Finished (Audiobook) - "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" - Richard P. Feynman

I listened to the second of my Richard Feynman trilogy - "What Do You Care What Other People Think".  It has fewer stories than "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" but it discusses the presidential committee to investigate the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in quite a bit of depth, which is definitely worth the read.  At the time of the writing, the commission was fairly recent, and Dr. Feynman refers to the "Iran Contra" investigations briefly as a point of comparison.

The only point of departure I have from Dr. Feynman is that he discusses education and social science as something other than "science".  I think that is a true interpretation of the present situation, as both are complex systems and both have great difficulty doing the baseline experiments (e.g. you can't surgery kids into control and experimental groups and see what parts of the brain learn math by rote - you need to infer from tests; attention and motivation are key factors, which don't typically exist in physics or chemistry).

However, that being said, Dr. Feynman shows exactly the tenacity and usage of science on the Presidential committee, which is a model for social science and educational research - do the basic science wherever possible, maintain both positive and negative experimental results, learn and loop back to examine predicates and assumptions, replicate, strive to understand in the full sense, not narrow sense. The Shuttle disaster did allow for the application of basic engineering and scientific processes (e.g. materials for the O-rings, application of best practices in engineering for the testing of equipment, use of research methodology practices to support and define knowledge and decision making).