Chapter 41 True Wisdom in Laughter, Part 5-11

During the Middle Ages, all sorts of crazy and ridiculous ideas emerged, such as the fact that rhino horn can improve sexual performance, is one of them.Then someone figured out how to filter ideas, experiment with what worked and what didn't, and weed out the ones that didn't.Of course, this method gradually developed into a science. It has been developing so well that we are in the scientific age today.In fact, our age is so scientific that it's sometimes hard to imagine how it was possible for witch doctors to exist before, because none of the ideas they came up with worked—only a few of them did.

Yet to this day, I still meet a lot of people who, sooner or later, talk to me about UFOs, astrology, or some kind of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of consciousness.Superpowers and more.So I came to a conclusion: this is not a scientific world. Most people believe in all these amazing things, so I decided to do some research to see why.And my curiosity, which loves to pursue the truth, brought me into a difficult situation, because I discovered that there are so many nonsense and rubbish in the world! First of all, I want to study all kinds of mysticism and mystical experience.I lay in a tank sealed off from the outside world and experienced many hours of hallucinations, knowing something about it.Then I ran to Esalen, which is a breeding ground for these kinds of ideas.I didn't expect so many strange things there beforehand, and it took me by surprise.

Isharon has many huge hot spring baths, built on a cliff platform 30 feet above sea level.One of the most enjoyable experiences I've had at Isalon was sitting in these baths and watching the waves crashing onto the rocks below, watching the cloudless blue sky, and beautiful girls quietly appearing. Once I sat in the bath again, and there was a beautiful girl in the bath and a guy who didn't seem to know each other.Immediately I started thinking, "How should I approach her?" I was trying to figure out what to say, and the guy said to her, "Uh, I'm learning massage. Can you let me practice?"

"Of course," she said.They got out of the tub, and she was lying on the massage table nearby. I thought, "That opening line is amazing! I never thought I could ask that!" He started massaging her big toe. "I can feel it," He said: "I feel the hollow - is that the pituitary gland?" I blurted out, "Dude, you're so far from the pituitary gland!" I've also studied the phenomenon of superpowers, the latest big hit being Uri Geller, who is said to be able to bend a key just by running his finger over it. At his invitation, I went to his hotel room to watch him perform mind-reading and key-bending.In terms of observing the mind, he has not performed successfully. Maybe no one can see through my heart?And my kid took a key and let him touch it, nothing happened.Then he said that his powers are better in water; as you can imagine, we followed him to the bathroom.The faucet was on, and he fumbled desperately for the key in the water, but nothing happened.So, I couldn't study this phenomenon at all.

Then I thought, what else do we believe? (That's when I thought about witch doctors, and how easy it was to study their authenticity: you just had to notice that they couldn't do anything.) So I looked for things that more people believed in, like "We've learned teaching methods” etc.Although there is a lot of advocacy and research on reading methods and teaching methods, if you pay attention, you will find that students' reading ability has been declining—at least not rising much—even though we are still asking these people to improve teaching methods.This is an ineffective prescription prescribed by a witch doctor. It should have been reviewed a long time ago. How do these people know that the method proposed is feasible?

Another example is the treatment of criminals, where we are clearly not making any progress.There's a whole bunch of theories out there, but our approach is clearly not helping at all in reducing crime. Yet these things all appear in the name of science, and we study them. Ordinary people relying on "common sense" alone may be intimidated by these fake sciences. If a teacher thinks of some good way of teaching her child to read, the education system forces her to use something else—and she can even be tricked by the education system into thinking her way is not a good way.Another example is that some parents of bad children cannot get rid of the shadow of guilt for the rest of their lives after disciplining their children, just because experts say: "It is wrong to discipline children this way."

Therefore, we should really review those theories that do not work, and review the science that is not science. Some of the educational or psychological studies mentioned above are prime examples of what I call cargo cult science.During the Great War there were some natives in the South Pacific who saw the planes land and unload bags of good things, some of which were given to them.They still wanted the same thing to happen in the future, so they paved the airstrip in the same place, lit fires on both sides, built a little hut, sent people to sit there, and tied two pieces of wood (pretending to be Headphones), plugged a bamboo (pretending to be an antenna), thinking it was the pilot in the control tower - and they waited, waited for the plane to land.They're called the idiots, they've done everything right, they've done everything right, they look like they did in wartime; but it doesn't work: the plane never lands.That's why I call this kind of stuff "scumbag science", because they have completely learned the appearance of scientific research, everything is very similar, but in fact they lack the most important part-because the plane never landed.

