10 ms·
Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
- LeonB 7y agoThis resembles the titular lesson from (Feynman’s second set of memoirs) “Why do you care what other people think?” ... when he had a breakthrough by stopping himself from caring about expectations and just started playing with what interested him. That led to the discovery which led to his Nobel prize.
- otras 7y agoFrom it’s wiki: “Of note is the story of his first wife, Arline, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died while Feynman was working on the Manhattan Project; the book's title is taken from a question she often put to him when he seemed preoccupied with his colleagues' opinions about his work, which echoed his earlier words to her.”
- LeonB 7y agoAh ok. The lesson I'm thinking of is in his first memoir, "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" in the chapter "The Dignified Professor" where he was feeling quite down because he believes he can't live up to the expectations people have of him. He makes a breakthrough in his thinking, when he realized that he's not responsible for other people's expectations. That's their mistake not his.
- notimetorelax 7y agoThis is so liberating to realize this in our own lives. This applies to personal as well as business growth.
- hooloovoo_zoo 7y agoEh, Feynman put a lot of effort into caring about what other people thought for his whole life. As Murray Gell-Mann said in his obituary, “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself.”
- garmaine 7y agoHe’s talking about a chapter from Feynman’s autobiography where he explicitly practiced being an uncaring asshole and was surprised at the effectiveness.
- notimetorelax 7y agoNot sure if we talk about the same chapter, but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize this behavior as being an asshole. He realized that he cannot force himself to work on a big problem. Instead he needed to start small with some seemingly inconsequential problem. This later grew into a major discovery.
- garmaine 7y agoNo I think we’re talking about separate chapters. Iirc (it’s been decades since I read it!) while dating after his first wife died someone advised him he was too “nice” and that women like alpha males who act like assholes. He decided to test that out both on his dates and professionally. He found it largely worked iirc—the dates were more successful, and people at work more responsive. But he didn’t like the kind of person it made him into so he stopped the test. Still I suspect the experience must have ingrained in him an understanding of the effectiveness of not caring what other people think, even if you don’t have to be an asshole about it.
- chimprich 7y agoIf he really didn't care what people thought, he wouldn't have told anecdotes and written books telling people how he didn't care what people thought about him. He wanted other people to think that he didn't care what other people thought. In general, caring about what other people think is a good thing. The alternative is to be a sociopath.
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497442
- jneplokh 7y agoNot caring about what other people think is truly freeing. The other important ting to realize is people just don't care most of the time.
- WalterBright 7y ago> Not caring about what other people think is truly freeing. 1. young people worry about what others think of them 2. middle age people stop caring what others think of them 3. old people realize that nobody is thinking of them
- threatofrain 7y agoBut #3 is a reality that slowly blossoms, not something you're born into as a young person. We are also all judging each other to different degrees, and some of these judgments do matter.
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- asdfman123 7y agoI feel like the advice "stop caring about what people think" is pretty useless for a lot of people. Really, how much you care about what other people think depends on what phase of life you're in. In your adolescence, your social survival and who you get to date largely depends on the opinions of others. When you hit your 30s, usually you have your own family and your own tribe, and other people just don't matter so much. You're in a different phase of life with different goals. I guess it's possible to find a way to not care what people think in your 20s, too, but for those who DO care a lot, telling them not to care isn't helpful.
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- taeric 7y agoIt is subtle that he didn't just dismiss others, per se. He specifically disregarded what they were working on. If he was brought in to consult or help, he was now working on it so would help. That is, he did not dismiss people. Or problems brought to him. He just did not worry about reinventing wheels. Odds are, other people are working on something and have made really smart contributions. Don't worry about that. Take advantage of it when you can, but largely don't worry about it.
- vast 7y ago> He just did not worry about reinventing wheels. That is what annoys the fuck out of me with the software community. We actually reinvent constantly but everyone praises that we never should do it. It feels like a secret master plan of a hidden lobby that want to claim novelty and creativity for themselves.
- dmix 7y agoThey’re called consultants. Every repackaged fad in software was pumped and sold by high paid consultants looking to sell the next buzz word to some big company who doesn’t understand software. A bunch of them even did it to “lean startups” here in Toronto and attempted to apply it to absolutely everything where it didn’t fit or was just lightly repackaged agile. They use it to get gov ‘innovation’ credit here too which is another cancerous industry full of buzzword consultants. Only occasionally by luck or in small hard fought increments do things actually get better via these hype trains.
- vast 7y agoJust accusing consultants it too simple. This mindset is prevalent in whole software culture. Think leftpad.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoLeftpad was an example where we should reinvent the wheel. Introducing a dependency on an NPM module for so little returned value is a lot different from a physicist or mathematician relying on a peer reviewed result from another academic.
