Richard Feynman on Pseudoscience
Why Hacker News recommends it
Commenters post it whenever a thread touches on soft sciences, replication problems, or what counts as real science.
What it is
A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman explaining why he considers much of social science pseudoscience. He stresses how easy it is to fool yourself and how much care real knowledge takes.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2016 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec senshan · 2026-07 · on “AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found”
This could serve as a beacon for those who still care: Richard Feynman: "I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself..." [this video]
Recommends summerdown2 · 2017-04 · on “Bangkok plans to ban all street food by year′s end”
I agree with you a bit. But I also think there's a danger in assuming every anecdote is a data point, which is best expressed here: [this video] (Short video with Richard Feynman)... tl;dv - it's very hard to know something and you have to be really careful that you've done the work and aren't just deluding yourself. Or, to put it differently - every anecdote is really only a data point if you understand what exactly it's measuring and what has been excluded. If you haven't taken the care necessary, then it's very easy to draw false conclusions. People are really bad witnesses and really bad at seeing what is and isn't given in the information they think they have - particularly if the anecdote i
Recommends paidleaf · 2018-06 · on “The Lifespan of a Lie – Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?”
> In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a scientific sense. The field has little to no scientific sense. It's why psychiatry/psychology is a soft science. It isn't based on the scientific method or reproducibility and testing. It's mostly based on consensus driven by a handful of powerful practitioners. [LINK] What sigmund freud did wasn't science. His oedipal complex theory isn't a scientific theory. There is no scientific test to refute it. You just accept it or not. The biggest problem of our generation is the conflation of science ( hard science ) with pseudoscience ( soft science ). Because both has the word science in it, people give soft sciences far more
Recommends qubax · 2018-09 · on “A Cornell Scientist’s Downfall”
"Social science". The term science has been appropriated by so many pseudosciences that it has lost any meaning. Because real science has such a good reputation, all the academic frauds have decided to link their field to science to enhance their own reputation. There is political "science", legal "science", economics, etc. Here is richard feynmann's poignant take on the matter. BTW, it has gotten way worse since feynmann's interview. [this video]
Recommends aeternum · 2026-05 · on “Australia Four-Day Work Week Study Data Shows Boosted Productivity”
I'm the one that said usually, Feynman didn't have that cop-out and he was specifically talking about social science: [this video] Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.
Cites ontouchstart · 2016-08 · on “What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages”
I guess that you would agree with Richard Feynman [this video] > ... how easy it is to make mistake and fool yourself ...
Cites _Codemonkeyism · 2017-02 · on “Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'”
Simple. You can only publish to Nature etc. if your results are replicated twice by others and you open up all your raw data. Short time later only real science will be published. The amount of published results will massively go down and Nature and other will not makes as much money. Now you know the reason why publishers publish results that can't be replicated. Or listen to anything from Feynman about real science e.g. [this video]
Cites awkwarddaturtle · 2017-07 · on “How economics became a religion”
Economics has always been more of a religion than anything else. It has no predictive aspects. It is purely reflective. And the entire system has a group of "ideologies/leaders/etc" that adherents cling to and worship. Economics is what Feynman calls a "pseudoscience" ( aka social sciences ). [this video] One sect of economists will argue with another sect of economists and neither side can ever win. Just like muslims and jews will argue with each other and never get anywhere.