Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
A 197450ya Richard Feynman speech recounts an anecdote about a scientist, Mr Young, who in 193787ya discovered serious flaws in rat maze-running psychology research: the rats were using information from the environment, like smells or the sound of the floor, to find their way through—rendering experiments dangerously ambiguous if the mazes are not carefully constructed to eliminate these side-channels (eg. by putting them on sand beds to dampen sounds). This discovery was then ignored by researchers, Feynman says, illustrating the difference between successful sciences like physics and ‘cargo cult’ ones like psychology.
Who was Mr Young and what was his research which was ignored by mainstream psychology? This question has been asked for decades, and mysteriously, never answered.
Here we finally answer it: Mr Young was probably Quin Fischer Curtis, in his theses published in 193193ya/193688ya, as part of John F. Shepard’s multi-decade research programme at the University of Michigan into ‘floor cues’, going well beyond just putting sand on the floor.
This research programme & its results tragically fell into oblivion due to the unfortunate circumstances of the UMich department which turned it into almost a parallel-universe of maze-running research: few results were published formally (in part due to Shepard’s perfectionism & constantly coming up with new maze experiments to run), the department drifted far out of the mainstream, and the maze-running paradigm fell out of fashion around WWII, which is also when the UMich department was ‘rebooted’ to fix its hermeticism—leading to collective amnesia.
So while it turns out the maze-running story supports the Feynman usage, it also tells a broader cautionary lesson about when academia does and does not function, in a different version of ‘publish or perish’.