- DuskStar 7y agoThis feels like the sort of advice that increases the variance of outcomes more than the mean, if that makes any sense. It'll help some people, but also really won't help others. It's like... You'd need some serious disregard for the rest of the physics community to think you can figure out a reactionless drive. This is great if you actually can, but otherwise it's going to lead you to failure. In a lot of ways, getting advice from the outliers on the very edge of a field is like getting advice from lottery winners. That's not to say you shouldn't - but at the same time a lot of effort has to be made to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- lallysingh 7y agoNo. Pay attention to what other people do that help what you're doing. That raises the mean by reducing drag.
- pavas 7y agoI think it would be very desirable to increase the variance of outcomes without significantly decreasing the mean. The way research funding is structured now, researchers are incentivized towards taking small publishable steps without too much risk. This is needed of course, but it isn't going to bring about another Newton. I think we desperately need a few more Newtons if we're to prosper in the next hundred years.
- DuskStar 7y agoA research infrastructure that could support improving the variance of results without significantly impacting the mean would be an enormous boon to the world.
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- jjeaff 7y agoThat is probably what is desirable for the field as a whole. But as an individual, not a good idea to shoot for high variance.
- mhh__ 7y agoI feel that these Feynman-isms can hide just how good of a scientist he was.
- icelancer 7y agoThe root of these Feynman-isms is exactly why he was a good scientist. He goes on at length about why this is in his various books.
- W-Stool 7y agoI'm a bit astounded by some of the more intellectual / academic interpretations of this story. The moral of this story, if there needs to be one, is to "follow your nose" - go where your knowledge and interests take you, and who cares what your peers think about it.
- halfway 7y agoA directive seemingly at odds with the spirit of social media.
- kstenerud 7y agoWhen you do what everyone else does, you get where everyone else gets.
- User23 7y ago"What do you care what other people think?" Is the most poignant question I've ever been asked in my life and for that I owe Mr. Feynman an inestimable debt. So few people as good questions.
- ToddBonzalez 7y ago“Dick, this guy must be either very smart or very lucky. He constantly claims he knew less about what was going on than anyone else in the field, but he still made the crucial discovery.” Rosalind Franklin would probably disagree.
- haihaibye 7y agoFranklin and her PhD students famous photo 51 was not enough. If it was, they would have the Nobel. Crick's mathematical breakthrough to calculate the helix twist and playing around with molecular models was also necessary.
- agumonkey 7y agoSimilarly I think it was Shannon.. that was operating differently from others. He wasn't organized and tried a lot of things as he saw fit, as long as it inspired him. He also did not care much about how it looked.
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- elasolova 7y agoThanks for the post. It is exactly what I need right now.
- mcnamaratw 7y agoThis trick may work much, much better for people who are massively engaged in their fields and need a new perspective. I don't think either Feynman or Crick started disregarding everything when they were noobs.
- madhadron 7y ago> At a certain point, I looked up and said, “Dick, [James Watson] must be either very smart or very lucky. He ignores the third option: very dishonest. Which is what applied in this case.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoCare to elaborate? Specifically, is there any doubt about Watson's contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure?
- pbnjay 7y agoWell since Rosalind Franklin did the majority of the work, yes.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoDid Watson and his co-author fail to credit her in their paper? If they credited her, but the media failed to give her attention, it's not his fault.
- pbnjay 7y agoYes, they failed to credit her: https://pubmed.gov/13054692 https://pubmed.gov/13054692 In his own book, Watson admitted he had seen her work before publishing his result.
- jrhawley 7y agoIt's been a ongoing conversation for years how Watson and Crick disregarded Franklin's work, with a lot of evidence to support it. Crick also wrote some scathing letters to Watson about how he was being disingenuous in this particular book [0]. [0]: https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBKN.pdf https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBKN.pdf
- haihaibye 7y agoThey published their papers in the same issue of Nature. This is the standard way of giving credit to both.
- cos2pi 7y agoWho is the author of this blog? My searching hasn't been able to turn up a name.
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- wwarner 7y agoIf you read Feynman's nobel acceptance speech (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/lectu...) and some of the other interviews he gave about his QED work, you get the sense that his model of working was to listen carefully to what other people in the field were asserting and then devising a method for proving (or disproving) to himself with his own calculus driven methodology. He got really really good at it, and it lead him to understand the whole field of study better than anyone else. I can see how it could lead to the crisis described in the article, because he would have to spend less time analyzing the work of predecessors and more time pursuing, and then testing, his own hypotheses.
- morelandjs 7y agoThe fine print is also to master and absorb the knowledge of the other brilliant people which have come before you. Feynman certainly did this himself. His comment does not mean snooze in calculus while working on the Riemann hypothesis. The "follow your own path" mantra is particularly important at the edge of human knowledge where established theories break down. As a physicist, I was personally surprised how much people blindly trust theoretical tools well outside their domain of original application. Even when the data is yelling at you "no that's wrong", people commonly persist because they read it in a book or heard it from a more senior professor. I believe this is the group think that Feynman was getting at.