500 points | by bookofjoe1 天前
And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer Nicolas Boileau: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément." - What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning.
One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.
For example, in film, being a great director requires a deep insight about acting, so they can explain what’s needed from a performance to an actor. A director may know what they need despite being unable to perform it themselves.
One of the worst teachers I ever had, was a genius Calc II teacher, who was an abusive asshole, and would humiliate students for asking questions he deemed as “stupid.”
Since a significant part of my learning, is asking “stupid” questions, this did not go well for me, and I took an Incomplete. I had a 4.0, to that point.
> “The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.”
From a poster in one of my tech school classrooms.
Maybe no one can learn how to ride a bike purely from a blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality.
But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water even in the case of riding a bike.
I would say anyway.
Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't the best example to invalidate the quote.
That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either way.
This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I actually think it's fair to say we don't understand how we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we don't understand, or only partially understand, in the sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and transmit the information. That perspective feels more accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly acceptable.
The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to" and "understands" hints at the difference here.
So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
I always adore the split between how my brain does things instinctually, but making it arbitrary completely demolishes the 'natural' flow of it. Same with complex ball throwing / bouncing trajectory calculations.
It also immediately makes me angry about how we teach math. When you learn about powers (squares, cubes, roots, etc), these things are just written out as arbitrary concepts instead of displaying them geometrically.
Hell, when I was first taught the Pythagorean theorem, it was just explained by drawing a triangle with A² + B² = C², without also drawing out the related squares of each side. Immediately doing that would instill so much more intuition into the math. In general, mathematical concepts gain so much clarity by doing them geometrically.
I mean, squares and cubes are just multiplication by the same factor: I distinctly remember even trapezoid surfaces, pyramid volumes being demonstrated by chopping and piecing parts together.
I could understand that in high school and uni when you need to move past "intuitive" maths into abstractions, but I'd be perplexed if this is really the "program", and not just an individual teacher (and surely, a big chunk of them too)!
(There's no rider however)
http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often poorly explained.
That's easy! It pushes air down, and the reaction force is what we call lift!
... now, why it pushes air down... there be many computational fluid dynamics PhDs... though "angle of attack" covers a lot, and the rest is just efficiency tweaks.
Good question for teachers who insist it's the Bernoulli Principle: "But my paper airplane has flat wings and flies just fine!" toss across classroom
Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes): http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
Looking at you, the "b" in debt, that I was pronouncing for a long time growing up and learning a lot of words from reading.
Schwas everywhere randomly (why is it adjust (uhd 'juhst) and not ad 'juhst when we have accept (ak 'sept). In German this is way more consistent. Diphthongs everywhere, almost no pure monophthongs. Which is a language feature but in written form is also fucked. I tend to have problems with oh vs aa sounds. E.g. poland is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish. Stress isnt written. Consonants not only can be spelled differently but also said differently. Gif vs djif, cell vs celt, china vs machine
This makes the language way harder in a high level than it should be if it had had some spelling reform at some point. Sorry for not using IPA Im on the phone.
There's two pronunciations of 'polish' though: the one you mentioned being what one does to grandmother's candlesticks, and 'pou lish' referring to someone or something from 'pou luhnd'.
For example, as I mentioned I frequently ran into situations where I could tell whether a student's sentences were correct or not, but I struggled to explain why. One example from early in my teaching career was when students would place their adjectives out-of-order, for example "The German, red, old, large car..." instead of "The large, old, red, German car...". I intuitively knew that the former is incorrect and the latter is correct, but when students would ask me why, I struggled to articulate a reason.
But the local teachers on staff (i.e. native Chinese speakers) would chime in with "The order of adjectives in English is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose." They (the local teachers) still made mistakes in their English, but they had mostly memorized the rules from classroom study, and could recite them better than I could. Which was helpful to both us as native speakers (who wanted to give the students concrete answers to their questions) and to the students (who wanted rules to govern future scenarios they might encounter).
I was admittedly a bit cocky coming into that job, thinking I was qualified simply because I was a native speaker. I quickly learned that teaching a subject is a skill unto itself. It requires abilities like gauging levels of understanding by asking comprehension questions, and tailoring the subject matter to those comprehension levels, so as not to either talk down to the student or talk over their head.
