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Feynman's lectures on the character of physical law should be something everyone sees in school. In general we look for a new law by the following process:

Feynman's lectures on the character of physical law should be something everyone sees in school. In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it. Notice however that we never prove it right... In the future there could be a wider range of experiments, or you could compute a wider range of consequences, and you may discover then that the thing is wrong. That's why laws like Newton's laws for the motions of planets last such a long time... It took several hundred years before the slight error in the motion of Mercury was developed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

swayvil 6y ago
Treating the words of authority like scripture is what got us into this mess.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I once thought that by leaving my old religion I was leaving dogma behind. But it appears that in the absence of one dogma/doctrine, people will create another.
  - irrational 6y ago
    People are people. Take away any differences in appearances, beliefs, communities, etc. and people will still find reasons to divide up and seek to destroy the outsiders.
  - lamename 6y ago
    1. The mind always tries to simplify. One way that manifests is in dogma. Many people are satisfied or just dont have the time and energy to continually update or critically assess their own beliefs (not that this is justified, just an explanation). This is the entire reason formal science education exists at the highest levels. We didnt evolve to be critical or rational. But at our best we can learn to approach it collectively. 2. Many people think that what they learn in school or from other authorities is immutable fact and that's the end of discussion. This is an unfortunate failing of the education system.
- leothecool 6y ago
  I think you are missing the point. Pop culture thinks science means space, chemicals, and electronics. We aren't even hearing the words of authority in this case. A scientist describing what science is doesn't sound like indoctrination or blind faith to me.
- zepto 6y ago
  Agreed, let’s not! What part of what Feynman said do you disagree with?
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    It boggles the mind to see this quote by Feynman when the entire premise of the article is that this is already how we teach science and it leads to a whole host of problems.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      I read the article and disagree with its conclusions about science education. I think science education isn’t actually taught the way the article says it is. At least that’s not how I was taught it in good public schools until college, at which point it was taught the way Feynman says. If it actually was taught that way at earlier points, I think we’d be in a better place. We teach a bizarro world version of feynman’s quote, where it’s more like the way we teach the formulas in math. It’s the right formula that they’re teaching, but the way it’s taught is encouraging its use as a black box.
      - guerrilla 6y ago
        Better, for sure, I agree, but is it enough as the OP argues it's not?
    - zepto 6y ago
      Asking if people read the post is against HN guidelines: ‘Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."’ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - zepto 6y ago
      I read the article. It seems to be an argument that the problems with trust in science come from teaching a kind of logical empiricism, itself a straw man, and not what you’d come away with from listening to Feynman. There is nothing in the article that supports this claim about the cause of the ‘problem’ or even a really usable understanding of what the problem is, other than that cigarette companies have been able to make people doubt things they shouldn’t have doubted, and that climate deniers and other kinds of ‘deniers’ are doing the same building on the work of the PR firms used by the cigarette companies. The best I can read as what the problem is, is that we think that teaching people differently could make them immune to propaganda, and so the problem is that we aren’t teaching them differently. I think this is highly questionable. It argues that we should instead teach science based on a feminist critique. As far as I’m concerned the article is complete bullshit. It sets up a straw man, and then argues to a completely unsupported conclusion. It’s terrible. Having said that here’s what it touches on that is useful: Teaching scientific method alone as ‘science’ is outdated. Science is part of public discourse and so it is important for students to understand how science works as social, sociological, and political processes, as much as it is an epistemological method. From this point of view, I respect the various ideas that they are advancing as valid for study. However ‘valid to study’ is very different from attempting to claim that science education should be based on this ideology, and is an obvious political land-grab which must be rejected. The article makes a bunch of naked assertions as if they are simply facts about reality, when in fact they are very much the subject of social science itself. Consider these statements: > Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not confined to scientific inquiry. Seems true enough, right? > It starts in infancy, when children learn language, everyday facts, and even religious beliefs from their caregivers. Does it? This is definitely not settled science. Obviously children learn from caregivers, but what they trust is a deeper question, and a subject of study. Also, then sources are far wider than ‘care givers’. This seems like an attempt to anchor the conversation in a blank slate kind of conception of the emergence of belief. This is discredited in social science, but is popular in the humanities. > Trust is only as reliable as the source of the knowledge; when that source is unreliable, we sometimes regard beliefs based on trust as the product of indoctrination. ‘Sometimes’ being the operative word. > Trust can be eroded when there is evidence of the unreliability of the source. Yes, but research has shown that it can be strengthened when there is evidence of the unreliability of the source, too. It depends on other factors, such as who is providing the evidence. Again this statement is simply not objective or reflective of current social science. > Reflective knowledge should therefore include some account of the reliability of the source of knowledge. If you delete all of the preceding elements, and just say: Reflective knowledge should include some account of the reliability of the source of knowledge. We are left with a reasonable proposal. Weirdly, one which is already common amongst science students, who don’t ignore the reliability of the results on which they base their work.
- ccsnags 6y ago
