Feynman once talked about this specific issue during a larger speech:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of
the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the
charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and
got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a
little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the
viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of
measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little
bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than
that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until
finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because
it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a
number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something
must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why
something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to
Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated
the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that
kind of a disease.
Yes, that’s a good point, and I’ve struggled with these issues a lot. It’s related to the concept of an information cascade, and it’s why CLIP (in revs after 2007) has mechanisms that force you to trace the source of a belief so that it doesn’t “echo” and then amplify without bound.
In the scenario Feynman refers to, CLIP would have made you state the reason for the adjustment toward Millikan’s result in subsequent experiments. Subsequent updates would then necessarily discount for this echo, preventing unwarranted re-corroboration of Millikan’s value.
CLIP has a harder time with the problem that User:neq1 is referring to, of course, because of the issues that arise when computing probabilities of logical outputs.
CLIP = Clippy Language Interface Protocol, see link.
Feynman once talked about this specific issue during a larger speech:
I always thought Feynman was overly optimistic here. Maybe it’s true for physicists though.
Good find. Thanks.
Yes, that’s a good point, and I’ve struggled with these issues a lot. It’s related to the concept of an information cascade, and it’s why CLIP (in revs after 2007) has mechanisms that force you to trace the source of a belief so that it doesn’t “echo” and then amplify without bound.
In the scenario Feynman refers to, CLIP would have made you state the reason for the adjustment toward Millikan’s result in subsequent experiments. Subsequent updates would then necessarily discount for this echo, preventing unwarranted re-corroboration of Millikan’s value.
CLIP has a harder time with the problem that User:neq1 is referring to, of course, because of the issues that arise when computing probabilities of logical outputs.
CLIP = Clippy Language Interface Protocol, see link.