It's actually an achievement in its own right, it wasn't a 8 lane road bridge, it was a fucking walkway, maybe 10 meters long. If they laid down a pair of tree trunks and hammered a few planks on it, it would last hundreds of years.
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
For anyone that sees this, the whole article is an interesting read. This part really stood out to me:
And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into: how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. 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. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.
Obviously I like this speech since I linked it, but I also can't help but wonder where Feynman would have stood if he were alive 2 years ago. Probably for the best he didn't live that long for us to find out.
It's actually an achievement in its own right, it wasn't a 8 lane road bridge, it was a fucking walkway, maybe 10 meters long. If they laid down a pair of tree trunks and hammered a few planks on it, it would last hundreds of years.
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
Cargo Cult Science, from 1974:
For anyone that sees this, the whole article is an interesting read. This part really stood out to me:
Obviously I like this speech since I linked it, but I also can't help but wonder where Feynman would have stood if he were alive 2 years ago. Probably for the best he didn't live that long for us to find out.