> What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
And the other side of the coin to both is a powerful trick to really nail a topic you feel like you have gaps on: get the basics and teach it / explain it to someone; you then have to explain it clearly thus have to fill all the gaps.
Making or building is a much deeper level of understanding in real life than teaching would ever be, ergo - those who can't do, teach.
E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you explain calculus to Archimedes?
In 1860 Lavoisier and Dalton have already published their work and died, so they know chemistry and atoms. Napier is much older, so they will understand exponential decay. It looks easy to explain.
I'm worry about getting some samples. Let's go to Poland and dig in random sites? Before the time travel I need a few days to study in Wikipedia where I should go and what mineral to look for.
I can try to guess how to purify it because I went to a high school with and specialization in Chemistry. (Let's dissolve everything with Nitric Acid, and then use Sodium Carbonate to precipitate Calcium and then Sodium Sulfide to precipitate all heavy metals including Uranium. I'm not sure if it works.) Anyway, one extra day to study this will be helpful.
To show the radioactivity I guess I can use a photographic plate. Luckily, it look like they already have some. (I was going to use Silver Nitrate and hope the best, but the chances of success are better if some of them already know what they are doing.) Add another day of preparation just in case.
Also, as an application, I'd try to irradiate food. 1860 is just in time for Pasteurization. Can I get enough radiation??? Is it safe???
---
Calculus to Archimedes:
That's easy. Archimedes was using Calculus 2000 years before it was cool. The guy calculated the area of a parable slicing it in small parts. Also the volume of a sphere slicing it in small parts. (And then the surface of a sphere with a trick.)
I taught Calculus in the first year of the university, and also in more advanced courses and also in high school. (It will be necessary to start explaining formulas or a translation of formulas to geometric figures. Also, the idea that a formula is related to a graphic in paper is hard, so it will take some time.) I guess I can enter the time machine on the spot.
Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe?
Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.
That's an interesting topic, and there's a whole community that is interested in this. Mostly for historical and educational reasons.
Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can reasonably do. You will never be able to build a useful internal combustion engine starting in a pre-industrial time. But you'll be able to introduce the positional decimal notation (took 4000 years to invent!), double-entry bookkeeping, paper making, printing press.
If you know a bit of technology, then you can create water plumbing (just avoid lead), and at least some metalworking.
Now I don't think this is entirely the way things are, I suspect there is a core of truth with a lot of religion and tradition surrounding it. But I have a lot of sympathy for wanting to have the freedom that control over your environment grants you. Personally I would hate to give up my tech. and remain a willing slave to the manufactures.
I tend to agree, but teaching another person is also a whole different set of skills from being able to drive something yourself.
One prominent example is the "curse of knowledge"; it may take a lot of practice becoming a beginner to be able to teach for a beginner's perspective in your area of expertise.
Teaching is a whole complicated skill unto itself, especially if one is teaching to beginners. Like (since we're on HN), how easy is it to imagine someone very good at programming but would be a terrible choice as a Comp Sci 101 prof? I'm guessing "very."
The whole idea deeply undermines teachers of all subjects.
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” -- Paul Valéry
Posted on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40700530
Although, it seems like he’s getting a bad rep these days. How did that happen?
PS: I’m referring to that video that pops up on top when you google him for example.
He was deeply affected by the death of his first wife. I personally believe that he developed misogynistic traits as a way of self-defense and driven by the pain of her loss. They were deeply in love. His farewell letter to her is so beautiful and touching, and yet so pragmatic, in a way that only Feynman could be.
He is a personal hero but I do understand he was human and as such, a flawed individual like anyone else.
> “During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”
> “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”
> I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.”
http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-feynm...
My memory is, misogyny, cringey stories that were surely greatly exaggerated and just happen to make Feynman the smartest guy in every room, kind of a jerk in general, divorce due to claimed domestic violence, never did the work of writing a book personally but has the reputation of being a prolific author, his pop appeal makes people elevate him to the very top minds of physics when the work of others was much more impactful.
