Richard Feynman’s Caltech Graduation Address on Integrity
lhup.edu
lhup.edu
I think the point he is trying to make to audience is he is willing to accept ideas which invalidate what he knows. His believes are verifiable, and though he is willing to give yours a chance, he won't just "let it be" unless it's verifiable.
I read another of his stories in which he took the class to the gym where he had a bowling ball attached to a string hanging down the ceiling in the center of the room. He went to the opposite end with the ball, had his back by the wall, brought the ball to his nose and let it go. The ball swung to the other side, swung back, and came dangerously close to his face(well, at the same spot where he let it go - simple pendulums. duh). He told the students "I want you to know I know and believe what I am going to teach. There are no manifestations or biases - only truth"(paraphrased)
I just tried thwacking my nose with about as much force as I could reasonably describe as a "slight shove" in that situation. It wasn't terribly pleasant, but it wasn't very painful and did no damage.
I cordially doubt that the younger prof was in danger of anything very bad. Assuming that the rest of the story is true, I suspect that Feynman was either being (commendably) over-cautious or showing off. Perhaps both.
(There's a more unpleasant failure mode for this demonstration: If you move your head forward after releasing the ball, then it'll hit your nose earlier, when it's lower down, which if the ball is very heavy can mean quite a considerable amount of extra energy.)
(The egg example makes things look worse than they are. If an egg squashes at all, it breaks. My nose can squash quite a bit before that happens.)
Good to know that this kind of scientific spirit still exists :-)
http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/05/a-weekend-of-woo/
The "elegantly designed hot tubs (clothing optional, and most opt to go without)" are still a big feature of meetings at Esalen Institute, but Shermer finds more to discuss about the activities during his latest visit there.
AFTER EDIT to comment on another interesting comment. A top-level comment mentions, "Very cleverly, he mixes in examples of absolute crackpottery (e.g Uri Geller, reflexology) with those of somewhat researchers (e.g. the psychology student) who may be somewhat clueless in their experimental procedures but are trying to do valid science, which in our minds equate both." Feynman indeed was dubious about much of psychology as it was written about during his academic career. He was not alone. Psychologists wrote in similar terms during the same period, for example David Lykken in is article "What's Wrong with Psychology Anyway?"
> He first encountered Feynman as a freshman in 1961 > On the first day of class, Scott recalled,
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf
besides confirming the text, includes photographs of Feynman delivering the address in academic gown. As always, the famous line from the address is "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." This is something for every thinker to think about every day in daily life, for a lifetime.
Upon reading this paragraph, I was reminded of his book "What do you care what other people think", which was a homage to Arlene, partly because Feynman made the fatal mistake of trusting the doctor's judgement to disregard the blatantly obvious diagnosis. He wrote about his experience in much more detail here:
Part 1: http://i.imgur.com/CSNop.png
Part 2: http://i.imgur.com/7mDTW.png
--------------------------------------------------------- //Comments below are irrelevant to the thread, I just felt like sharing.
Feynman was depressed for a while but eventually his love for physics helped him recover. Hans Bethe once said, "Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful then any other person when he is exuberant." Feynman is arguably the most logical and happiest human being that has ever existed.
Feynman's magnificent exuberance and puzzle solving enthusiasm remained up until his last days, where his coworker Christopher Sykes remarked "Look at this man. He faces the abyss. He doesn't know whether he is going to live through this week. But he was consumed by it, and he worked on it all day long...." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h11m33s
A few days before his second operation, Feynman sang a bongos song about orange juice, an amusing take of Linus Pauling's advice to possibly cure his cancer. Just look at his smile at the end of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8
I would also like to add that on Feynman's last days at the hospital, his last words to his artist friend Jirayr was "Don't worry about anything, go out and have a good time!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h32m15s Maximus would be proud. "Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back."
it's a shame that many scientists game the grant system making their research sound more sexy than it is, seems to undermine the point of publicly funded research (as feynman points out).
and i know i drive myself crazy every morning reading most of the articles here: https://news.google.com/news/section?topic=snc
"First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was."
He played around with lockpicking too. Outstanding dude.
1. Very cleverly, he mixes in examples of absolute crackpottery (e.g Uri Geller, reflexology) with those of somewhat researchers (e.g. the psychology student) who may be somewhat clueless in their experimental procedures but are trying to do valid science, which in our minds equate both.
2. He seems to say: "This is the way to proceed scientifically, you can't do it another way", where the methods he alludes to are the methods of experimental physics. (simply put) In physics you do your experiment, carefully controlling factors and you get your result. Unfortunately, this method is either hard to apply (e.g. in the rat experiment, there are so many variables to control, some unknown, because it's a complex organism, now think of experiments on humans) or downright impossible (e.g. the educational problem he mentions, which is a good example of a Wicked Problem, we're still discussing solutions).
3. Expanding on the education system point: Feynman says: " A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one." But therein lies the big problem: nobody can agree on how to measure how good a system, observe the huge teachers's ratings debates taking place in the US. What Feynman misses, I think, is that these are socio-scientific problems, if scientific problems have O(n^2) complexity these have O(2^n). You definitely need the scientific method but that's not going to be enough in attacking these problems.
4. Feynman also directs his assault solely on the "experts" and charlatans who create and perpetuate these stupid pesudoscientific theories, e.g. "ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience." What would be a better way to eradicate such tendencies would be to study why human beings are so susceptible to ideas like religion, UFOs, superstition, etc., i.e. target the consumers rather than dealers.
