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Richard Feynman on Pseudoscience

Jacob Edward · 362.7K views · 2016-04-17 · 1:53

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Commenters post it whenever a thread touches on soft sciences, replication problems, or what counts as real science.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2016–2026

Topics

Scientific method & science communicationPhilosophy & ethics
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feynmanpseudosciencesocial sciencereplicationepistemics

What people said

senshan · 2026-07 · Strong recommendation

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..." [VIDEO]

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aeternum · 2026-05 · Recommendation

I'm the one that said usually, Feynman didn't have that cop-out and he was specifically talking about social science: [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.

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qubax · 2018-09 · Recommendation

"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. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Jacob Edward, played through YouTube.

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