The fault lies partly with the viewers and commenters, ascribing a similar level of expertise to their platitudes and ill-informed takes on, for eg. AI, as to their actual field of expertise. But they don't exactly discourage that either, and in some cases lean into it actively. It's at least a hopeful sign that the descent into "physicist disease" isn't especially rapid in Angela's case, physics still being the primary topic on the channel, but it's still disappointing all the same.
Maybe that’s why Angela Collier doesn’t like him? Reminds me of how a lot of astronomers despised Carl Sagan.
And her video on Feynman is detailed and worth watching. She goes through evidence from court cases of Feynman strangling his wife, of how Ralph Leighton created much of this myth of Feynman by fanboying him. And she gives him the benefit of the doubt as well, presenting him as flawed, but human.
It's a terrible book, in my opinion. If you want to know why, Angela Collier says it better and in more detail than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
Is that the video you're referring to? Watch the video and I think you'll see why he is "getting a bad rep these days".
Very much an example of "never meet your heroes" for me.
This is really more in line to some of the things Feynman communicated in many of his interviews. I feel like it more accurately reflects the way Feynman approached things.
He was such a loss. RIP
Also, the way many discoveries are explained in a course is usually very streamlined compared to the papers that present them initially and defend them in detail on a limited number of pages.
It stands there as a testimonial to our brevity on this planet, to all that we will not see, do, understand.
So it goes, I guess.
“One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.”
I don't think it's sad at all.
I would like my own suborbital two-seat rocket plane. That is an object. I probably will never have a two-seat rocket plane. I would like to win the lottery when it's over $300mm, the object would be the $150mm in after-tax winnings. I will probably never have $150mm in lottery winnings.
I very specifically mentioned the lottery so maybe it "clicks" what's being talked about, at least the way i read it.
...no it's not?
Much of traditional psychoanalysis has been superseded by modern psychotherapy. And I'm not even familiar with that idea being part of psychoanalysis in the first place. (And there are many schools of psychoanalysis that disagree with each other too.)
Quite frankly, it's not a great insight. It's perfectly fine to want something and then get it. Don't worry, you'll want something else afterwards. The idea that you should set your sights on an impossible goal doesn't hold up to the slightest logical scrutiny here. And a lot of people get disillusioned or burned out from trying to achieve impossible things and failing.
Modern psychotherapy is actually about aiming for achievable, realistic goals in your life. It's much more in line with the serenity prayer, in terms of aiming for realism:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It's an insight that has stuck with me since then and seems to strike a chord with others when shared, regardless of whether or not it's "great".
Of course it's fine to want something and then get it. Last night I wanted a Klondike bar so I walked to my freezer and got one. This misses the point entirely.
Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
I appreciate your point about the serenity prayer, I think there's something relevant there for sure.
Right, I think that's what might be striking a chord.
Modern psychotherapy would tell you that you'd picked something thinking it would solve problems that it never would. A classic example is that if you achieved a certain career objective or measure of success, you would feel loved and approved of and worthy. And then when you achieve it, you don't.
The answer is absolutely not to pick a goal you can't achieve. That's completely wrong.
The answer is to understand that career or professional success will not make you feel loved. That if you feel like you have an unmet need for love and approval, you need psychotherapy to understand where that is coming from in terms of your childhood, current relationships, etc.
And then you can reframe your professional or career goals as something else entirely. And when you reach one, you can feel proud and then set another one. You won't have a feeling of emptiness or unfulfillment, because you'd never set unrealistic expectations for what that achievement would provide.
Far better to identify achievable goals that have a timespan of a few years max, and with milestones at least every few months to know you're on the right track.
Impossible goals are ultimately a nonsensical proposition. And if you have an activity you enjoy, you just do that activity. Like crossword puzzles. They don't have a goal.
And to him (and others like him), that might have been possible.
While for other more ordinary people, it'd be profoundly unwise and endlessly futile, to hope to do that
Feynman disagreed — couldn't understand how knowing more about the thing could possibly take away from it.
It was the one thing I read from him where I disagreed with him. It seems strange to me he didn't see naivety, wonder as things someone might cherish. Those are things that you are in danger of losing when you come to know too much.
