Don Surber: The cargo cult of climate change"...Feynman's IQ may have been 125 but he was the smartest American not named Benjamin Franklin.
...While he won a Nobel in physics, it was teaching he liked best.
...Which brings us to his commencement speech,
Cargo Cult Science, subtitled "Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself."
Feynman began, "During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency.
...Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it.
This method became organized, of course, into
science. ..."But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And
I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world."- ...He said, "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."
He called out the pseudoscience of the day: ESP, psychotherapy and parapsychology.
He also called out liberal programs..."
