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Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

Science has always been political, within itself and in relation to the rest of society.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

Your link is not a story about politics, it's a story about psychological bias.

Just because Feynman diagnosed the gradual charge drift as internal pressure doesn't make it internal pressure. The effect would be the same between fearing one was wrong and fearing one would be condemned and punished as wrong - changing the data to be closer to the official line.

Authority is always political.

It's not a story about authority, either, if by authority you mean something narrow enough to always be political.

If you don't think Millikan's authority as a scientist was not a factor then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's a broad enough definition of authority that all authority no longer originates from politics. When scientists are behaving correctly authority is awarded on scientific merit irrespective of politics.

> When scientists are behaving correctly authority is awarded on scientific merit irrespective of politics.

I suppose then one can conclude that scientists have behaved incorrectly since Aristotle's time.

Political has multiple meanings in English, and I think this use is legitimate.

This could be just anchoring bias. But I think it's much more likely that people after Millikan did not want to look bad in front of their professional peers for fear of social and professional consequences. Which I think is something we can reasonably call political.

But I think it's more likely that the bias was internal, in which case it could not be reasonably called political. Without arguing further we can agree that the parent's claim was unfounded, because the linked article did not demonstrate that the motivation was social.

(The reason I know we can agree is that unfounded is not the same as false, it just means it's a non-statement.)

We cannot agree on that. Feynman's talk is mainly about social phenomena, so it's entirely reasonable to assume that this anecdote is also meant to illustrate a social point: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Obviously, hence the word "too".

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