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THE VIDEO SHELF · scientific method

Richard Feynman on Pseudoscience

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.

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Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Jacob Edward
Topic
scientific method
Format
interview
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
5
HN mentions in dataset
14
Recommendation years in dataset
2016–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • 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 …

    senshan on Hacker News · 2026-07
    In AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found

  • I agree with you a bit. But I also think there's a danger in assuming every anecdote is a data point, which is best expressed here: [VIDEO] (Short video with Richard Feynman)... tl;dv - it's very hard to know something and you have to be …

    summerdown2 on Hacker News · 2017-04
    In Bangkok plans to ban all street food by year′s end

  • > In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a scientific sense. The field has little to no scientific sense. It's why psychiatry/psychology is a soft science. It isn't based on the scientific method or reproducibility and testing. It's mostly …

    paidleaf on Hacker News · 2018-06
    In The Lifespan of a Lie – Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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