Of course, Feynman was a genius in Physics, in his intuitive grasp of complex physical concepts he may be the best in history. And from what I've ready about him he seemed to have a weak spot (like Newton's alchemy, Einsteins's reluctance to accept QM, etc.) for showmanship, by which I mean: when he got the momentum going with a good example/though/principle that has applications outside physics he was a bit too quick to overgeneralize.
The beauty of his genius was that he managed to distill an important essence of Science into a relatively short and entertaining address that he could pass on to those new Scientists in hopes that they would grasp it as a useful concept that could be applied to their careers, the Scientific community, and to society in general.
The fact that we're still quoting it here on the Internet and thus passing on the wisdom is a nice bonus.
And indeed, he even makes that exact point in this speech.
1. Mixes in? Is your charge that he tried to commit the fallacy of equivocation in some way? I'm not following how discussing the obvious abuse of integrity that Geller demonstrated and then the less-obvious abuse of integrity the psychology student demonstrated detracts from his point that integrity is really important to the usefulness of the Scientific method.
2. Seems to say? To me, he "seems to say" that a lack of integrity in the whole process is a commonly occurring characteristic of Cargo Cults. He seems to say that a lack of integrity diminishes the utility of the Scientific method.
3. You entirely missed the point of Feynman's education comment and the context of the part you quoted. Basically, he said that what we're doing to fix problems in education isn't working and we continue to rely on the same people and methods to fix them. The funny thing is that here we are almost 40 years after Feynman gave that address and we've never added the integrity that he spoke about to the process of improving education in America. As with the Cargo Cults, it's not surprising that results haven't improved.
4. This item/suggestion makes no sense. Feynman isn't proposing a holistic plan to fix the problem. The speech we're discussing was a commencement address to upcoming graduates from an institute that trains Scientists. Why wouldn't it be entirely appropriate to urge new Scientists to consider the importance of integrity to the Scientific method?
> Of course, Feynman was a genius in Physics, in his intuitive grasp [...]
I don't think you made one semi-solid point in your critique of this address by Feynman; but you're going to double-down and start to generalize about how Feynman was too quick to overgeneralize? Are you trying to be ironic?
3. I think you missed my point here, based on your mentions of "same people" , "integrity", etc. Many, many approaches have been used to solve the education problem in the US in the past 40 years, some quite innovative, and not by the same people either. People from outside the field, like Feynman or more recently Bill Gates, think that the problem is just a case of idiots doing the same old thing, once you bring about the better methods, "integrity" (in this case perhaps may refer to teacher's ratings) and money, the problem may be solved relatively easily. As we have seen, that is not the case, because although the above sentiments contain most of the truth, there are other factors affecting the problem, too. The point is, unless you can attack all the factors at once, you won't be able to solve such deep sociological problems, which is why these require scientific++ approaches.
As for your tone, why not try to be a little more humble, rather than "makes no sense", "semi-solid" etc., why not "I didn't understand", even if the argument does suck.
> Feynman is beating up on psychology here, I think, because it's not as rigorous as physics.
I don't think the text of the address supports that conclusion. Even he were doing that, it doesn't mean that his argument was unsound. I don't understand the motivation for your ad hominem here, but I note the invalidity of your argument.
3. I don't understand. Does the fact that we have plenty of examples of 180 degree turnarounds in academic performance in the worst school districts in the country not indicate that there are solutions that empirically show a better way to run an education system not put a lie to your claim that this is not a problem that we can apply success-based Scientific-like methods to? I would most humbly suggest that you view the documentary entitled "Waiting for Superman" which documents successful education initiatives in some of the worst school districts in the country that are resisted by teachers' unions and the politicians whom they fund for obvious money and power reasons. Feynman, 40 years ago, had remarkable understanding of the problem that we're still dealing with today.
> As for your tone, why not try to be a little more humble,
I don't understand. Am I supposed to feign ignorance when I thoroughly understand the arguments you attempted to make and spotted why they are invalid? Would dissembling make me humble? I think they would make my rebuttal less clear and needlessly disingenuous... but we can try it your way for this post.
Perhaps you can't do controlled experiments with people that's fine, give up and go work on something else don't compromise and still call it science. Because your results are meaningless.
PS: How much useful information has been gained from human nutritional experimentation over the last 50 years?
Similar problems that require a combination of statistics, biology, psychology, ethics, and politics:
* Should universities stop affirmative action, should they stop reverse affirmative action for Asians?
* Should we (like Norway) enact laws that require a certain percentage of women on company boards?
* Should there be gender equality (in the sense of numbers) in almost all professions? Are men (or women) more suitable for certain jobs?
etc., I'm sure you can think of many more.
I think you're completely wrong about education. The science is already there. We have empirical evidence on ways to improve it. The problems with education are almost all political... but this thread isn't really about education, though is it? From reading your posts, it seems like you really want this thread to be a battle over education and if I had to guess I'd say that Feynman's insightful almost throwaway comment on education really struck a nerve.
> Now, you may not want to call it "science" but that doesn't make the results meaningless.
If you're not doing good science, then your results will likely only be indirectly useful. The last 50 years of increasing education expenditures without showing any results speaks volumes about what a tragedy having an attitude like yours is. Maybe if someone had listened to Feynman in 1974 and quickly eliminated any educational expenditures that didn't produce results, we wouldn't be having this argument.
So, you don't get to see what happens when people eat the exact diet you want them to for 20 years. Having people fill out servery on what they ate is not a reasonable substitute. In this case there are options like sending people actual food. You don't know if they eat it, but you do know you sent it and you can measure outcomes based on what food was sent.
PS: Also, most of what your talking about is almost pure politics. When politics and science really clash it's rare for science to make much headway. See: Climate Change, Evolution, etc.