Next, logically, I should tell you what they lack, but this is as difficult as explaining to the natives on those small islands in the South Pacific. How can you convince them how they should reorganize their homes and produce wealth on their own?This is much harder than "tell them to improve the shape of the earphones".Still, I've noticed a common problem with "scumbag science," which is what we expect you to have grasped after all the science you've learned in school—we never explicitly say what that is, but we hope You can learn from many, many scientific studies.So it's kind of interesting to talk about it openly like it's doing now.This is "scientific morality," the principle of honesty that must be observed in scientific thinking—somewhat of best effort.For example, if you are doing an experiment, you should include in your report everything that might disprove the experiment, not just what you think is true; you should include other theories that could also explain your data , something that comes to your mind but has been ruled out by other experiments, etc., are all included in the report to make it clear to others that those possibilities have been ruled out.

You must account for any minor details that you know of that might raise suspicion.If you know what went wrong, or could go wrong, you have to do your best to explain it.For example, when you think of a theory, when you put it forward, you must also write down the facts that are not good for the theory. There is also a higher level issue involved here.When you put many ideas together to form a big theory and come up with what data it fits, you should first make sure that it can explain not only the data that made you come up with this theory, but also, Other experimental data can also be explained.

All in all, the point is to provide all the information so others can adjudicate how much you have contributed; not to present only information that would lead people to a certain opinion. The easiest way to illustrate this concept is to compare it with an advertisement. Last night I saw an ad that said "Wesson Oil" would not leach into food.There is nothing wrong, this statement is not considered dishonesty, but what I want to point out is not just to be honest, it is related to the morality of science, which is a higher level.The description that should have been added to that ad read:

At a certain temperature, no cooking oil will seep into the food; if you use another temperature, all cooking oil, including Wesson cooking oil, will seep into the food.So they spread hints, not facts; and we have to tell the difference. According to past experience, the truth will eventually come to light. Other colleagues will repeat your experiments to find out whether you were right or wrong; nature will agree or disagree with your theories.And while you may gain temporary fame and excitement, if you don't do it carefully, you will certainly not end up being respected as a good scientist.This kind of virtue, this hard work of not deceiving yourself, is the ingredient that most of the stupid sciences lack. The difficulties they encounter mainly come from the research subjects themselves, and the fundamental inability to apply scientific methods to these subjects.But that's not the only difficulty.That's why the plane didn't land! From past experience, we have learned how to deal with some situations of self-deception.For example, Robert Millikan (Robert Millikan) did an oil drop experiment, measured the electric charge of electrons, and got an answer that we know today is not quite right.His data is a bit off because he used an inaccurate value for the coefficient of air viscosity.So, if you sort out the data obtained by measuring the charge of electrons after Millikan, you will find some very interesting phenomena: draw these data and time as a coordinate graph, and you will find that the value obtained by this person is compared with The value of Millikan is a little bit higher, the next person gets a little bit bigger, and the next person gets a little bit bigger, and finally, it stabilizes at a larger value. Why didn't they figure out that the new value should be higher in the first place? ——This incident made many relevant scientists blush—because apparently the way many people do things is: when they get a result that is higher than the Millikan value, they think there must be something wrong, and they will desperately look for it. And found the reason why the experiment was wrong.On the other hand, when they get results similar to Millikan's, they don't check them so hard.Therefore, they excluded the so-called data that differed too much and were not considered.We are now well aware of those tricks, so we will never make the same mistakes again. However, learning how not to lie to yourself, how to develop scientific morals, etc. - sorry - was not included in any of the courses.We only hope that through subtle influence, you can realize it by yourself. Rule number one, don't lie to yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool yourself, so be extra careful.When you can not lie to yourself, you can easily not lie to other scientists.After that, you just have to follow the honest way of tradition. I want to add one more thing, which is not very important to science, but something I really believe in -- that when you speak as a scientist, you must not deceive the public.I'm not talking about what to do when you cheat on your wife or girlfriend, when you're not a scientist but a human being, we leave those questions to you and your pastor.What I'm talking about right now is the quality of being special, of being different, of not just not lying to people, but doing your best to show that you could be wrong, and that's what you have as a scientist; it's what we are as scientists. , to other scientists as well as to non-scientists. Let me give another example.A friend who spoke to me before going on a radio show, who studies cosmology and astronomy, was confused about how to talk about applications of this work.I said, "There's no application at all." And he replied, "That's true, but if you say that, our kind of research work is even less supported." honest.If you present yourself as a scientist, you should explain your work to the entire non-scientist public - if they don't want to support your research, that's their decision. Another form of this principle is that once you decide to test a theorem, or explain some ideas, you should publish the results no matter which side the results are biased towards.If only some results are published, maybe we can whitewash the arguments beautifully, but in fact, we must publish both positive and negative results. I think the same attitude is needed when giving advice to the government. Suppose a senator asks you whether a certain well should be drilled in the state he represents, and you conclude that it should be done in another state, and if you therefore do not publish the conclusion, it is to me In other words, you are not giving real scientific opinion, you are just being used.In other words, if your answer happens to be in the direction of the government or politicians, they use it to their advantage, but don't publish it as soon as the other situation arises. This is not the way to give scientific advice! Many other errors are more characteristic of low-quality science.When I was teaching at Cornell, I often had discussions with people in the psychology department.A student told me about an experiment she was planning to do: Others had found that under certain conditions, say X, rats would do something A.She is curious whether they will still do A if she changes the condition to Y.So she plans to see if they will do A in the case of Y.I told her that she must first repeat the experiment done by others in the laboratory to see if the result A can be obtained under the X condition, and then change the condition to Y to see if A can be changed.Then she can know if the difference is what she thinks it is. She liked the new idea and went to tell the professor; but the professor said, "No, you can't do that, because that experiment has already been done, and you're wasting your time." After that, it seems to have become a general rule of psychology: everyone does not repeat other people's experiments, but simply changes the experimental conditions to see the results. Today, the same dangers persist, even in the famous profession of physics.I was shocked to hear about an experiment done at the National Accelerator Laboratory.In the experiment, the researcher used deuterium, a heavy hydrogen.And when he wanted to compare these results with the case of using light hydrogen, he directly used the light hydrogen data obtained by others on different instruments. When he was asked why he did this, he said it was because he had no time left in his plan to repeat that part of the experiment, and there would be no new results anyway...  So, by being too eager to get new data to get more funding to keep the experiment going, they are likely to destroy the value of the experiment itself; which should be the original purpose.In many cases, the experimentalists there are unable to conduct research in accordance with the requirements of scientific ethics! It must be added that not all psychological experiments are like this.We all know that they had a lot of experiments with rats running mazes, and there was no obvious conclusion for a long time.But in 1937, a guy named Young did a very interesting experiment.He made a maze with a long corridor with many doors on either side.Rats come in through the door on this side, and food is behind the door on the other side.He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in through the third door—regardless of which door he originally let the rats go in.He found it impossible; the mouse would immediately go to the door where the food had been found. The question, then, is that, since the hallway is so beautifully made that each door looks the same, how on earth does the mouse recognize a previous door?Apparently this door is a little different!So he repainted the doors so that each door looked the same.But the mice still recognized the door they had walked through first.Then he guessed it might be the smell of the food, so after each time the mice walked through, he used chemicals to change the smell of the maze, and they returned to the original door.He then thought that the rats might rely on the lights or arrangements in the laboratory to judge directions, just like humans; so he covered the corridor, but the result was still the same. Finally he discovered that they could identify their paths by the sound they made when they walked on the road, and the only way to do that was to lay fine sand in the corridor.So he traced one possibility after another until he stumped all the mice, and finally they all had to learn how to get to the third door.If he loosened any of the factors, the little mouse would know it all. From a scientific point of view, it was a first-rate experiment.This experiment makes things like rat mazes valuable, because it uncovers the conditions the rat is really using—not the conditions you'd guess it was using.This experiment tells us: you have to change those conditions, how to carefully control and conduct the mouse maze experiment. I followed the subsequent development of this research.I found no mention of this experiment in any of the similar experiments after Young.They never sanded the maze or performed experiments carefully.They went back and let the mice go through the maze as before, completely oblivious to Young's great discovery. They didn't mention Young's paper simply because they thought he had found nothing about mice.But in fact, he has discovered the preparation you must do first, otherwise you will never find out what the results of the mouse are.Idiot science often ignores this important experiment. Another example is the experimentation of superpowers.Like the criticism many people have made—even themselves—they improve their techniques so that the effects become less and less effective, and finally none at all.All psychologists who study the paranormal are looking for reproducible experiments (ones that can be done again and get the same effect), or even just a statistical number.So they experimented with a million rats -- oh, sorry, I mean people -- and did a lot of experiments and got certain statistics, but the next time they tried, they couldn't get those phenomena again.Now some would even say that expecting psychic experiments to be repeatable is a petty requirement.Is this science? This man was originally the dean of the "School of Paranormal Psychology", and when he gave his retirement speech, he talked about the establishment of a new institution, and he told others that the next step is that everyone should select students who have obvious supernatural powers. Come and train instead of wasting time with students who are very interested in these phenomena but only occasionally have psychic effects.I think this kind of education policy is very dangerous - only teaching students how to get certain results, but not how to stick to scientific ethics and conduct experiments. I have only one hope, therefore: that you will find a place where you can freely assert the virtues I have mentioned; . I sincerely wish that you will be able to obtain such freedom.