Richard Feynman’s Caltech Graduation Address on Integrity

Richard Feynman’s Caltech Graduation Address on Integrity
lhup.edu

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.

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?"

http://cogprints.org/371/3/148.pdf