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The author writes, far down in the article after extensively criticizing Feynman, “None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain”. I feel this is disingenuous.

The author writes, far down in the article after extensively criticizing Feynman, “None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain”. I feel this is disingenuous. Surely the author understands that what most readers will take away from articles like this is “historical figure X who had a great reputation for decades, actually did terrible things [and so maybe he shouldn’t have that great reputation].” IMO, the only way that a nuanced portrayal of such historical figures could be given, is to write a more general biographical overview of the person and include the negative aspects in there among all the other facets. Not writing an article that focuses specifically on the negative aspects, that does have the effect of, firstly, character assassination, and secondly, shaming people today who continue to admire the figure for his/her overall achievements (because "how could you possibly admire someone who did unacceptable behaviour X to group Y?").

ximeng 5y ago
Think this is as much about the author's negative experiences of the culture in scientific research as it is about Feynman. Anyone who has read the book will know something of both sides of Feynman, here she is saying that despite him describing his womanizing side as fun and playful it genuinely harms people like her who are trying to succeed as female scientists.
- randombits0 5y ago
  “Why do we bemoan the exit of sexual harassers, and those who otherwise harm their colleagues, from the scientific community? Instead, we should mourn the loss of all the promising scientists that they forced out, whose contributions will never be known.” Yet she was not forced out. Was that her choice? Should we also mourn the lost contributions of others forced out for weakness? Are we to support those forced out due to “unfair” weaknesses while agreeing to dismiss those forced out by “fair” weaknesses? The sexual/gender dynamic of social interaction is only one aspect that may be abused. There are far too many others to even try to list. And while trying to take the path of fairness and equality is something folks can intelecualize, in practice people are kinda selfish and shitty!
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    She was not forced out, but many others have been. Not all driven out are women, or minorities, or gay, trans, poor, shy, short, loud, ill, or what-have-you. But that is the way to bet. The key developer of the Moderna vaccine was shat on her whole career. She had to leave academia to get (commercial) funding for the final work. Treated better, she might have got it done a decade or more earlier, saving possibly millions of lives. There is a treasure trove of work by women, abused minorities, and the rest, abandoned when they were driven out of science for crappy reasons, waiting to be rediscovered. And there is a massive shitpile, preserved by overprivileged nobodies, one-hit wonders, and tenured posers, waiting to be binned. That work is easier to preserve in less quantitative fields like psychology and history, but there is plenty to go around. Drive them out.
    - babesh 5y ago
      I haven’t read anywhere that said that the Moderna developer was shat on because of her gender. What I read was that the scientific establishment didn’t believe that there could be a viable delivery mechanism. So please don’t use that as evidence to push your point. You are arguing with emotion here instead of facts. There have definitely been minorities, women, etc... that were driven out of science and some work that should have been more recognized. From what I can tell, the people doing the driving out are actually the nobodies. The nobodies are taking the mantle of moral outrage and weaponizing it to drive out people who disagree with them.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Apparently you have not read any histories of her work. And, obviously it is and always was the nobodies and has-beens driving out people who would shake things up. It has always been easiest to blight the careers of outsiders. The people working are busy, you know, working. The majority of them are obviously not minorities. There is plenty of competition for scarce placements, grants, and facilities, and everyone needs all available boosts to get enough of all of those just to work. We need to ensure all of these available boosts are for quality work.
seoaeu 5y ago
Other biographies already exist including the very popular autobiography mentioned in the article. It seems unfair to give a pass to the authors of those biographies for not painting a full picture, but then to object to anyone pointing out the negative aspects that were missed.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  As the author notes (and as people note on the other front-page Feynman thread today), some of the negative aspects are found in Feynman’s very own autobiographical writings. It is therefore hard to claim that they are overlooked.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    I would say that they are "negative", with scare quotes... There's really nothing negative in that book. I don't know about other sources about Feynman's life, but his own autobiography does not really speak ill of him, at least if that information is taken at face value. The quotes that appear in TFA with much fanfare are only descriptions of thought processes, not of actions. So, young Feynman was not particularly good at flirting, and then he received advice from other people which he thereby tried to apply. This process and its mixed results are therefore described with comic detail. Then he also drew some naked women with a pencil. If that is the best case against Feynman, he's still safe. Really, the only legitimate negative thing that you can extract from that book is that he was a bit obsessed with positive attention when young, which may have made him be a bit insufferable. But who isn't at 20. And that's it.
    - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
      I'm not sure Feynman is still safe. For example, there is the matter of his visiting topless bars. A common position today is that women who choose sex work should not be shamed (because that denies their own agency, and in the case of prostitution keeping things underground only helps trafficking), but at the same time the men who visit sex workers should be shamed for objectifying the female body.
geofft 5y ago
Feynman did some things that were obviously great. Feynman also did some things that were obviously terrible. Neither of these conclusions requires a "nuanced" portrayal. There's a sort of hidden assumption that we need to assign a univariate reputation to people (historical and otherwise), which brings up the difficulty of how to combine these two observations on incomparable axes into a single conclusion. That doesn't require "nuance" either; the fundamental problem here is trying to figure out if thing X outweighs thing Y. That combination isn't going to be particularly informative about the actual person under discussion; it'll mostly just tell you what coefficients you're using when weighting the two observations. Surrounding every negative observation by positive observations is neither scientifically honest nor informative about the observation itself. It just says that the writer thinks the negative observation shouldn't carry as much weight. In this case, the author is making no such judgment and presenting the facts directly, which I think is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
gumby 5y ago
> The author writes, ... “None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain”. I feel this is disingenuous. I read that statement very differently. Her essay is about the pervasive and accepted sexism in physics and astronomy. Her use of Feynman is of course a hook, but also shows that this is a longstanding, accepted trend, and accepted in such a way that those who wish to lionize him simply ignore it. She shows that people objected in the past but were brushed off. She also shows that people who object today are brushed off. And that other professors are given the same treatment (e.g. people who objected "ruined [Ott's] career" rather than considering that he ruined his own. And by saying "None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain" she is being explicit that he was embedded and part of a longstanding culture. You're even selectively ignoring the rest of the paragraph in which she expands on this very point. You can't change the past but you can change the present and this is what the author is asking for.