I'm probably belaboring my point, but I remember when I was in my 20's pointing out to my girlfriend at the time some of the more well known constellations in the night sky. They were not well know to her. I'd try to point to a star, point to another — "There, that's Scorpio. You can see the one reddish star, Aldebaran in the center..."
No, she could not see it. Christ, like Orion, I can't look up at the night sky in winter and not see it. What does she see in the sky at night?
Oh, that's right, an amazing jumble of mysterious points of light — like I used to as a young boy.
Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer".
Do you also find that you enjoy magic tricks less when you know how they're done?
Personally I find the "not knowing" kind of painful. I can't imagine cherishing ignorance.
I don't know why I'd want to continue to be naive about something after experiencing it. There's plenty of new things to see and do that will generate that "wonder" feeling all over again.
No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money is better spent on something else.
Also, if you’d like a free magnet for your whiteboard, I’ll happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)
That seems a reasonable goal.
He thought everything settled about physics should be teachable in the freshmen introductory series, and if he couldn’t make it fit that meant we didn’t really understand it yet.
I personally like the idea of upper level classes being about things we are still working out. That feels more like preparing people for the real world, where your job is to figure stuff out they couldn’t teach you in class because you and your coworkers are going to write the “book”. Or at least make money because not enough people have figured “it” out to make it cheap.
I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro vs upper level, and even that is optimistic. Even tenured professors are still learning new things about what is already known to the world at large.
Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take less time to teach and learn.
Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when people would have spent a lot of time learning about all the complicated movements the planets make through the sky, "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on. These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a heliocentric model (both of general application). The motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".
It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.
Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.
Also, we shouldn't be so quick to throw away the original process of discovery. If our goal is to make scientists that can discover i think it'd be best to expose them to some of the real discovering. Like, the way fermi-dirac statistics is presented typically leaves out the rich process of discovery and understanding that took place, similarly with einsteins field equations. It leads young students into the thought that the big names are great, eldritch gods, completely incomprehensible in their genius. It begins to feel like you could never ever have made the discovery, because what you learned was not the discovery, it was the sum of 70 years since. I felt a great weight lift watching the sean carroll talk about _how_ Einstein made his equations. He explained the logic of each step, the assistance he needed to reach critical points, and generally made it human. I believe it was an RI talk. Then i remember some video about the process to find FD statistics to resolve the ultraviolet catastrophe and it was so enlightening. They aren't old gods, they're people that worked for decades to reach completely reasonable goals and we just don't teach it like that at all. It's incredibly discouraging to new students to never see that these people were mere mortals.
It's also possible that he meant every problem in your domain. That would be slightly more reasonable, and something I could agree with.
Some basic sanity checks: Personally recruited onto the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer in 1943. Feynman Diagrams, fundamental to QM and became popular in the early 50s. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture was given in 1959. The Feynman Lectures on Physics were recorded at Caltech between 1961-1964 and became famous throughout the field shortly after. Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics shared with Schwinger and Tomonaga in 1965 Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection came out in 1983 Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman released in 1985.
Any Physics Professor on earth would give both their legs to have the career Feynman did before he was supposedly only made relevant by his Biography.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.
Yes, you do--it's just that the mythbuilding builds on different aspects of their personalities.
Mythbuilding around Einstein made him out to be the physics outsider who came in and revolutionized physics--or, in the somewhat less outlandish (but still outlandish) version, the kid who flunked all his physics classes in school and then revolutionized physics. Neither is anywhere near the truth. Einstein was an expert in the physics he ended up overthrowing. The reason he did badly in school was that school was not teaching the actual cutting edge physics that Einstein was interested in--and was finding out about from other sources, pursued on his own. And even then, he didn't flunk out of school; when he published his landmark 1905 papers, he was about to be awarded his doctorate in physics, and it wasn't too long after that that he left the patent office and became a professional academic.
