Reading Notes

Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science

  • We have lots of things that appear scientific, but hardly produce results in the real world
  • This is especially true in the social sciences
    • Education
    • Criminal reform
    • Psychotherapy
  • All of the above are examples of cargo cult science
  • Comes from the notion of cargo cults in the South Pacific
    • Pacific Islanders see strange people come in and build runways
    • Then airplanes come down with all sorts of fantastic things
    • So the native islanders build things like runways and set up fires to resemble runway lights, and even arrange for a person to sit and act like the controller
    • But nothing happens - the planes don’t come
    • Cargo cult science: investigation that follows all the forms and precepts of science… except that its results don’t hold up in the real world (“the planes don’t land”)
  • So what is cargo-cult science missing?
    • Scientific integrity
      • You must report on everything that might cast doubt on your experiment
      • Other hypotheses that explain the results should be reported as well
    • Contrast with advertising - which seeks to tell only part of the truth in order to portray its product in the best possible light
    • Eventually the truth will out - eventually people will try to reproduce your experiment and they won’t be able to reproduce your results
  • So why is science hard
    • People find it easy to deceive themselves
    • Example with Millikan’s oil drop experiment
      • When scientists got a number that was too far away from Millikan’s original value, they suspected they’d done something wrong and threw out the value
      • When they got a number that was closer, they didn’t check so hard
  • How to avoid cargo cult science:
    • Don’t fool yourself – you are the easiest person to fool
    • When you’ve succeeded at not fooling yourself, communicate your findings in an honest way to everyone else
    • Bonus: don’t fool laymen when you’re speaking as a scientist - if there aren’t real applications to your work, be honest about that
    • How do you avoid fooling yourself?
      • Preregister your ideas - publish no matter which way the experiment comes out
      • Don’t take others’ findings for granted - before you try to build upon an idea, do what you can to reproduce it so that you know you’re building atop a solid foundation
        • Yes, people will say that reproducing already discovered results is a waste of time - those people are dumb
      • Pay attention to meta-science - people aren’t just discovering facts about the phenomenon you’re studying, they’re also discovering facts about the experimental apparatus needed to get valid results
        • Example: study with rats running down corridor - no new findings about rat behavior, but many new discoveries about experiment design
      • Worry about the process more than the result - if you have a process that yields reproducible results, stick with it, no matter how tempting it may feel to deviate

Sam Harris: The Pleasures of Drowning

  • Martial arts have become divorced from the real world of knowing how to defend yourself
  • Students spend time going through drills without stopping to consider if those drills have any correspondence to real world attack scenarios
  • Many effective techniques are too dangerous to practice effectively, so they’re neglected, and also acquire a reputation for being fight-enders when they’re really not
  • How do brazilian jiu-jitsu and other grappling arts remedy this?
    • Can be safely practiced under conditions of “100% resistance”
  • Brazilian jiu-jitsu makes you want to learn, by making your ignorance painfully manifest
  • UFC brings science back to martial arts - martial artists are fighting “for real” against other martial artists, and the best method of fighting is the one that wins fights
  • In the absence of rules prohibiting clinching, fighters tend to grab a hold of one another and grapple
  • This clinch tends to persist, and the bigger fighter or more experienced wrestler takes the other person to the ground
  • Once a fight goes to the ground, Brazilian jiu-jitsu has the advantage
  • So what is the best method of fighting? All of the above, depending on distance:
    • At arms length: punching like a western boxer and kicking like a Thai boxer
    • Closer in: Thai boxing - striking with knees and elbows
    • Once your opponent grabs you - freestyle wrestling - controlling posture and throwing your opponent to the ground
    • On the ground - Brazilian jiu-jitsu
  • The problem with learning Brazilian jiu-jitjsu exclusively is that it biases you to go to the ground, when in a real street-fight going to the ground is the last thing you want to do
  • But if you find yourself on the ground, grappling with someone, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is the surest way of making sure you win

