Oct
29
2024

Not a Joke

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I've mentioned before that I regret not having flunked some courses in college so that I could have graduated in 1974 instead of 1973, and had Richard Feynman for a commencement speaker. His speech is available here, or you can read it (an "adapted" version) in Ralph Leighton's first collection of Feynman's yarns, our Amazon Product du Jour.

Feynman's speech pinballed over a number of topics, but is best known for his warnings about "cargo cult science". What's that?

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

How to avoid that? Well, this is the key bit:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Years later, Feynman described the cargo cultism at NASA leading to the Challenger disaster, where officials fooled themselves into killing seven astronauts.

Anyway, that's what leapt to mind when reading this Slashdot item: Climate Scientists Respond To Attacks on Objectivity. A Guardian article is quoted:

Climate scientists who were mocked and gaslighted after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work.

The researchers said these feelings should not be suppressed in an attempt to reach supposed objectivity. Seeing climate experts’ fears and opinions about the climate crisis as irrelevant suggests science is separate from society and ultimately weakens it, they said.

The researchers said they had been subject to ridicule by some scientists after taking part in a large Guardian survey of experts in May, during which they and many others expressed their feelings of extreme fear about future temperature rises and the world’s failure to take sufficient action. They said they had been told they were not qualified to take part in this broad discussion of the climate crisis, were spreading doom and were not impartial.

The Guardian (and, implicitly, Slashdot) are sympathetic to the "researchers". Me, not so much.

I noticed that Sabine Hossenfelder weighed in on the issue too:

It almost seems the "researchers" read Feynman's warning about Cargo Cult Science and took it as a how-to.

Also of note:

  • And we also have Cargo Cult Politics. Alan Jacobs noticed something about the candidates' articulation.

    To call a person “articulate” is to say something rather complex. One element of articulateness is the quick and easy summoning of words — but if the words summoned are not appropriate, we don’t call the person articulate but rather a chatterer, a windbag, a babbler. We call what comes out of their mouth “word salad.” Appropriate words are precise and also information-rich. The articulate person is able to speak fluently but also to the point.

    I say all this by way of noting something curious: The current Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are surely the least articulate Presidential candidates in American history — the least able to speak in reliably coherent complete sentences, the least likely to summon relevant information in discussing a topic, and most prone to extended and expansive servings of word salad.

    During the 2020 Presidential campaign a meme arose comparing Biden and Trump to Kennedy and Nixon debating in 1960, and sure enough, if you listen to the 1960 debates it’s astonishing how … well, articulate both men are. They navigate their way smoothly from subject to verb to object in every sentence; they have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. The only Presidential candidate of this century who wouldn’t sound foolish in their company is Barack Obama.

    More interesting observations at the link, including Mencken's comments about the rhetorical stylings of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

  • And the current betting favorite for Cultist-In-Chief is… Guess who? Hint: He's divorced two wives, and is in an ongoing divorce proceeding against reality. Jacob Sullum notes Trump Thinks News Outlets Should Lose Their Broadcast Licenses, Even When They Have None.

    During his first year as president, Donald Trump suggested that "NBC and the Networks" should lose their "licenses" because their "partisan, distorted and fake" news coverage was "bad for [the] country" and "not fair to [the] public." Ajit Pai, the Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pushed back, saying, "The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast."

    Undeterred by that rebuke, Trump has repeatedly re-upped the idea that broadcast licenses should be contingent on whether they are used to air content that offends him. Last November, for instance, he complained that MSNBC "uses FREE government approved airwaves" to execute "a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE." He declared that "our so-called 'government' should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity."

    That jeremiad was nonsensical in at least two ways. First, there is nothing "illegal" about MSNBC's anti-Trump content; to the contrary, the criticism to which Trump objects is constitutionally protected speech. Second, MSNBC is a cable channel, so it does not use "government approved airwaves" to transmit its programming and therefore does not need a broadcast license to operate.

    One week before Election Day, and the probability I will leave the "President" line blank on my ballot is approaching 100%.

  • And then there's Cargo Cult Education. At FEE, Michael Strong looks at The Opportunity Cost of Compulsory Schooling. And it turns out those costs are high.

    Prior to the rise of compulsory schooling, it was common for young people to take on adult-level responsibilities at puberty. Indeed, in indigenous cultures, a rite of passage around puberty led to a transition to adulthood. Thomas Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager documents just how common it was for teens in the US to take on significant responsibilities prior to the rise of compulsory high school. Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie are among the many who began their working lives at puberty.

    The terms “teen” and “adolescence” were created in the early 20th century. This wasn’t even a recognized category before then. John Taylor Gatto’s provocative thesis in The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher, that schooling trains us to be passive and dependent, is not even controversial for those who know much about the history of young people. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, wrote The Case Against Adolescence which makes the case that the infantilization of young people has been tremendously harmful. Human beings should take on significant responsibilities at puberty for healthy, normal development.

    […]

    I have made the case that schooling is a damaging evolutionary mismatch that is a causal factor in much of (most of?) adolescent dysfunction and mental illness. Does anyone believe that paleolithic teens, with young males and females eager to play an adult role in their tribes, exhibited the kinds of behaviors we see today? As behavioral health disorders (functional mental illness and substance abuse) surpass physical disorders as the largest causes of disability, it appears as though the opportunity cost of government schooling is quite high and getting higher. A 2024 study puts the annual cost of mental illness at $280 billion. A 2008 study puts the annual cost of substance abuse at $510 billion, which, with inflation alone, not assuming that the annual cost increased, would be $750 billion. Together we are at roughly $1 trillion.

    I came across Strong's article via Tom Knighton's substack post, where he wonders Is compulsory public education hurting our society as a whole? After quoting Strong at length:

    The truth of the matter is that compulsory public education is framed as an unmitigated good, but every shred of evidence saying that it is also happens to be suspect, especially when you remember what the Prussian system that our public education system was based on was designed to do: Create docile, obedient workers.

    Public education creates a problem because it strives to carve our children into sitting down, shutting up, and doing what they’re told.

    But obedience doesn’t achieve great things. It might be a peaceful life for many—and, to be sure, a peaceful life is a good thing in many ways—but it’s the same kind of peaceful life that a drone would “enjoy.”

    I realize abolishing compulsory attendance laws is probably not going to happen soon, if at all. (Reason's December issue is themed "Abolish Everything"—but I don't see compulsory attendance laws in their wish list.) Still…