[extropy-chat] Feynman's 1963 Lecture - The Uncertainty of Science

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> Robin Hanson wrote:
>>
>> Dear Richard had to be pretty caught up in his rhetoric to say these 
>> whoppers. Scientists most definitely pay attention to the people pushing
>> an idea, including how long they have studied.  There are in practice
>> more ideas proposed than people have time to evaluate in much detail.
>> So most are rejected (regarding publication, funding, jobs) without
>> knowing whether those ideas conflict with observations or not.  There
>> are definitely authorities who decide to reject or not, and they most
>> certainly pay attention to where the advocate comes from when making
>> this decision. And dear Richard knew this full well.
> 
> Evidently dear Richard was expounding upon the Way, upon Science as 
> distinct from academia, and perhaps lost his way and began to speak as 
> if the ideal had already become reality.

Although, reading through the lecture, I find that Feynman said only that 
there was freedom in physics, and he contrasted physics to other sciences 
which he said were not so advanced.  From what I have heard this 
egalitarianism is not the state in physics today, but maybe in the 1950s it 
was so.  I was not there, and I am not a physicist.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence