It is AI-generated of course, but the only major slop is that bell tower on the right; there's nothing like that at Caltech, either in 1974 or now.
But it's a reasonable likeness of The Man himself, pretty much as he looked back then. Stolen from Roger Pielke Jr.'s latest substack article: Cargo Cult Climate Economics. He includes a relevant paragraph from Feynman's address to Caltech's 1974 graduates:
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.
You can read the entire thing here.
Has that sort of thing been happening despite Feynman's warnings? Roger argues yes:
Last December, Nature retracted “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” by Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz (KLW24) — one of the most influential climate economics papers of the past decade. The paper claimed that climate change would cost the global economy $38 trillion a year by 2049 and projected an income reduction of 19 percent within 26 years regardless of future emissions.
KLW24 was the second most mentioned climate paper by the media in 2024, according to Carbon Brief. The paper was cited by central banks and governments to justify more aggressive climate policies.
I was among those who viewed the retraction as good news: science self-correcting, a bad paper removed, maybe things are getting back on track. It turns out there is more to the story — Much more.
The Kotz retraction was not a one-off case of flawed science belated retracted.
I have another favorite Feynman quote, from a 1966 talk he gave to the National Science Teachers Association:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Pithy and accurate.
Also of note:
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And our leaders are wearing no clothes at all. Veronique de Rugy writes on The Same Crisis Wearing Different Clothes.
America has a spending problem. It also has a health care problem. These are not two separate crises but rather the same crisis wearing different clothes. The Cato Institute's new "Handbook on Affordability" is a great resource to understand the root problem and how to fix it.
Start with a recap of the fiscal picture. The federal government runs large deficits so persistently that they've become a structural threat to price stability. As Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett argue in the handbook's second chapter, when debt expands faster than the economy, investors begin pricing in one of three outcomes: higher future taxes, deeper spending cuts or inflation that quietly erases the real value of what the government owes. When Congress fails to credibly commit to the first two, it chooses door No. 3 by default.
You can read Cato's "Handbook on Affordability" here. And you probably should.
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Where's Ned Ludd when you need him? That's probably what a lot of people are asking. Jason L. Riley suggests calming down: The Biggest AI Risk Is Foolish, Fear-Driven Policies. (WSJ gifted link)
So far, artificial intelligence hasn’t lived up to the hype. It hasn’t cured cancer or doubled the human lifespan. That doesn’t mean it never will, but it does suggest that the more sober takes on how—and how soon—the technology will affect our daily lives are closer to reality.
Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity,” speculated in a 2024 paper that AI will profitably automate about 5% of all tasks and add roughly 1% to the global economy over the next decade, a modest boost. Mr. Acemoglu argues that while AI models have emerged that can engage in sophisticated reasoning, they don’t match human cognitive abilities.
Nor does he believe that AI is on the cusp of rivaling human creativity. The models can learn what they are trained to learn through algorithms, and that’s useful, Mr. Acemoglu told an interviewer last year. “But no task that we perform in reality is just recounting already established knowledge,” he said. The tasks “are much more complex. They involve interactions. They involve a lot of things that are based on tacit knowledge or that are based on matching your contextual understanding of a problem with the specific task at hand.”
There's nothing wrong with AI that "policymakers" can't make worse.
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Librarians are some of my favorite awful people. Jonah Goldberg, however, goes into the awfulness: Throwing the Book at Librarians. (archive.today link)
Here’s the entry for the verb form of “ban” over at Dictionary.com: “to prohibit, forbid, or bar; interdict. to ban nuclear weapons.” Examples include: “The dictator banned all newspapers and books that criticized his regime.”
And here’s the definition of “ban” as a noun: “the act of prohibiting by law; interdiction.”
Now, here are some recent headlines:
“Book bans and attempted bans remain at record highs, with ‘Sold’ topping the list” (the Washington Post); “Book bans mired at record high” (The Hill); Book Bans in U.S. Hit Record Levels (Daily Beast); “Book bans hit 4,235 titles in 2025 as group warns censorship is near record highs” (CBS affiliate KOMO). Lots of these, and many more, are based on the AP story about the Monday release of the American Library Association’s annual list of “Banned and Challenged Books.”
Some articles are more nuanced than others about the ALA’s methodology and definitions. A banned book is a book that is removed from a library. A book has been “challenged” if someone or some group merely complained about it. The complaints vary. Some challenges are simply about whether the work is age-appropriate and should therefore require parental approval or only be available upon request. Others request or demand outright removal from the library’s collection. The ALA is not very helpful in breaking down these distinctions.
Jonah notes that the ALA claims to be a big fan of "democracy" … unless the democracy works to challenge librarians' decisions about what books to buy and make available to the kiddos. In that area, librarians must not be questioned.
![[The Blogger]](/ps/images/barred.jpg)