Mythbuilding around Hawking made him out to be the genius who, despite his severe physical disability, could see through all the complexities and find the simple answers to fundamental questions that will lead us to a theory of everything and the end of physics. (This mythmaking, btw, was not infrequently purveyed by Hawking himself.) That story conveniently forgets the fact that none of those simple answers he gave have any experimental confirmation, and aren't likely to get any any time soon. He did propose some groundbreaking ideas, but none of them are about things we actually observe, or have any hope of observing in the foreseeable future. And the biggest breakthrough idea he's associated with, black hole entropy and black hole thermodynamics, arguably wasn't his, it was Bekenstein's; Hawking initially rejected Bekenstein's arguments for black hole entropy.
The myth is not "Einstein did badly in school, but for that reason not this one". "Einstein did badly in school" is a myth, period. Einstein excelled in school.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/14/science/einstein-revealed...
hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university, not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.
It's undisputable he did badly in university and could not hold himself in academia because of this metric.
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/07/fro...
He's the only one who left behind a model for how to go about emulating him.
Hawking and Einstein left behind their work but nothing I'm aware of teaching others how to do comparable work.
Who would you put in the top 10 ahead of him?
She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."
What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.
Feynman also became active in physics right at the end of the heroic era. So he's disadvantaged by it.
That easily puts him among the top 10 physicists of the 20th Century.
Beyond his research contributions, he was a highly innovative und unorthodox teacher, and an utterly captivating raconteur. He had a highly unusual combination of skills and personality traits. That's why he's so famous.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Tapes-Research-Chemist-storie... [2] https://feynman.com/stories/al-seckel-on-feynman/
"Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" was not written my Feynman and contained obviously fabricated stories. The fact that he was aware of this is more a point against his character than for it, no?(And says nothing of his scientific prowess)
Honestly, my problem with the video in question is that its tone unjustly attempts to denigrate Feynman (starting with the clickbaity title itself, a sham legacy? really?) by trying to frame the narrative that his supposed works were not his to begin with. The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all? If this is the central takeaway of the video then I'm honestly glad that I didn't waste precisious few hours of my life on such misleading content. Feel free to correct me though.
To me, Feynman is iconic because of the way he communicates. Of course, there is a disjunction between the man and his ideas and I'm not unwilling to believe that he had some flaws.
The video is not about denigrating Feynman. The "sham" legacy refers not to Feynman's legacy as a physicist, which is undisputed. The "sham" legacy refers to Feynman's false legacy written by other people for personal motivations.
> The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all?
Yes, that's the joke, but you're misunderstanding it. The joke is not punching at Feynman, but about how we know so little about him because we have no written primary sources about his views, only secondary sources.
Might not reply to this anymore, because a lot of these comments are people criticizing the video content they imagine in their heads based on the title only, not having watched the video.
"Anyway, I was among the first five. I have since found out from
somebody from Canada, where it was scored, who was in the scoring
division—he came to me much later and he told me that it was
astonishing. He said that at this examination, 'Not only were you
one of the five, but the gap between you and the other four was
sensational.' He told me that. I didn’t know that. That may not
be correct, but that’s what I heard."
Feynman's grasp of mathematics was astounding
>is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics.
That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work
Many decades later we say more accurately, he was a bad ass scientist who either sexually harassed or straight up raped most of his female mentees and was generally kinda racist (I mean, so was everyone back then. Still tho) and a general asshole.
I mean I don't really think there is any point in declaring anyone the best scientist ever. But he's firmly in whatever the top tier is when only considering scientific contributions.
As Churchill said, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of context (which might be in the video or Gleick's biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to), suggests that Feynman didn't create the content that's in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took credit for them. That is emphatically not the case. All of the content of those books is Feynman's. Leighton took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task, and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody, certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
It's "the content that people interacted with that they formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually editorialized and published by other people"
They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written by these authors from the real historical person
So again, I think "never wrote a book" is misleading if it gives the impression that the portrayal of Feynman in such books was not Feynman's own portrayal of himself. It was.
This all comes back to the observation I've made working with competent people, which is that we're all stuck trying to solve problems with the computational power of a slab of meat
(she later goes on to address this modesty as being underhanded)
(continued watching, two hours in now, this is great work)
Also while breaking the rules might be fun, lockpicking desks & sending coded messages out of Los Alamos "for fun" is maybe not for the best.
