and entered the century of biology. Most of what you read about, regarding the "reproducibility crisis" and so forth, has to do with the medical and behavioral sciences, which have grown in relation to the physical sciences. It's to the point where, when somebody generalizes about "science research," it's likely to be about life science, and a few of us physical scientists realize that we're an insignificant exception.

I wouldn't say that life science is better or worse than physical science, but that it introduces a new set of problems that may take a few decades to address. One difference is that the life sciences seem more dependent (for now at least) on weak statistics.

Disclosure: I'm a physicist in industry.

The pressures are perhaps greater now than when Feynman started out in science, partly because so much of the academic career path is more rigid and formulaic than it used to be. Still, human nature being what it is, the temptation to cut corners has always been (and likely will always be) there.

This.

Somewhere there was drawn a line - education for work, and education for science.

Nearly everyone think both are the same. Leading to thinking publish or perish being ok even if it's shit work.

This subject is something the data science/ ML world need to take very seriously. I am constantly passed snippets of google analytics as 'proof' something on the website worked with no analysis of what else could have caused it. With pay per click you get some very sulky looks when you say 'how much of that result do you feel is caused by people clicking the ad that would have clicked the search result if the ad wasn't there?'

Taking a tangent to talk about the style rather than content here.

To me the sign of the true greats in the world of thought are not just those who make new discoveries or have new ideas, but those with the amazing power to communicate those ideas without jargon. Feynman, a Nobel laureate, is often remembered for his teaching as much as his discoveries. His books are very funny too.

I remember, when I was college age, a friend telling me they were writing a paper on Existentialism. They kept trying to explain it to me and I felt like an idiot, I couldn't get the meaning of 'existence precedes essence' or whatever, and became sure that philosophy was for smarter people than me...until I picked up a copy of 'Existentialism and humanism' by Sartre, whose idea it was in the first place, and it is not full of jargon and the ideas are perfectly simple. I then read some Camus novels, which actually changed my life(!) and again the ideas are perfectly simple. Their greatness is in their challenge to the norm, the idea that we have everything the wrong way round.

Now I treat anyone who uses jargon unnecessarily (and it can be a useful shorthand at times) as someone who is trying to appear part of something they are merely a commentator on, or who is trying to keep the uninitiated out. I have so much more respect for people who can communicate in plain English. Feynman was a master, as is Orwell.

Startup culture has some really annoying forms of this. Despite my interest and involvement in technology I am actually foremost a finance professional although I do less of it each each day. When you want to stay solvent you need to forecast your cash flows, not f* around with 'burn rates'. Verbalisation is a special form of rubbish. I heard a sportsman saying he was 'hoping to meddle in the Olympics', when I presume he meant '...win a medal'. I especially hate language that is not specific, 'bi-weekly' means both 'fortnightly' and 'twice-weekly' for instance. I can only conclude that people who use too much jargon are pseudo-intellectuals.

This is spot on. Being able to express ideas without jargon is to me a sign of mastery. You've learned the subject so well you can convey it in layman terms. I learned the most out of computer science from talks given by such people.

I feel like its the exact same with the Agile crowd and their daily stand-ups, burn-down charts, velocity and other forms of cargo cult management. I haven't seen anyone explaining all of it without massive jargon.

Another form would be this trend of adding "awesome" to everything, ie.: "build something awesome!" While the jargon isn't advanced its still the very same lack of scientific integrity.

Jargon is not necessarily a bad thing. It is often necessary to be precise. I can describe the "meaning" of a computer program to a layperson but when talking with other experts it becomes essential to distinguish between, say, operational and denotational semantics. That's jargon but it is absolutely necessary for good work.

I agree, but even in those cases if you can't explain it without jargon its often a sign of a shallow understanding to begin with.

I feel that if you can explain a concept without jargon such that a layperson understands it, then you can be much more precise to experts when using said jargon. Because your understanding is also much more precise as well.

In science, we use a lot of words that were borrowed from Latin and Classical Greek. It is an interesting mental exercise, to imagine yourself trying to explain notions of modern science and artifacts of modern life to a person from, say, 2,500 years ago, whose native language was Latin or Greek. Not only would it be difficult to transfer our jargon - because the the original meaning of the word might have been different (why is 'atom' divisible? or, why is amber a basic constituent of matter?), many things we are so used to would make little sense (what is it that you are computing all the time?).

I'm confused by your use of the word "amber". Did you mean to write lepton or quark? I realize the irony in this comment.

The Greek word for 'amber' is ἤλεκτρον (ēlektron).

Thanks for sharing; I feel the same way you do, and you've put in into words more succinctly that I could have.

In the name of accuracy, I'd just like to point out that the athlete was probably say he was "hoping to medal in the Olympics", i.e. he was using the verb form of medal. It might not be common to use it that way, but it's common enough that it probably doesn't count as jargon.

