https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
“In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
The link above will take you to Richard Feynman’s 1974 Caltech commencement address, in which he tackles various forms of pseudoscience and hollow science and things that look like science but aren’t science.
It is something that I, as a Science Fiction author, am particularly fascinated by. My species makes a living by writing things that sound like science but are not quite science (discounting the hardest of hard SF, which does attempt to apply scrutiny to its own theories, and is unsurprisingly largely written by people from a scientific background). We invent logical traps and labyrinths, sure, but we very rarely have experimental proof that would stand up to much scrutiny. There’s ways around this of course, the time travel in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? is explained by:
Being alien technology that predates the story
Being invented by itself, resulting in an information paradox
With 1, no explanation is needed as we humans need only to step into the machine and hit buttons. With 2, the explanation is out there to be found, but the anachronistic invention of the time machine a long time before any comparable high-technology (FTL travel, immortality, advanced AI) is reached is explained away by the simple fact that the invention of the machine is the cause and the effect. It is a Jinn, to borrow Islamic terminology (borrowed by physicists and then borrowed again by pseudoscientists with horrendously coloured blogs that take the word and drag it back into the realm of myth), it is causa-sui. The time machine invented the time machine.
This works in fiction because we are reading to see what happens. Especially in Science Fiction, we are reading to see the potential implications of a technology such as cloning or time travel. We are visiting the future so we might bring back a discovery or warning back to the present. We are not obliged to explain exactly how the science works, and often that can be part of the mystery and intrigue of a story.
But outside of fiction, things that look like science but aren’t quite science still exist. As Feynman suggested, the education system is struggling (this is in 1974, and the systems in the UK and US haven’t changed much).
“There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods.”
I had a lot more to say for this newsletter, but I felt that I was wading into waters I had not properly studied yet. I was going to talk about the new theory that maths is racist, how people are profiting from circular arguments, how solutions are being invented that only hinder the people they claim to help, how religious debaters use one example of being almost right one time to justify everything else in their book including their outdated treatment of other people, and some other things, but I am weary of overstepping. I don’t want to start sounding too serious either, because I want this blog to remain in the realm of the creative, sometimes humorous, and theoretical. I am weary of using examples which are highly politicized because people too easily assume an opinion from a soundbite, and even if I did reveal my personal opinions today, they may change by tomorrow.
My point being, I think more people should be more careful when they wade into arguments. It is easy to convince a member of the public that you are being scientific when you are not, and it is our moral duty to at least try to apply scrutiny to our own arguments before putting them ‘out there’. We should all strive to collect data on what we believe in and to react to it as objectively as possible, not censoring or ignoring that which we disagree with, or firing people who disagree with our beliefs.
As an aside, I think I am an atheist because of the way my mind works. I could never settle on one worldview, and I am more than comfortable in telling people I do not know all the answers. I don’t know what happens when we die, but I can play with theories through my writing without having to pretend to subscribe to them. I think that many creative people are like this, but that some of us hide away from the uncreative people, sometimes for our own safety.
Advertisers need to be more honest. Science communication with the public needs to be clearer. Education needs to put more focus on teaching kids HOW to read, not WHAT to read. And ideologies need to adapt to new evidence, otherwise they will become more and more distanced from reality as time goes on.
For example, flat-earthers now are a lot more laughable than they were a few centuries ago. I wonder what other faiths are headed that way?
What good is a theory that refuses to be questioned?