It's not just "experience in mischeveity", it's "being a general nuisance, then everyone clapped"
I LOVE the videos of how Feynman talks about physics and have read and loved many of the books she talked about. But really this whole video is, I think, spot on about them.
All I see is people trying to point out the differences between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard Feynman the real person"
"Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their native languages that he doesn't speak.
"Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning physicist
Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a good scientist?
[EDIT] Oops, somehow this post appeared twice?
Her best point is basically her own subjective opinion that Feynman does not belong amongst the greatest physicists of all time like Newton and Einstein. And like yeah I guess that’s sort of true. But most of the video is just stating that Feynman’s fans are weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring. It’s the combination of both and she mostly ignores that.
Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
In any case I’ve found Feynman’s work and life to be inspiring since I was a teenager. He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
> He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
There were multiple points in the presentation on her experience with Feynman fans and why they deserved the Bros title.
* Having an unearned superiority complex while having misogynistic beliefs (6:50->8:23) - followed by examples of personal experiences by the video creator
* Making up stories about him (1:42:XX->1:44:XX)
* Thinking that negging is cool? I realize I already said misogynistic beliefs, but feel like this should be re-iterated (24:20->25:50). The example given about the Feynman and the waitress was particularly rage-inducing to me. I'm picturing my mother or wife in that scenario and some jackass doing that to them.
> Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
This is a mischaracterization of this section of the video. 37:33-> 39:45 for anyone else who wants to make their own judgement. The point was that people watch the clip of Feynman and come out with the wrong/harmful conclusions.
Regarding the negging incident, she left out important context in her summary of this part of the book.
Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the women at that bar were intending to use men to get free drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner and then says she has to run to go meet up with a lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging, was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically, not being a pushover.
Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
I also think the incident about lying about whether he was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and two girls go with him back to his place. But later he confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor".
Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize how different people's attitudes were to things like nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a thing.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
...
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl!
The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation bias. It matters, because training your mind to be misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into other aspects of your life, like how you treat female coworkers.
Freeman Dyson loved him.
(Both nobel prize winners)
Is this not an undesirable trait in non fiction stories?
Gell-Mann famously threatened to sue Feynman if he didn't alter his book which he did in later printings.
The parts of the Cargo Cult Science chapter that referenced specific scammers were removed out of fear of a defamation lawsuit.
The Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path chapter in which he discusses picking up women at bars was removed after the first edition.
All of Surely You're Joking received a pass to change the language of the book in order to "remove sexist and misogynistic language".
What Do You Care What Other People Think? was also altered to remove his descriptions of his first wife and broadly the language of the book was also updated.
I hope that people who read this book in the future are able to recognize some of his truly toxic traits, and not think that being a jerk is part of his genius like the Steve Jobs mythos.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops
How many women or other discriminated-against people didn't have the chance to make a difference in the world because of attitudes of people like Feynman?
Some people look at that story and say, "Look at what a jerk Feynman was to the lady in the story!" And then they completely ignore the part where Feynman says that even though the method was effective, he didn't feel right using it.
She has good things to say about him in the end, from the evidence of his actual behaviour, like doing education outreach and loving his wife.
It's why OK Boomer is an insult.
But what do I know.
"Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
I wonder how developers nowadays can related to that since -some of them- relate on AI to watch it doing their craft.
The mathematics mindset and the programming mindset could not be more different.
Writing a mathematical proof is similar to writing everything from scratch each time.
However, and this is a serious affirmation: learning to write mathematical proofs will make anyone a much better developer, because of the changes in the mental processes involved in the creation and expression of ideas.
Mathematics and Computer Science mindsets are closer than most other pairs of academic streams. There’s a reason why so many universities have their CS departments under their Math Departments.
It’s true that (almost) every proof is built on top of others, but this is not the way mathematicians learn their craft — you do have to start at the bottom.
The average programmer, on the other hand, has never been anywhere near the hardware or, these days, the software near the bottom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4
He had an amazing ability to make physics fun and entertaining. I could listen to him talk all day.
She brings up points that don't seem easy to dispute, yet all of the comments here seem to be praise for the man outside of just his achievements.
Think Edison, more than Tesla.