Cargo cult science (1974)

There's two parts to this problem. One, is his reflections on what is unquestionably outlier belief, like reiki and reflexology and spoon bending. The other is his intense dislike of the low bar p-jacking in social sciences and the lack of rigour, even in his own field.

They aren't the same thing. Labeling both of them 'cargo cult' science does the problem space a disservice.

Bad science, belief that the proof is 'in' or that low bar experiments prove things against a lack of reliable, reproducible outcomes, isn't the same thing as the implications of funding for space from the Drake Equation, or a lack of funding for VLSI engineering research because the money went on feel-good stats about alternative medicines.

What happened with the Shuttle, was false belief in the hierarchy of science and a fear about speaking out. What happened in tertiary education since Feynman died is that peer review has decayed into a game to tenure, and has nothing to do with the real outcome of why scientists exist.

During his lifetime in nuclear physics, it was normal for scientists to lodge patent applications. But that said, it wasn't the main game on the Manhattan project and Leo Szilard used his patent rights as a lever to try and get a say in the socialized and politicized outcomes of his discoveries. Now, most scientists who work in a field with fertile IPR are really strongly driven to the IPO implications of that IPR. It's not a tool, a lever, its the main game. Adding 5% efficiency to classic solar cells in a reproducible patent-free manner right now would be transformative for everyone. Adding 5 patents which contribute 0.1% efficiency to classic solar cells might pay back better.

Feynman sat to one side of that game. He lived through a time of tenure and a role in science, which nowadays would be very hard to maintain.

> Plus, given dark matter and dark energy, we know something must be out there, even if its not unicorns, there's something.

Because science is paradigmatic, this is the problem. We do not know something else must be out there because we have no direct evidence of either Dark Matter nor Dark Energy, which, btw, have absolutely nothing to do with one another. We might just not yet have the intuition to understand what is causing our perception of the need for these labels.

I, for one, am absolutely convinced Dark Matter is absolute bunk and will be widely accepted to not exist eventually within the next 50 years. The initial reason for Dark Matter's existence, to explain rotational velocities of spiral galaxies we assume spiral galaxies appear to have more invisible matter, has been explained by the fact that the initial observation was of a galaxy in isolation, and the assumption that it was an isolated inertial frame without considering the cluster of galaxies around it, which perfectly explain spiral galaxy rotational velocities without any need for Dark Matter. But because science is paradigmatic and even in the Space Age the correct information is taking decades to disseminate, many if not most are still are convinced Dark Matter is needed even though no one knows what it is. It's nothing, really, it's a phantom, imagination gone haywire. Also, as other unexplained developments occurred, these too got lumped into Dark Matter, which galaxy clusters can not explain. So the problem becomes the shame of not just saying, "we don't know... we don't understand this," and labelling it something to fake it like we do understand it. This is a flaw of modern science, or at least of cosmology,i.e. the unwillingness to accept that we don't (yet) know the precise reasons for what is observed.

The social sciences indeed have the politically charged element, but I think you've hit on a broader point here. Investigating "what is" needs to involve to at least some extent a true curiosity and an adaptable plan. Modern science is so formalized that I find these ingredients to take way too much of a back seat - at least in what I've observed of modern biology.

I swear more often than not the way proposed experiments are framed reeks of a "what ought to be" perspective. Not because it's wishful thinking or an externally incentivized conclusion, but just because questions are often both incremental and kinda binary. So it is reasonably likely that what they've proposed to check will turn out about how they expected, and if it doesn't it may not be publishable at all. By crafting the proposal in a particular (fairly common) style, they've inadvertently turned it into "what ought to be".

By contrast, I loved talking to my really old professors because there were some awesome ones that you could tell spent a decent amount of time in their day just absolutely fucking around. Should that be the universal model of science? No, but I do believe you need those types, and I've struggled to find much of a modern equivalent. The tight job market doesn't help.

Of course with fewer low hanging fruit over time as well as greater experimental costs, it is indeed more difficult to effectively spitball now. And sure there are fewer random novel observations that would be worth a fun off the cuff paper for others to follow-up on. But I still can't shake the feeling that the scientific system has partially self-imposed the eradication of this style of curiosity, in a misguided attempt to formalize science.

From my perspective, there seems to be a massive underlying assumption throughout the system that scientific outputs should stand as nearly atomic units, with little chance for "unscientific" pieces of work to contribute to an eventually formalized scientific result. That clashes awfully with the ever increasing scale of open questions, and it doesn't play well with the individualistic academic ego stroking credit model either.

There's a huge set of potentially politically fraught middle grounds that exist between Einstein -> Newton and random quack -> some modern distinguished scientist. And by politically fraught I mean career politics that directly impact the scientific landscape, not "politics".

It is my impression that back in the day it was more common for academics with differing opinions to banter or at times straight up disrespect each other semi-publicly. This could be historical survivorship bias, but it is a fact that aspiring scientists had a much greater likelihood of becoming a tenured PI in previous generations, and usually reached that status much earlier in their lives.

I fear that with the state of the academic job market along with present cultural norms, it is less common now for an early career investigator to question the quality of an established PI's work, or even for PIs to meaningfully criticize each other in scientifically accessible formats.

Besides, questioning the work of past scientists is implicitly questioning the research of many modern scientists, at least if that questioning is to be considered remotely novel. There are socially acceptable avenues to question past science, but there are also cases where modern PIs of influence have built so much on an assumption from prior results, such that the impact of their work would indeed be threatened by questions of the foundation.

It is important that the latter situation is handled in a manner consistent with scientific ideals. I don't know what Feynman was exactly referring to with his quote, but I'd be surprised if he was focused on the behavior of random lay people. Someone immersed in science is probably going to be most concerned with the behavior of fellow scientists and emerging trainees.

I think the problem is that two different notions of expert have been widely confounded within the present scientific training structure, let alone within public perception.

There is a huge amount of prior literature on many topics, so to be an expert in something like immunology you're almost definitely a PhD, or maybe a very academically inclined MD. However this notion of expert simply means you have learned intricate details about many of the important previous results, most of which are probably true. It does not mean you actually have the ability to do good science in the field of immunology.

But for any technical question in your niche that isn't uncharted territory you can serve as an expert. Such expertise has obvious uses in many other domains, and as there isn't really a great term for it, it gets called scientific expertise. Perhaps the person may be called a biologist, but that also has scientific undertones which may or may not be warranted.

I'm sure you are aware of this, but I don't often see it explicitly stated, and so it feels like people talk past each other in a sense. It is wholly possible to approach e.g. chemistry in a non-scientific way, just as something like business can be approached in a scientific way. I don't think the double language will be resolved any time soon, since I don't see much effort to make this distinction in the actual design of PhD training - forget about random internet forums.