It was deliberate. I don't believe at the time there was a common verb form of medal in UK English (It was Matthew Pinsent UK rower educated at Eton and Oxford and therefore would likely have known this was not a plain English word and therefore industry jargon) (although there clearly now is a verb form, although it should be frowned upon IMHO). It was spoken, so I wrote it how I heard it (some years ago). Medal was not a verb, so he must have meant meddle!

A lot of this is also about understanding your audience. I will happily use jargon when talking to peers and plain language when talking to others.

The problem on the internet is when content leaks. Sometimes a piece of writing meant for peers gets shared to others and you get accused of using jargon. Or inside jokes.

In reality the problem is that at first you have a period when you're finding each other's common jargon. You think someone is a peer and you use jargon. If they seem confused, you explain.

But some people feign understanding for fear of seeming dumb. Then you are in trouble. You become the pompous ass with jargon and they learn nothing.

Maybe the answer is to never start with jargon and only upgrade if the other person turns out to be a peer.

But that often offends them if they are indeed a peer.

I think the GP hit the nail on the head with the phrasing "anyone who uses jargon unnecessarily".

Jargon is meant to make communication clearer and faster between peers. If it is making it less clear instead, there is something very wrong.

I once worked at a company that had so much jargon they published a glossary on their Sharepoint site, and a list of TLA's (Including 'TLA' itself as the joke goes...it means 'Three Letter Acronym' for the uninitiated.

This is what I might call, 'treating the symptom of bad communication and not the cause'.

I think companies use Jargon to help instill a cult community on purpose. I just proposed the idea of creating such a glossary as you mentioned. I can't change a company with close to 100,000 people so I assimilate to get my pay check.

One company I was at had a jar in each conference room. When you used an internal name or acronym without first defining it, you had to put a $1 in the acronym jar. This was used to buy the team lunch. They had to abolish the policy as it was seen illegal to force such behavior. It worked very well while it lasted though.

I don't worry if they think I'm a pompous ass and continue to use jargon. Their opinion is only a reflection of their insecurity or fear of seeming dumb. And, they are being dumb.

People use new jargon I'm unfamiliar with all the time at work. I always ask them to clarify what they mean. That's how you get smart and knowledgable and don't live in fear.

I feel a lot of the things described in the article is happening in fields like information security now. It was interesting listening to the 33C3 talk "In Search of Evidence-Based IT-Security"[1] a couple of days ago and read this Feynman-article now.

The article may have been posted before, but it was new to me.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8169-in_search_of_evidence-based...

This article is always relevant. There is always an expert telling people to do something a certain way because reasons, despite zero evidence for those reasons.

The thing that interests me about Cargo Culting in general is the extent to which it is actually a means of learning - admittedly a very inefficient means.

I wrote down my thoughts on this twice:

http://www.selectedintelligence.com/post/42868061516/cargo-c...

http://www.selectedintelligence.com/post/52795739838/cargo-c...

Shame crazy ideas about rhino horn continued beyond the middle ages http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/why-does...

I know this is a classic and all, but I really feel like this would be a lot better if it actually broke down the mythology of science history rather than just being like, yup, this is the Ultimate Age of Reason™ but there's a lot of people who just can't get with the program for some reason.

I'm not sure Feynman was arguing that it was the Ultimate Age of Reason™. Hence "And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world."

I often use the term 'Cargo Cult Programming'. Not a very large but significant amount of developers fall into that category sadly.

I've always wondered about 'Cargo Cult' with reference to software development. When you write software you are expecting a certain result. Surely if you don't get the result, you try something else.

EDIT: ah right. So you 'may' get the result, but it's not due to the thing you have ascribed it to.

It's about confusing correlation with causation.

Look at Cargo Cult Agile for example. Company X is very successful. Company X uses points to estimate tasks. Therefore, if we use points to estimate tasks, we will be successful.

Remember when everybody went crazy for Erlang because WhatsApp was written in Erlang?

Wikipedia actually has an article on "Cargo cult programming". They have it as "the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

> Surely if you don't get the result, you try something else.

Results have many "dimensions" and it is often not clear what THE result is. You will usually get A result though.

"No, the code must be correct: I tested it"

We as Climate Change scientists can benefit the most from this very powerful and long term approach in communicating climate change science to the public.

I believe Richard Feynman originally coined this term as he discusses its origin in his auto-biography 'Surely You Must Be Joking Mr. Feynman'.

To the Hacker News community I wanted to share a thought which is a belief that human science and human cargo cult science will always be at odds. We should not chastise the Cargo Cultists for their desire to engage in science, but rather embrace and direct their misguided initiatives. Cargo Cult Science will emerge in humanity again and again. I believe it is the duty of scientists to aid Cargo Cultists in their pursuit of true science.

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