Cargo cult science
Cargo cult science or English cargo cult science is a polemical expression that denounces bad scientific work. As a metaphor , it stands for formally or syntactically correct procedures and processes in the scientific community and in dealing with technology, in which the status and symbolic content of these processes exceeds the actual utility value. The attempt is therefore made to achieve economic success and public recognition through the more symbolic actions.
The expression comes from the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman (1918–1988), who applied a term from ethnology , cargo cult , to social processes in the Western world .
Feynman's use of the term
Feynman first used the term in a speech given to the graduating class in 1974 at the California Institute of Technology . He used it to describe an approach in the scientific community that fulfills formal criteria, but which lacks scientific integrity. The speech was also reprinted in an issue of Engineering and Science and can be found on many websites because it was approved for non-commercial distribution by Caltech. She was also mentioned in his 1985 book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! printed.
Feynman describes the rites of a cargo cult as follows:
“In the Samoa Islands, the locals did not understand what it was about the planes that landed during the war and brought them all sorts of wonderful things. And now they pay homage to an aircraft cult. They create artificial runways next to which they light fires to mimic the signal lights. And in a wooden hut crouches a poor native with wooden headphones with bamboo sticks protruding from them to represent antennas, turning his head back and forth. They also have wooden radar towers and all sorts of other things and hope to attract the planes that bring them the beautiful things. You are doing everything right. Perfect in shape. Everything looks exactly like it did back then. But it doesn't work. Not a plane lands. "
Feynman cites didactics and pedagogy as examples of cargo cult sciences.
Feynman warned that scientists must first and foremost avoid deceiving themselves if they were to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists. Scientists should be ready to question their own theories and results.
When dealing with technology, Feynman later cited his impressions from the commission of inquiry into the Challenger disaster . He criticized both dominated by wishful risk assessments of NASA for the space shuttle program and the work of the Commission of Inquiry itself as a cargo cult science. In both cases, according to Feynman, formal criteria were met without questioning the sometimes absurd content.
Other uses of the term
Hans-Peter Beck-Bornholdt and Hans-Hermann Dubben have presented what they consider to be problematic handling of statistical methods and results in a scientific enterprise oriented towards output and headlines - and less quality and substance - in a series of case collections and popular scientific presentations. According to Beck-Bornholdt and Dubben, the propagated increase in cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans could never be statistically separated from the improved diagnostics due to the public interest in BSE . Mass slaughter, import bans and the time-consuming testing in connection with BSE were purely symbolic acts with no practical utility or impact and thus cargo cult science.
Scientific investigations of no usefulness, but with a high symbolic content, also imputed Walter McCrone to a large number of works on the Turin shroud . McCrone used as simple, well-tested and adequate research methods as possible, which was partly used against him due to the lack of media effectiveness. He did archive and source work on the origin, age, style and production method of the shroud, compared samples from the shroud with his own blood on textiles (whereby he found clear differences) and was able to detect color pigments on the shroud using polarization and electron microscopic methods. McCrone interpreted the shroud as a medieval cloth painting, which was later confirmed by the C14 age determination . McCrone described research that believed to determine the blood type of Jesus or breadcrumbs from the Last Supper with high-resolution high-tech methods as nonsensical. This is more about an interpretation that has already taken place (as a mysterious original) and the vanity of institute directors as well as the market value or prestige of elaborate apparatus-based methods than the scientific clarification of complex facts.
Cargo cult technology
In 2000, Steve McConnell, then editor-in-chief of IEEE Software , described the syntactically correct but pointless processing of a procedure model or process model without a deeper understanding of the underlying problem when developing business processes and complex software as "cargo cult". In the technological development of large companies and the technology policy of governments, the term implies ritualized clinging to traditional symbols or projects that have become meaningless.
swell
- ^ Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (PDF; 1.3 MB). Engineering and Science 37 : 7 (June 1974), pp. 10-13.
- ↑ caltech.edu: Usage Policy : "You are granted permission for individual, educational, research and non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display and performance of this work in any format."
- ↑ Richard Feynman: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (WW Norton & Company, 1985), ISBN 0393316041 .
- ↑ Translated by Inge Leipold in Jeffrey Robbins (Ed.), Richard P. Feynman, Freeman J. Dyson: It is so simple - From the pleasure of discovering things (Munich / Zurich: Piper Verlag, 2001)
- ↑ for example in the two jointly written books The Dog who Lays Eggs (rororo 2001) and The Light of the Wise Men: Errors and Misjudgments in Daily Thinking (rororo, 7th edition 2003, ISBN 978-3499614507 )
- ↑ Walter McCrone in: Vienna Reports on Natural Science in Art 1987/1988, 4/5, p. 50.
- ↑ See his publication Judgment day for the Shroud of Turin . Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books, (1999) ISBN 1-5739-2679-5
- ↑ Cargo Cult Software Engineering (PDF; 72 kB). IEEE Software 17 : 2 (March / April 2000), pp. 11-13.