Cargo Cult Science (1974)
calteches.library.caltech.edu
Cargo Cult Science (1974)
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#2Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities.
The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basically rode that to success in her professional and public life.[1]
All of this came crashing down when no one could replicate her experiments. It’s absolutely incredible that things got this far in science, or at least the soft sciences. Shameful
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#3Experiments that attempt to create AGI singularities by just making huge neural networks strike me as cargo cult science.
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#4Experiments that attempt to create AGI singularities by just making huge neural networks strike me as cargo cult science.
There are people attempting to develop superhuman artificial general intelligence by making a single large neural network?
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#5> there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one.
Has anyone found this paper? I searched a few years ago and couldn't find anything.
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#6[deleted]
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#7> there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. Has anyone found this paper? I searched a few years ago and couldn't find anything.
Me neither, and for this reason I tend to use this paper to see who pays attention. Best case: someone tracks down the missing paper(s).
I suspect it may be a joke Feynman played on us to prove a point. :)
Good catch.
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#8Many previous submissions; the ones with comments:
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004
2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791
2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#9Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society’s imagination, one of the most egregious is “Power Posing”.[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities. The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basical…
There are more subtle variations on this that still affect the harder sciences.
A topic closer to home for most of us might be benchmarking. It is terribly difficult to construct an honest A/B comparison between two different algorithms, especially when the person doing the testing designed B themselves.
Re: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
#10> there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. Has anyone found this paper? I searched a few years ago and couldn't find anything.
Paul Thomas Young
obit: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1421573
rat paper still missing