  Science is a method for understanding the world, not an ideology. I do give most non scientific people the benefit of the doubt. They are at least trying. What is really disturbing is that this is a real problem within sections of the scientific community and especially within the public relations of the scientific community. “Science Communicator” is almost synonymous with this trap. I think it stems from oversimplification and a need to generate funding for research.
- SyzygistSix 6y ago
  I feel like authorities betraying public trust is a large part of what got us into this mess. I trust the scientific process. I don't trust the people involved in the process and in charge of making and following policy based on scientific and technological process.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    One thing that allows for this is the oft neglected "method of discovery". The usual "scientific process" concerns itself with how to keep an experiment correct/truthful - but how do we decide what experiments to conduct in the first place? Scientific funding can be biased towards the successes of the past, and so future funding can be guided by political agendas.
revax 6y ago
I like it but in every theory, there is always some edge case where the theory doesn't work. In a sense, every models in natural science are wrong but some are more right than other.
webmaven 6y ago
> In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it. That elides a lot of complexity, mostly around the validity of the experiment design and execution. Confounding factors, confirmation bias, selection bias, p-hacking, etc. can all skew the results in ways both overt and subtle. The following quote from the movie 'Thank you for smoking' may illustrate: "This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany. I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius, he could disprove gravity." So no, 'if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong' is a gross oversimplification. Not to mention that there may be very good reasons that an experiment can't (or shouldn't) be done, or that various 'natural experiments' must be relied upon.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
neonological 6y ago
The key to the quote above is that nothing is proven right. That is the fundamental flaw with science, if you understand this, you understand science. In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing can ever be proven true. It is fundamentally impossible. Every single claim made by every single scientist since the beginning of science has never ever been proven true. This “flaw” is what drives most of the debate and misunderstandings about science in the cultural and political arena. For example... No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true... it is fundamentally impossible. Hence the debate rages on endlessly.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Except science _can_ set error bounds. No, global warming can never be "true" from the perspective of 100% accurate with no room for error. Science is able to set error bounds though. The latest particle physics results come with "this theory is correct to within 99.99% of the theoretical model". That means that even if the theory is wrong, it can account for 99.99% of all observations you make. That is the power. Obviously climate change models aren't like particle physics so we don't expect such accurate error bounds (too many sources for error). However, the question you must ask is "are the error bars sufficient for the decision I have to make?". My conclusion thus is that unlike dietary science or pop psychology, the evidence here is very likely real, despite any doubts that may persist. I could of course be wrong. That's a fundamental truth one has to admit to oneself & other peers who understand how science works. That's not a political truth that would make sense to admit because saying "I can never know but I'm pretty sure" has been weaponized into "you don't know anything & you're wrong". Same reason when speaking among science-literate friends I say "global warming" but am careful to say "climate change" to everyone else because the warming aspect got corrupted into "you said it's global warming but winter was especially cold this year". Maybe there has been a massive social pressure within the scientific community into confirmation bias. Certainly the community does self-police & ridicule anyone who doesn't ascribe to it. Why do I think the theory is reliable & it's not a massive conspiracy (intentional or otherwise)? I trust that there's lots of very bright people who have studied the math, from within & without the field & validated the models don't have any fundamental issues of any kind (conceptual, numerical issues, computer sims are solid, etc). I trust that people outside of the field who have related degrees have validated huge swaths of it. I trust that technological advances have provided us with exponentially better sensors & monitoring and that has fed back into exponentially better simulations to validate models. And with all of that development, over the course of 20 years, the results haven't changed, no new hypothesis have borne out. The scientific community is both small & large. It's large in that there will always be some amount of bad behavior somewhere, bad or unethical science, wrong results, mistaken theories that take hold for a time, etc. It's small though in the sense that when there's a very real problem, it can be brought to light & it's really hard to suppress that knowledge. That's why the chorus about global warming has been increasing. Oil companies knew about this as a problem & suppressed their own voices to the debate because it would hurt their bottom lines. In fact, they often fund the opposition. This isn't a conspiracy theory. There are court documents showing this. A well-informed person can use all of this knowledge to make a guess about who to listen to. A less-informed person will let themselves be swayed by the opinion they want to hear & or as a "fuck you" to the scientific community for ruining their career choice.
guerrilla 6y ago
It seems to me this is exactly the "science as inquiry" model that the OP is arguing against.
SkyBelow 6y ago
I find this is too simple, because it assumes the experiment is correct. Experiments can have errors and being able to doubt experiments, especially when you have disagreements between experiments, is a very important step in science. This isn't to say that one should hold to a belief without any evidence to back it, only that we consider the possibilities that experiments themselves are flawed and take that into account, such as by designing seemingly unrelated experiments to test a single guess. To give another Feynman quote. >We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. >Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
trashtester 6y ago
Then there is the Asimov quote : "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht... A good scientific model is less wrong than the one preceeding it.