ximeng 5y ago

Think this is as much about the author's negative experiences of the culture in scientific research as it is about Feynman. Anyone who has read the book will know something of both sides of Feynman, here she is saying that despite him describing his womanizing side as fun and playful it genuinely harms people like her who are trying to succeed as female scientists.

randombits0 5y ago
“Why do we bemoan the exit of sexual harassers, and those who otherwise harm their colleagues, from the scientific community? Instead, we should mourn the loss of all the promising scientists that they forced out, whose contributions will never be known.” Yet she was not forced out. Was that her choice? Should we also mourn the lost contributions of others forced out for weakness? Are we to support those forced out due to “unfair” weaknesses while agreeing to dismiss those forced out by “fair” weaknesses? The sexual/gender dynamic of social interaction is only one aspect that may be abused. There are far too many others to even try to list. And while trying to take the path of fairness and equality is something folks can intelecualize, in practice people are kinda selfish and shitty!
- ncmncm 5y ago
  She was not forced out, but many others have been. Not all driven out are women, or minorities, or gay, trans, poor, shy, short, loud, ill, or what-have-you. But that is the way to bet. The key developer of the Moderna vaccine was shat on her whole career. She had to leave academia to get (commercial) funding for the final work. Treated better, she might have got it done a decade or more earlier, saving possibly millions of lives. There is a treasure trove of work by women, abused minorities, and the rest, abandoned when they were driven out of science for crappy reasons, waiting to be rediscovered. And there is a massive shitpile, preserved by overprivileged nobodies, one-hit wonders, and tenured posers, waiting to be binned. That work is easier to preserve in less quantitative fields like psychology and history, but there is plenty to go around. Drive them out.
  - babesh 5y ago
    I haven’t read anywhere that said that the Moderna developer was shat on because of her gender. What I read was that the scientific establishment didn’t believe that there could be a viable delivery mechanism. So please don’t use that as evidence to push your point. You are arguing with emotion here instead of facts. There have definitely been minorities, women, etc... that were driven out of science and some work that should have been more recognized. From what I can tell, the people doing the driving out are actually the nobodies. The nobodies are taking the mantle of moral outrage and weaponizing it to drive out people who disagree with them.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Apparently you have not read any histories of her work. And, obviously it is and always was the nobodies and has-beens driving out people who would shake things up. It has always been easiest to blight the careers of outsiders. The people working are busy, you know, working. The majority of them are obviously not minorities. There is plenty of competition for scarce placements, grants, and facilities, and everyone needs all available boosts to get enough of all of those just to work. We need to ensure all of these available boosts are for quality work.

