Trobriand Islanders

[jporter]

On Oct 28, 2005, at 1:29 AM, Cometman wrote:

> What have you got against the Trobriand Islanders?  Is NATO going to
> invade them next?  Is Kissinger en route to them to win another Nobel?
>

I have always felt that Feynman  got it reversed in his poignant
description of The Cargo Cult of South Pacific Islanders in his
Caltech commencement address given in 1974:

http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

	Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you
	what they're missing. But it would be just
	about as difficult to explain to the South Sea
	islanders how they have to arrange things so
	that they get some wealth in their system. It is
	not something simple like telling them how to
	improve the shapes of the earphones. But there
	is one feature I notice that is generally missing
	in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all
	hope you have learned in studying science in
	school -- we never say explicitly what this is, but
	just hope that you catch on by all the examples of
	scientific investigation.

	It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and
	speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity,
	a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to
	a kind of utter honesty --a kind of leaning over
	backwards.

	For example, if you're doing an experiment, you
	should report everything that you think might make
	it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it:
	other causes that could possibly explain your results;
	and things you thought of that you've eliminated by
	some other experiment, and how they worked -- to
	make sure the other fellow can tell they have been
	eliminated.

Apparently, "scientific integrity" as preached by Mr. Feynman
does not include the creation, testing and dropping of atomic
bombs on innocents, nor accepting responsibility for it, more
than some lip service about poor marksmanship.

Might be time for "a postdialectic paradigm that includes culture
as a whole," including the effects of "scientific integrity", not just
as some barely remembered elective course on the way to a
shiny new degree in science, but front and center, in every science
classroom on a daily basis.

To the Military Industrial Complex- those funding the actual research
and development of scientific enterprise- the rest of us are all
Trobriand Islanders. The price of not forging a bridge across that
yawning divide is no small part of the meaning of GR.

jody