swayvil 6y ago

Treating the words of authority like scripture is what got us into this mess.

nitrogen 6y ago
I once thought that by leaving my old religion I was leaving dogma behind. But it appears that in the absence of one dogma/doctrine, people will create another.
- irrational 6y ago
  People are people. Take away any differences in appearances, beliefs, communities, etc. and people will still find reasons to divide up and seek to destroy the outsiders.
- lamename 6y ago
  1. The mind always tries to simplify. One way that manifests is in dogma. Many people are satisfied or just dont have the time and energy to continually update or critically assess their own beliefs (not that this is justified, just an explanation). This is the entire reason formal science education exists at the highest levels. We didnt evolve to be critical or rational. But at our best we can learn to approach it collectively. 2. Many people think that what they learn in school or from other authorities is immutable fact and that's the end of discussion. This is an unfortunate failing of the education system.
leothecool 6y ago
I think you are missing the point. Pop culture thinks science means space, chemicals, and electronics. We aren't even hearing the words of authority in this case. A scientist describing what science is doesn't sound like indoctrination or blind faith to me.
zepto 6y ago
Agreed, let’s not! What part of what Feynman said do you disagree with?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  It boggles the mind to see this quote by Feynman when the entire premise of the article is that this is already how we teach science and it leads to a whole host of problems.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    I read the article and disagree with its conclusions about science education. I think science education isn’t actually taught the way the article says it is. At least that’s not how I was taught it in good public schools until college, at which point it was taught the way Feynman says. If it actually was taught that way at earlier points, I think we’d be in a better place. We teach a bizarro world version of feynman’s quote, where it’s more like the way we teach the formulas in math. It’s the right formula that they’re teaching, but the way it’s taught is encouraging its use as a black box.
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      Better, for sure, I agree, but is it enough as the OP argues it's not?
  - zepto 6y ago
    Asking if people read the post is against HN guidelines: ‘Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."’ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - zepto 6y ago
    I read the article. It seems to be an argument that the problems with trust in science come from teaching a kind of logical empiricism, itself a straw man, and not what you’d come away with from listening to Feynman. There is nothing in the article that supports this claim about the cause of the ‘problem’ or even a really usable understanding of what the problem is, other than that cigarette companies have been able to make people doubt things they shouldn’t have doubted, and that climate deniers and other kinds of ‘deniers’ are doing the same building on the work of the PR firms used by the cigarette companies. The best I can read as what the problem is, is that we think that teaching people differently could make them immune to propaganda, and so the problem is that we aren’t teaching them differently. I think this is highly questionable. It argues that we should instead teach science based on a feminist critique. As far as I’m concerned the article is complete bullshit. It sets up a straw man, and then argues to a completely unsupported conclusion. It’s terrible. Having said that here’s what it touches on that is useful: Teaching scientific method alone as ‘science’ is outdated. Science is part of public discourse and so it is important for students to understand how science works as social, sociological, and political processes, as much as it is an epistemological method. From this point of view, I respect the various ideas that they are advancing as valid for study. However ‘valid to study’ is very different from attempting to claim that science education should be based on this ideology, and is an obvious political land-grab which must be rejected. The article makes a bunch of naked assertions as if they are simply facts about reality, when in fact they are very much the subject of social science itself. Consider these statements: > Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not confined to scientific inquiry. Seems true enough, right? > It starts in infancy, when children learn language, everyday facts, and even religious beliefs from their caregivers. Does it? This is definitely not settled science. Obviously children learn from caregivers, but what they trust is a deeper question, and a subject of study. Also, then sources are far wider than ‘care givers’. This seems like an attempt to anchor the conversation in a blank slate kind of conception of the emergence of belief. This is discredited in social science, but is popular in the humanities. > Trust is only as reliable as the source of the knowledge; when that source is unreliable, we sometimes regard beliefs based on trust as the product of indoctrination. ‘Sometimes’ being the operative word. > Trust can be eroded when there is evidence of the unreliability of the source. Yes, but research has shown that it can be strengthened when there is evidence of the unreliability of the source, too. It depends on other factors, such as who is providing the evidence. Again this statement is simply not objective or reflective of current social science. > Reflective knowledge should therefore include some account of the reliability of the source of knowledge. If you delete all of the preceding elements, and just say: Reflective knowledge should include some account of the reliability of the source of knowledge. We are left with a reasonable proposal. Weirdly, one which is already common amongst science students, who don’t ignore the reliability of the results on which they base their work.
ccsnags 6y ago
Science is a method for understanding the world, not an ideology. I do give most non scientific people the benefit of the doubt. They are at least trying. What is really disturbing is that this is a real problem within sections of the scientific community and especially within the public relations of the scientific community. “Science Communicator” is almost synonymous with this trap. I think it stems from oversimplification and a need to generate funding for research.
SyzygistSix 6y ago
I feel like authorities betraying public trust is a large part of what got us into this mess. I trust the scientific process. I don't trust the people involved in the process and in charge of making and following policy based on scientific and technological process.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  One thing that allows for this is the oft neglected "method of discovery". The usual "scientific process" concerns itself with how to keep an experiment correct/truthful - but how do we decide what experiments to conduct in the first place? Scientific funding can be biased towards the successes of the past, and so future funding can be guided by political agendas.

