{"id":34,"date":"2005-03-29T08:23:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-29T13:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2005\/03\/29\/cargo-cult-science\/"},"modified":"2005-03-29T08:23:00","modified_gmt":"2005-03-29T13:23:00","slug":"cargo-cult-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2005\/03\/29\/cargo-cult-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Cargo Cult Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a500'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n I ran across the term &#8220;cargo cult science&#8221; and was trying to get a better<br \/>\n understanding of the term.   Here is what the late Professor Feynman defined<br \/>\n cargo cult science as:\n <\/p>\n<p> <em><\/p>\n<p>\n In the<br \/>\n South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.  During the war they saw<br \/>\n airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to<br \/>\n happen now.  So they&#8217;ve arranged to make things like runways, to put<br \/>\n fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man<br \/>\n to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars<br \/>\n of bamboo sticking out like antennas&#8211;he&#8217;s the controller&#8211;and they wait<br \/>\n for the airplanes to land.  They&#8217;re doing everything right.  The form<br \/>\n is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\n work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things cargo cult science,<br \/>\n because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific<br \/>\n investigation, but they&#8217;re missing something essential, because the<br \/>\n planes don&#8217;t land.\n <\/p>\n<p> <\/em><\/p>\n<p>\n I think nowadays many would use the term pseudoscience to describe<br \/>\n this phenomenon.   But the most important thing about cargo cult<br \/>\n science or pseudoscience is a misunderstanding of what the scientific<br \/>\n method is about.   Unfortunately, politics and economics can influence<br \/>\n the &#8216;scientific truth&#8217; far more than one can think.\n <\/p>\n<p>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.brocku.ca\/etc\/cargo_cult_science.html\">Read Dr. feynman&#8217;s description of cargo cult science<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I ran across the term &#8220;cargo cult science&#8221; and was trying to get a better understanding of the term. Here is what the late Professor Feynman defined cargo cult science as: In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}