Page 73 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Cargo Cult Science

"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a mas-
sage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like
that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says, "I feel a kind
of dent—is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified—I had blown my cover—and said, "It's
reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also
looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest
craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend
keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his
invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys.
He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind,
I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing hap-
pened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can pic-
ture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the
key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened.
So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I
thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to
check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things
that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of
how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathemat-
ics 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 con-
tinually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch
doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they
know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat
criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no
progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use
to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think
ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudo-
science. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children
to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is
even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not
necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them
in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she
didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science
that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are ex-
amples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas
there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land

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