revax 6y ago

I like it but in every theory, there is always some edge case where the theory doesn't work. In a sense, every models in natural science are wrong but some are more right than other.

webmaven 6y ago

> In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it. That elides a lot of complexity, mostly around the validity of the experiment design and execution. Confounding factors, confirmation bias, selection bias, p-hacking, etc. can all skew the results in ways both overt and subtle. The following quote from the movie 'Thank you for smoking' may illustrate: "This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany. I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius, he could disprove gravity." So no, 'if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong' is a gross oversimplification. Not to mention that there may be very good reasons that an experiment can't (or shouldn't) be done, or that various 'natural experiments' must be relied upon.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

neonological 6y ago

The key to the quote above is that nothing is proven right. That is the fundamental flaw with science, if you understand this, you understand science. In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing can ever be proven true. It is fundamentally impossible. Every single claim made by every single scientist since the beginning of science has never ever been proven true. This “flaw” is what drives most of the debate and misunderstandings about science in the cultural and political arena. For example... No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true... it is fundamentally impossible. Hence the debate rages on endlessly.

vlovich123 6y ago
Except science _can_ set error bounds. No, global warming can never be "true" from the perspective of 100% accurate with no room for error. Science is able to set error bounds though. The latest particle physics results come with "this theory is correct to within 99.99% of the theoretical model". That means that even if the theory is wrong, it can account for 99.99% of all observations you make. That is the power. Obviously climate change models aren't like particle physics so we don't expect such accurate error bounds (too many sources for error). However, the question you must ask is "are the error bars sufficient for the decision I have to make?". My conclusion thus is that unlike dietary science or pop psychology, the evidence here is very likely real, despite any doubts that may persist. I could of course be wrong. That's a fundamental truth one has to admit to oneself & other peers who understand how science works. That's not a political truth that would make sense to admit because saying "I can never know but I'm pretty sure" has been weaponized into "you don't know anything & you're wrong". Same reason when speaking among science-literate friends I say "global warming" but am careful to say "climate change" to everyone else because the warming aspect got corrupted into "you said it's global warming but winter was especially cold this year". Maybe there has been a massive social pressure within the scientific community into confirmation bias. Certainly the community does self-police & ridicule anyone who doesn't ascribe to it. Why do I think the theory is reliable & it's not a massive conspiracy (intentional or otherwise)? I trust that there's lots of very bright people who have studied the math, from within & without the field & validated the models don't have any fundamental issues of any kind (conceptual, numerical issues, computer sims are solid, etc). I trust that people outside of the field who have related degrees have validated huge swaths of it. I trust that technological advances have provided us with exponentially better sensors & monitoring and that has fed back into exponentially better simulations to validate models. And with all of that development, over the course of 20 years, the results haven't changed, no new hypothesis have borne out. The scientific community is both small & large. It's large in that there will always be some amount of bad behavior somewhere, bad or unethical science, wrong results, mistaken theories that take hold for a time, etc. It's small though in the sense that when there's a very real problem, it can be brought to light & it's really hard to suppress that knowledge. That's why the chorus about global warming has been increasing. Oil companies knew about this as a problem & suppressed their own voices to the debate because it would hurt their bottom lines. In fact, they often fund the opposition. This isn't a conspiracy theory. There are court documents showing this. A well-informed person can use all of this knowledge to make a guess about who to listen to. A less-informed person will let themselves be swayed by the opinion they want to hear & or as a "fuck you" to the scientific community for ruining their career choice.

guerrilla 6y ago

It seems to me this is exactly the "science as inquiry" model that the OP is arguing against.

SkyBelow 6y ago

I find this is too simple, because it assumes the experiment is correct. Experiments can have errors and being able to doubt experiments, especially when you have disagreements between experiments, is a very important step in science. This isn't to say that one should hold to a belief without any evidence to back it, only that we consider the possibilities that experiments themselves are flawed and take that into account, such as by designing seemingly unrelated experiments to test a single guess. To give another Feynman quote. >We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. >Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...

trashtester 6y ago

Then there is the Asimov quote : "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht... A good scientific model is less wrong than the one preceeding it.