richard-feynman on S Anand

Bias among search engines

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Search engines rank their own sites better. Yahoo Answers ranks higher on Yahoo, but not on MSN or Google. Google Answers ranks high on Google, but not on Yahoo or MSN.

This is bias, but not necessarily evil. They may just be fooling themselves.

Even scientists, the genuinely objective ones, do this. As Feynman points out in Cargo Cult Science:

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 an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit 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 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 close 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.

But, (and this is the important part):

We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease. But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves–of having utter scientific integrity – is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.

It’s not easy to catch on, by osmosis or otherwise.

Feynman quotes

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Feynman quotes. BTW, Infinity – on the life of Feynman – would be a good movie to watch.

Comments

anony 3 Oct 2005 7:53 pm: This page is hell. Thise silly yellow things keep popping up.
S Anand 4 Oct 2005 1:15 pm: Agreed. The popup shows the tags associated with the link. Any ideas on improving it?

Vacation

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I am on vacation.

Comments

sathish 20 Apr 2005 3:39 am: enjoy madi.. have fun.
harish 21 Apr 2005 10:57 pm: hi anand. have fun
mark wu 22 Apr 2005 2:31 pm: yes and thank you
Venkat 25 Apr 2005 6:01 am: Enjoy maadi
Dhar 25 Apr 2005 12:36 pm: Coming back here after a long break. Have quite a few interesting links to check out! Will certainly check out the MIT Prank once I am on a good Net connection.
sunshine 29 Apr 2005 8:46 am: Anand u r so cute he he he
sunshine 29 Apr 2005 8:47 am: Hey that one was to pull ur leg(i read that u hate being called cute"
bharani 29 Apr 2005 10:26 pm: this commenting style doesnt look very clean…leaves a lot of blank space on your page…i was wondering if there was some pic there that was not showing up…lol…
S Anand 1 May 2005 8:54 am: True, Bharani. I’ve been thinking the same. Am planning some changes, and will have them online by mid-May.
sathish 4 May 2005 4:08 am: Anand, One suggestion is that you could have the comments below the main post, instead of right hand side of the post.
rinku 9 May 2005 4:59 am: rinku:where did u get a copy of “What do you care what other people think"by Richard Feynmann.I have been hunting for that book for around 2 years and still no success.
Venkat 16 May 2005 4:55 am: Where are you right now Boss?
sp 16 May 2005 8:53 am: hi “rinku”…i have a old copy of the book, and you
Sriram 23 May 2005 6:21 am: I work for Dell and they seem to have blocked your weblog!! Any clues why?
Dhar 25 May 2005 10:20 am: Or if you dont have a server outside that you can use, try searching on Google for something called JAP (Java Anonymity and Proxy)