Examples in Specific Experiments and Results
- Oil drop experiment: The history of published results for this famous experiment is an example given in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - in which each new publication slowly and quietly drifted more and more away from the initial (erroneous) values given by Robert Millikan, rather than all having a random distribution from the start around what we now believe the correct result is. This slow and linear drift in the chronological history of results is unnatural and suggests that nobody wanted to contradict the previous one, instead only submitting for publication "agreeable" results.
- Physician Raymond Tallis describes the psychoanalytic school established by Jacques Lacan as an example of cargo cult science. Tallis argues that Lacan, who was poorly trained in both traditional medicine and psychoanalysis, superficially mimicked medicine and science, and that Lacan's later devotees similarly mimic their guru's confused concepts.
- The Cranfield University report “Aircraft Cabin Air Sampling Study” provides a recent example of cargo cult science. The government-sponsored study purported to measure the concentrations of toxic substances in aircraft cabin air but used such inappropriate methodology the results were of little value. Nevertheless, they were used to make comparisons with domestic environments of dubious relevance in order to assert that “...there was no evidence for target pollutants occurring in the cabin air at levels exceeding available health and safety standards and guidelines.”
Read more about this topic: Cargo Cult Science
Famous quotes containing the words examples, specific, experiments and/or results:
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)
“Most parents aren’t even aware of how often they compare their children. . . . Comparisons carry the suggestion that specific conditions exist for parental love and acceptance. Thus, even when one child comes out on top in a comparison she is left feeling uneasy about the tenuousness of her position and the possibility of faring less well in the next comparison.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)