I think the point he is trying to make to audience is he is willing to accept ideas which invalidate what he knows. His believes are verifiable, and though he is willing to give yours a chance, he won't just "let it be" unless it's verifiable.

I read another of his stories in which he took the class to the gym where he had a bowling ball attached to a string hanging down the ceiling in the center of the room. He went to the opposite end with the ball, had his back by the wall, brought the ball to his nose and let it go. The ball swung to the other side, swung back, and came dangerously close to his face(well, at the same spot where he let it go - simple pendulums. duh). He told the students "I want you to know I know and believe what I am going to teach. There are no manifestations or biases - only truth"(paraphrased)

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf

besides confirming the text, includes photographs of Feynman delivering the address in academic gown. As always, the famous line from the address is "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." This is something for every thinker to think about every day in daily life, for a lifetime.

Upon reading this paragraph, I was reminded of his book "What do you care what other people think", which was a homage to Arlene, partly because Feynman made the fatal mistake of trusting the doctor's judgement to disregard the blatantly obvious diagnosis. He wrote about his experience in much more detail here:

Part 1: http://i.imgur.com/CSNop.png

Part 2: http://i.imgur.com/7mDTW.png

--------------------------------------------------------- //Comments below are irrelevant to the thread, I just felt like sharing.

Feynman was depressed for a while but eventually his love for physics helped him recover. Hans Bethe once said, "Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful then any other person when he is exuberant." Feynman is arguably the most logical and happiest human being that has ever existed.

Feynman's magnificent exuberance and puzzle solving enthusiasm remained up until his last days, where his coworker Christopher Sykes remarked "Look at this man. He faces the abyss. He doesn't know whether he is going to live through this week. But he was consumed by it, and he worked on it all day long...." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h11m33s

A few days before his second operation, Feynman sang a bongos song about orange juice, an amusing take of Linus Pauling's advice to possibly cure his cancer. Just look at his smile at the end of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8

I would also like to add that on Feynman's last days at the hospital, his last words to his artist friend Jirayr was "Don't worry about anything, go out and have a good time!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg1CU8t9nw#t=1h32m15s Maximus would be proud. "Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back."

it's a shame that many scientists game the grant system making their research sound more sexy than it is, seems to undermine the point of publicly funded research (as feynman points out).

and i know i drive myself crazy every morning reading most of the articles here: https://news.google.com/news/section?topic=snc

"First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was."

1. Very cleverly, he mixes in examples of absolute crackpottery (e.g Uri Geller, reflexology) with those of somewhat researchers (e.g. the psychology student) who may be somewhat clueless in their experimental procedures but are trying to do valid science, which in our minds equate both.

2. He seems to say: "This is the way to proceed scientifically, you can't do it another way", where the methods he alludes to are the methods of experimental physics. (simply put) In physics you do your experiment, carefully controlling factors and you get your result. Unfortunately, this method is either hard to apply (e.g. in the rat experiment, there are so many variables to control, some unknown, because it's a complex organism, now think of experiments on humans) or downright impossible (e.g. the educational problem he mentions, which is a good example of a Wicked Problem, we're still discussing solutions).

3. Expanding on the education system point: Feynman says: " A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one." But therein lies the big problem: nobody can agree on how to measure how good a system, observe the huge teachers's ratings debates taking place in the US. What Feynman misses, I think, is that these are socio-scientific problems, if scientific problems have O(n^2) complexity these have O(2^n). You definitely need the scientific method but that's not going to be enough in attacking these problems.

4. Feynman also directs his assault solely on the "experts" and charlatans who create and perpetuate these stupid pesudoscientific theories, e.g. "ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience." What would be a better way to eradicate such tendencies would be to study why human beings are so susceptible to ideas like religion, UFOs, superstition, etc., i.e. target the consumers rather than dealers.

Of course, Feynman was a genius in Physics, in his intuitive grasp of complex physical concepts he may be the best in history. And from what I've ready about him he seemed to have a weak spot (like Newton's alchemy, Einsteins's reluctance to accept QM, etc.) for showmanship, by which I mean: when he got the momentum going with a good example/though/principle that has applications outside physics he was a bit too quick to overgeneralize.

1. Mixes in? Is your charge that he tried to commit the fallacy of equivocation in some way? I'm not following how discussing the obvious abuse of integrity that Geller demonstrated and then the less-obvious abuse of integrity the psychology student demonstrated detracts from his point that integrity is really important to the usefulness of the Scientific method.

2. Seems to say? To me, he "seems to say" that a lack of integrity in the whole process is a commonly occurring characteristic of Cargo Cults. He seems to say that a lack of integrity diminishes the utility of the Scientific method.

3. You entirely missed the point of Feynman's education comment and the context of the part you quoted. Basically, he said that what we're doing to fix problems in education isn't working and we continue to rely on the same people and methods to fix them. The funny thing is that here we are almost 40 years after Feynman gave that address and we've never added the integrity that he spoke about to the process of improving education in America. As with the Cargo Cults, it's not surprising that results haven't improved.

4. This item/suggestion makes no sense. Feynman isn't proposing a holistic plan to fix the problem. The speech we're discussing was a commencement address to upcoming graduates from an institute that trains Scientists. Why wouldn't it be entirely appropriate to urge new Scientists to consider the importance of integrity to the Scientific method?

> Of course, Feynman was a genius in Physics, in his intuitive grasp [...]

I don't think you made one semi-solid point in your critique of this address by Feynman; but you're going to double-down and start to generalize about how Feynman was too quick to overgeneralize? Are you trying to be ironic?

Perhaps you can't do controlled experiments with people that's fine, give up and go work on something else don't compromise and still call it science. Because your results are meaningless.

PS: How much useful information has been gained from human nutritional experimentation over the last 50 years?