Feynman's cargo cult, honesty in science

[Andre]

By shear chance I stumbled upon the Cargo Cult address of Richard Feynman, Caltech 1974.

A few quotes:

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of
having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something
that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that
I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about
that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after
that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science,
but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool
the layman when you're talking as a scientist...

...For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology
and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the
applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any."
He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of
this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're
representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to
the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you
under those circumstances, then that's their decision...

...If you've made up your mind
to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should
always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only
publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look
good. We must publish both kinds of results..

How would that compare to the practice of nowadays?

 

[Andy Resnick]

His first paragraph stands unchanged after 30+ years.

His last paragraph is also likely unchanged, since there's added pressure to publish.

 

[lisab]

His first paragraph stands unchanged after 40+ years.

His last paragraph is also likely unchanged, since there's added pressure to publish.

Are you implying the rest of what he talks about has changed?

 

[Andy Resnick]

Are you implying the rest of what he talks about has changed?

ummm... I dunno?

Paragraph 2 is true for me, but I can't say if it's true for anyone else.

The other paragraphs apply to me personally, and while I think science is practiced as ethically now as it was then, there are certainly more issues now than there were.

For example, it is a fact that Universities have gotten more involved with profit-making corporations and ventures since 1974. It is also a fact that individual academic researchers have been encouraged to be more entrepreneurial since 1974. These combine to create more opportunities, but also more ethical boundaries- and since we are still not requiring any formal ethics training as part of graduate school, proto-scientists are left to figure out what's right and wrong on their own. Most do ok, some don't.

The next-to-last paragraph is the interesting one. What do you think of that one?

 

[Max™]

I dunno, I'd argue that there is a major aspect of science which is very much in the public eye these days (and is no longer open for discussion on these forums) which seems to run afoul of the last paragraph.

 

[Andre]

His first paragraph stands unchanged after 30+ years.

His last paragraph is also likely unchanged, since there's added pressure to publish.

I guess you refer to the last quoted paragraph in the OP. It seems that the message is more to publish results anyway, regardless if they do or do not support or refute the (pet) idea under investigation and not hold back any results if they don't fit the desired notion. How many projects are unpublished because the results were not as expected/desired?

But I suggest to read the whole address.

 

[Andy Resnick]

How many projects are unpublished because the results were not as expected/desired?

But I suggest to read the whole address.

I vaguely recall reading the original address; I was indeed referring only to the OP's excerpted sections.

To your question, I don't see how that be answered- how can you even tell if a project occurred or was otherwise completed, if the results are not published?

But, I suppose we can look at tobacco safety studies, funded by the cigarette manufacturers and the US federal government since the 1950's (maybe even earlier). In retrospect, there were studies not published by the tobacco agencies because the results conflicted with their business interests.

As another example, look at the Petroleum Research Fund- it's an endowed fund administered by the American Chemical Society:

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_TRANSITIONMAIN&node_id=631&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=facad61c-29fc-4a0e-9396-d4b1cb47d375

This granting mechanism provides some protection to scientific integrity, because grants are awarded independent of the corporations funding the research. And, publication of the results is not dependent upon the corporations agreeing with the results.

The bottom line is that the opportunities for bad behavior by individual PIs has greatly increased over the past few decades, but there has not been a concomitant increase in scientific organizations providing ethical guidelines to scientists- it's been left to lawyers. One notable exception that I know of is NIH- anyone funded by NIH training grant dollars *must* take an ethics class.