3 thoughts on “The Latest Michael Mann “Libel””

  1. The deal is that no one remembers Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science lecture or cares about the recommendations.

    Calling something “Cargo Cult Science”, not just something but a whole lot of everything by that label was quite a charge. It is essentially saying that a whole portion of Federal is funding something on the level of superstitious Melanesian people who paint “USA” on their chests, parade with wood carved in the shape of M1 rifles, make “runways” and build “control towers”, and hope for the “cargo” (war shipments) to arrive.

    Given many anthropological duds starting with Margaret Mead in Somoa, for all I know the Cargo Cult is a Western invention, maybe a kind of hazing ritual for young naifs in that culture, so Dr. Feynman was saying that many scientists are even more gullible than the primitive Melanesians, although many so-called primitives may be quite shrewd as you have to be when acting outside of your family group.

    But the science is settled and the evidence is overwhelming so no one cares if the data is collected and analyzed with less rigor than what they physicists do at CERN or Fermilab in announcing a new particle?

    1. Cargo Cult Science is when you exercise the forms of carrying out the scientific method, without actually adhering to it. It is when you determine your conclusion beforehand, and then seek out evidence which is merely consistent with that conclusion, and avoid considering evidence which would tend to contradict it. It turns the burden of falsification on its head, demanding that the conclusion is to be considered factual until falsified, rather than attempting to falsify the conclusion before even considering it potentially valid.

      It confuses correlation with causation. E.g., the pale-faces built the towers, and the shiny birds were sent by the Gods in response. We release latent CO2 into the atmosphere, and the CO2 concentration has been increasing, and the temperatures have been rising, and then stopped. It does not seek to explain precisely how the observation compels the response, it merely assumes that to be mere detail. Like the Underpants Gnomes:

      1) CO2 rises
      2) ?
      3) The Earth heats up

      Somewhere in step #2, there is a hazy sense that CO2 will raise the level of heat in a controlled volume in the laboratory, but the extrapolation to a planetary scale is taken for granted.

      Like Marxian economics, it assigns primary value to the labor involved. All of the work gone into building the bamboo towers, and fabricating the coconut headphones, must produce the desired result. All the complex computer codes, and volume of papers written, must provide the true answer, regardless of whether they are founded upon a flawed premise.

      It focuses on the credentials of qualified shamans promoting the view, rather than the substance of the view itself. And, it rationalizes failure of the conclusion to comport with reality as interference from supernatural forces, or as epicyclic contortions which are merely additional complexity to be laid on top of the underlying unproven, but unquestionably valid, foundation.

      And, it pronounces anathema upon the unbelievers.

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