In a response to the comments on my previous post, I say that the primary attitude of science isn’t to be skeptical, it is to think for yourself. (Which, in practice, means ignoring what fancy hot-shot scientists at prestigious universities tell you to think.) Funny that fancy hot-shot scientists at prestigious universities never teach that.
Or almost never. In another comment on that post, Andrew Gelman mentions the Feynman Lectures as books from which you can learn about science. Having read Volume 1, I have no idea what he means. I was a freshman at Caltech. Feynman was a professor there at the time. The Feynman Lectures had been published but they were judged too difficult for most of the freshmen! I am not kidding. The faculty had learned that they were too hard to understand. They didn’t teach what the faculty called “problem-solving” — that is, deriving predictions from theories. So there were two tracks of Intro Physics at Caltech: the Feynman track (fewer students) and the non-Feynman track (more students). I was in the Feynman track. He wasn’t the professor, but we used his book. That’s how I came to read Volume 1. I liked it, but it didn’t teach me anything important about science.
Yet — during the exact same time, freshman year — Feynman himself did teach me something important about how to be a scientist. He taught me (= encouraged me) to think for myself. Not in any obvious way. On Wednesdays at 11:00 am, Feynman would answer questions for an hour. Anything except textbook problem-solving questions. There were more than a thousand students at Tech but maybe 20-30 attended these little sessions. One day I asked: “I’ve read some philosophy. It doesn’t make sense. Yet lots of people say it’s important. Am I missing something, or does it have as little value as I think it has?” Feynman’s answer: He agreed with me. There was one book of philosophy he liked, a survey by Bertrand Russell, but for the rest of it, it was people talking and talking and saying nothing.
Wow, he agrees with me, I thought. I had reached what I thought was a very minority opinion — an opinion I’d read nowhere else, had heard nowhere else — and this famous person who I respected agreed with me! It certainly taught me to think for myself.
HOW SILLY
An argument from authority (Feynman agrees with me) to support “think for yourself” ! ! ! …
(rotflmao)
Let’s see what happens to my previous comment…
“One day I asked: “I’ve read some philosophy. It doesn’t make sense. Yet lots of people say it’s important. Am I missing something, or does it have as little value as I think it has?” Feynman’s answer: He agreed with me.”
That’s interesting, Seth, because what you’re doing in this and the previous post is what’s known as Philosophy of Science.
Andrew, by “fancy hot-shot scientists” I was thinking of people who have written famous textbooks (David Freedman, James Watson, Paul Samuelson, other authors of biology, chemistry, geology, economics, and physics textbooks) that are assigned in large numbers to undergraduates. Those books have their strengths, but teaching students to think for themselves isn’t one of them. By a long shot. I was also thinking of undergraduate science lectures I’ve attended. What do you do to try to teach students to think for themselves? You actually teach students to ignore your opinion about stuff? That’s impressive.
Anthony, you will look in vain among books and articles labelled “philosophy of science” for anything that resembles this post and the previous post.
Actually, I don’t believe that you can teach people to think for themselves: that comes naturally, or not.
Another somewhat different thing that comes naturally, or not, is creativity.
But you _can_ train people to conform, and you can exclude (often coercively) people that do think for themselves and creative people – and these are both characteristic of mainstream modern ‘science’ – which is why I put-in the scare-quotes around science.
Or, you could say that modern science has replaced a multitude of individual biases with massive blocs of group-think bias (a.k.a. peer review).
It’s interesting, though, that when you talk to people who hold patently ridiculous ideas (that Uri Geller can bend metal with his mind, that TV psychics can communicate with one’s dead relatives, etc.) what these people tell you, in essence, is that they are thinking for themselves and not allowing hot-shot scientists to tell them about the nature of reality.
Seth,
You know, Feynman himself (I think he said this in the preface) admitted that the lectures were a pedagogical failure. In my frosh year (’72-‘73) everyone used the Red Bible. My wife’s frosh year (’73-‘74), the other track used the Berkeley physics series — much better textbooks, though not as poetic as Feynman.
By the way, I had an oral final at the end of my senior year with Feynman in a graduate-level course. I was lost by the end of the year in that course, and seriously contemplating an “F.” It actually ended up being a good experience. He gave me an A-: I probably deserved a B-, but I think he bumped me up one grade for having the guts to hang in there even though I was clearly in over my head.
I’m still glad I went to ‘Tech, though it is not for the faint of heart. And, yeah, what I learned from Feynman was not so much physics but more how to maintain integrity as a scientist and as a human being.
Dave Miller
Class of ‘76