seoaeu 5y ago

Other biographies already exist including the very popular autobiography mentioned in the article. It seems unfair to give a pass to the authors of those biographies for not painting a full picture, but then to object to anyone pointing out the negative aspects that were missed.

Mediterraneo10 5y ago
As the author notes (and as people note on the other front-page Feynman thread today), some of the negative aspects are found in Feynman’s very own autobiographical writings. It is therefore hard to claim that they are overlooked.
- enriquto 5y ago
  I would say that they are "negative", with scare quotes... There's really nothing negative in that book. I don't know about other sources about Feynman's life, but his own autobiography does not really speak ill of him, at least if that information is taken at face value. The quotes that appear in TFA with much fanfare are only descriptions of thought processes, not of actions. So, young Feynman was not particularly good at flirting, and then he received advice from other people which he thereby tried to apply. This process and its mixed results are therefore described with comic detail. Then he also drew some naked women with a pencil. If that is the best case against Feynman, he's still safe. Really, the only legitimate negative thing that you can extract from that book is that he was a bit obsessed with positive attention when young, which may have made him be a bit insufferable. But who isn't at 20. And that's it.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    I'm not sure Feynman is still safe. For example, there is the matter of his visiting topless bars. A common position today is that women who choose sex work should not be shamed (because that denies their own agency, and in the case of prostitution keeping things underground only helps trafficking), but at the same time the men who visit sex workers should be shamed for objectifying the female body.

geofft 5y ago

Feynman did some things that were obviously great. Feynman also did some things that were obviously terrible. Neither of these conclusions requires a "nuanced" portrayal. There's a sort of hidden assumption that we need to assign a univariate reputation to people (historical and otherwise), which brings up the difficulty of how to combine these two observations on incomparable axes into a single conclusion. That doesn't require "nuance" either; the fundamental problem here is trying to figure out if thing X outweighs thing Y. That combination isn't going to be particularly informative about the actual person under discussion; it'll mostly just tell you what coefficients you're using when weighting the two observations. Surrounding every negative observation by positive observations is neither scientifically honest nor informative about the observation itself. It just says that the writer thinks the negative observation shouldn't carry as much weight. In this case, the author is making no such judgment and presenting the facts directly, which I think is an entirely reasonable thing to do.

gumby 5y ago

> The author writes, ... “None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain”. I feel this is disingenuous. I read that statement very differently. Her essay is about the pervasive and accepted sexism in physics and astronomy. Her use of Feynman is of course a hook, but also shows that this is a longstanding, accepted trend, and accepted in such a way that those who wish to lionize him simply ignore it. She shows that people objected in the past but were brushed off. She also shows that people who object today are brushed off. And that other professors are given the same treatment (e.g. people who objected "ruined [Ott's] career" rather than considering that he ruined his own. And by saying "None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain" she is being explicit that he was embedded and part of a longstanding culture. You're even selectively ignoring the rest of the paragraph in which she expands on this very point. You can't change the past but you can change the present and this is what the author is asking for.