Nate Soares: Failing with Abandon

  • You can limit failure
  • It doesn’t follow that you can drop your self control entirely just because you’ve missed a goal by a little bit
  • You can stop yourself after going “one over”
  • Remember, you put your targets there - if you missed by a little bit, remember that it’s your target, not imposed by an external authority

Nate Soares: Rest in Motion

  • The work that needs to be done is not a finite list of tasks, it is a neverending stream
  • The goal is to move through the work, to do things
  • Inaction is boring - the ground state for most people is an active one, not a passive one
  • The actual reward state for most people isn’t one where you’re doing nothing, it’s one where you’re doing the things that you want to do, rather than things you have to do
  • Rest when you need to rest, not when you’ve run out of work to do (hint: you’ll never run out of work to do)
  • Instead of thinking of your work in terms of lists (which are finite), think about your work in terms of streams (which are not)
  • Divide your work up into streams (rest is a stream too) and consume tasks from each stream at the rate that you can do them
  • Do what needs doing at a sustainable pace

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

  • Language is a tool, and, as such, we can choose to alter it
  • Slovenly language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts
  • So, how do we avoid slovenly language?
    • Avoid staleness of imagery
    • Be precise in what you’re saying
    • The worst kind of writing is where the writer means one thing and says something else, or writes some prose indifferent to whether it means anything at all
  • Specific things to avoid
    • Dying metaphors:
      • There are original metaphors, which evoke a visual image and assist thought
      • There are “dead” metaphors, which have passed on to being ordinary words or phrases
      • The danger is in using metaphors that are overused, but not so overused as to be considered an ordinary word
      • The “dying metaphors” have lost the ability to evoke, but don’t really have a fixed meaning as an ordinary word
      • Don’t mix incompatible metaphors
    • Operators or false verbal limbs
      • Don’t eliminate simple verbs to make your sentence look more fancy
      • Instead of being a single word, the verb becomes a phrase
      • Most people who militate against the “passive voice” are actually warning against this
    • Pretentious diction
      • Fancy words used for the sake of having fancy words
      • Latin phrases used in contexts where Latin phrases make no sense (e.g. outside of law, medicine, and history)
      • Instead of using fancy words, come up with some actual English that describes what you’re trying to say
    • Meaningless words
      • If a sentence doesn’t contribute to the conclusion, cut it out
      • Be concrete!
  • The real crime in modern writing is that writers no longer think of true things, and then choose words to describe those things to others
  • Instead they assemble strips of words created by others and then let the meanings of those words drive what is true
  • The cost of this is that meaning is muddled both for the author and the reader - how is the reader to know what the author means when it’s not even clear to the author what he or she means?
  • A good writer will ask him or herself the following 4 questions:
    • What am I trying to say?
    • What words will express it?
    • Is there any imagery that will make my meaning clearer?
    • Is the image fresh enough to have an effect?
    • Bonus questions:
      • Can I make it shorter?
      • Is my writing ugly?
  • Political and bureaucratic writing is often ugly, stale, meaningless writing
  • The advantage of this style of writing is that they make horrors seem banal, and allow us to defend that which is hard to defend while keeping alleigiance with middle-class virtues
    • Things like dropping the atomic bomb or continued British rule in India may be defended, but only by using arguments that are too difficult for most people to bear
    • The advantage of this kind of soggy writing is that it allows us to name things without making them visible
  • Language is fixable
    • If enough of us set our minds to using clear language, then clear language will win
  • Final guidelines:
    • Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print
    • Never use a long word when a short word will do
    • If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out
    • Never use the passive when you can use the active
    • Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or jargon if there is an English equivalent that will serve
    • Break any of the above rules to make your writing more beautiful
  • The goal is to make stupidity obvious, both to the writer as well as to the reader
  • [Editor’s note: whenever I see ‘concomitant’ in print, I think of this comic]