On Research Integrity and Not Deceiving Oneself
At night I was reading Professor Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and came across his essay Cargo Cult Science, from which I gained much.Many people say they are honest and do not deceive themselves, and when they say so they truly mean it. But to a scientist this does not mean they achieve real honesty and non-self-deception, because people are limited by their own cognitive ability and often cannot see the true laws behind things.Professor Feynman says humanity ability to understand the world is very limited. It took us tens of millions of years of groping to form a scientific way of thinking that can barely be said to approach an understanding of the true laws of nature. Researchers must uphold research integrity and conduct meticulous, exclusionary research to reach nearly correct conclusions. Research integrity is built on a spirit of skepticism—questioning not only others but also oneself—and upholding it is the only way to do good science.We are extremely prone to reaching wrong conclusions. For example, Aristotle believed that heavy objects fall faster than light objects in free fall, which indeed matches our intuition. It was not until Galileo conducted his gravity experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa that people realized our subjective impressions are often unreliable.Another example is the famous rat-maze experiment, in which a maze is set up in the laboratory and rats seek food. If our thinking is not rigorous enough, we will reach many entirely different conclusions. But a scientist named Young found that no matter how he changed the conditions—painting the door panels the same color or setting up more barriers—the rats could still go directly to the door where the food was; only after the floor was covered with a layer of sand did the rats become lost in the maze. So he finally discovered that the rats actually identified the food location by the echoes from the floor as they walked. Before finally finding the answer, he changed many experimental conditions and ran many experiments, but all those earlier experiments failed.These facts tell us how difficult it is to grasp the objective laws behind things and reach correct conclusions. If we understand this, we dare not lightly claim to be honest and free of self-deception. In daily life we have no idea how many moments of unintended self-deception we have had; many of our conclusions are reached rashly, far short of the standard of scientific integrity.In fact, when we apply the standard of scientific integrity to many truths from ancient times to the present, we find they do not stand up to scrutiny. Because the process by which people arrived at these truths was too rash, lacking rigorous exclusionary research and argument, and was entirely intuitive judgment—just as Aristotle rashly declared that heavy objects hit the ground before light ones.Many people say I am very honest, and I myself think I try to be honest, but after reading Feynman essay I do not believe I can meet the standard of research integrity. In my past research and writing, I may not have conducted rigorous exclusionary research and argumentation.Many theories in TCM were likewise arrived at without rigorous exclusionary research and argument, which makes many traditional TCM theories suspect; they may be correct or may be wrong. These conclusions were reached by our intuition. Our intuition is not entirely unreliable, but very often it is indeed unreliable.So when we study TCM, we must be especially careful not to be led by the nose by intuition. We should not blindly worship or believe a book just because of who wrote it or when it arose. We must carefully test the reliability of theories in practice, think more, and do more exclusionary research. A given result has many possible explanations; past explanations are only one possibility that may hold. Whether those explanations are right or wrong needs our fresh reappraisal—we must not echo what others say. Only by holding such an attitude in study and research can we, to the greatest extent, avoid deceiving ourselves.