13 ms·
Feynman on group decision-making at Los Alamos (1985)
- huhtenberg 5y agoIt's always a great pleasure to work with people that aren't only at the same level, but also recognize and use that to not dwell on things that are obvious to everyone in the group.
- dijit 5y agoI have been in such environments and I while I hadn't considered that the reason they worked so well was that they were great people: they were, in fact, great people. An interesting thing happens when there's a high level of respect. People stop being so anxious about not "winning", or "being heard", people just remove themselves from their ideas and feel comfortable and confident. I left that company because the company around that team was a bit shit, but I wish I could foster an environment of high trust and mutual respect like that again.
- jart 5y agoWell I imagine when you're an Arthur Compton or a Richard Feynman or an Oppenheimer, you don't have a whole lot to prove.
- tigerlily 5y agoI like how you included all the Oppenheimers :)
- smilespray 5y ago...and all the Arthur Comptons and Richard Feynmans!
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- watwut 5y agoI dont think it is just the question of quality of individual. It is result of the way leadership shapes the place, what it rewards or not. People react greatly to the environment they are in. Whether people worry about being heard, whether being winning is important or not influences a lot how they will discuss. Whether you can afford to remove yourself from the idea is artefact of the environment too.
- pnt12 5y agoI agree with the thought about leadership. Peer to peer discussions can be exhausting, where a consensus is hard to achieve and a majority vote is often unsatisfying. A good leader can listen to every idea, make a decision and steer everyone in that direction.
- tmule 5y agoIt’s unclear what is being praised- is it the high working memory (and reasoning power) of those great men or the ability to have an open discussion about the merits of a case?
- _delibash_ 5y agoIt looks like it's both. But either way, it's not that extraordinary.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThe memory one could be, depending on how much detail and new ground is covered. Imagine your first day as a developer and you hear their architecture for the first time, and you recall all the points if a discussion between 5 expert people there. You remember the words and build the mental model simultaneously. It would be impressive, unless your full time job is consulting in such meetings.
- tmule 5y ago“ It would be impressive, unless your full time job is consulting in such meetings.” There’s self section of individuals with high working memory into such roles. There are many managers who attend meetings all day and can’t synthesize what’s being discussed in real time, indicating that this isn’t about practice.
- coldtea 5y agoWhat's not extraordinary? "the ability to have an open discussion about the merits of a case"? You'd be surprised...
- 30minAdayHN 5y agoi think he was praising their ability to not bring in their egos to the discussion while trusting that best idea will win. best idea won without lot of inefficiency of repetition which often happens.
- lbriner 5y agoI'm unsure of what is surprising to Feynman. Is he saying that he assumed clever men would be obnoxious and self-righteous when they weren't? Although an anecdote, I would imagine there are plenty of examples where the opposite would happen to people who could still fairly be called great men/people. In fact, some times, great people are necessarily obnoxious - or at least cold. I can't imagine that kind/warm people could have got Tesla or Apple to where they are, it takes a certain hard nose to make hard choices in business.
- vasco 5y agoI interpreted it as it merely being a side point, this aspect of obnoxiousness. What Feynman was impressed it was the fact that they didn't need to repeat the ideas more than once. I think you're trying to see a deeper argument when this is the argument itself. Even in groups of smart people I've found that the group needs to write ideas down as it discusses them and repeat some of them to clarify to one person in the group that didn't get it the first time. If you don't do the writing down / repeating most people will lose track of most ideas, the same way most people can't play blind chess and remember all the pieces on the board. It's a comment on mental capacity moreso than manners.
- WastingMyTime89 5y agoAs an aside, while I don’t do Feynman point regarding some of the exceptional meetings he has been to, as a chairperson my experience is you can significantly improve the meeting by systematically restating arguments, asking for clarification when a participant doesn’t agree with your restatement and providing a brief summary of propositions before a decision is made.
- jodrellblank 5y agoI don’t know anything about uranium separation, but is it possible the situation was not “Arthur Compton has the best idea, nobody needed to repeat it because they all remembered it on one hearing” and was more like “Arthur Compton started the meeting by setting out the main Uranium separation plan we all know well and have been leaning towards for weeks, and everyone lay out their previously hotly argued views and no dealbreakers with better alternatives arose so the committee agreed on the way”. Or perhaps that nobody had any stake in doing Uranium separation one way over another way for personal identity reasons? Perhaps the surprising bit was that they could all agree on the not-ideal method because they needed to move on and the meeting was a formality of agreement and alignment, not a brainstorming fight for your own idea session? We have another anecdote of Feynman being shown blueprints of a nuclear power plant and he doesn’t understand and eventually asks a stupid question about a part, “expecting” to be laughed at and told it’s a door, but it turns out to be a valve which could cause a problem if it fails. Nobody else had noticed, implying they were pretending their understanding, and they left thinking he was a great insightful man which he’s saying he isn’t (but is likely downplaying for comedy as well as humbleness)
- W0lf 5y agoIn my experience (and coming just out of a meeting alike) these types of respectful and forward-moving meetings are typically in a case where each attendant has roughly the same level expertise in a given domain and knows the basics of scientific principles. Hence, everybody in the meeting brings in his or her unique view of the topic at hand and knows intrinsically when it makes sense to contribute something to the discussion. Usually things get out of hands, if somebody is talking just for the noise or, and this is worse, a clearly bad idea wins the discussion because politics or the messenger has shouted the loudest.
- systemvoltage 5y agoEven if participants have same level of domain understanding, it takes more to be willing to work towards a solution without their egos, their achievements, their alpha-ness getting in the way. I’ve seen the opposite more often than not. Where I do see this level of camaraderie is amongst close friends who know better about each other.
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- 317070 5y agoOverheard on such a meeting yesterday: "Well, an alternative would be to use the coordinate system named after me." I feel these meetings work best when there is no career pressure, but when people have aligned goals and just want to make progress. It's easier to leave good points unsaid if everyone prefers having any conclusion to having no conclusion.
- suction 5y agoThis also describes companies during the "we're creating a great product / service" phase, when meetings aren't "won" by those who can sell themselves or their ideas best. Companies on the decline will always have very charismatic / well-spoken / authoritarian characters at the top who'll put their own ego before sustainable success. Think Ballmer at Microsoft.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago>Companies on the decline will always have very charismatic / well-spoken / authoritarian characters at the top who'll put their own ego before sustainable success. And countries.
- smitty1e 5y agoMy takeaway from the anecdote is that greatness != omniscience. These smart fellows brought experience and biases to difficult questions and had to have enough trust and confidence in the group to let the group function as a seminar. The best teachers never really quit being students.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoThe more you learn the more ignorant you feel. It was refreshing to hear that even eg Noam Chomsky feels this way.
- Max_Ehrlich 5y agoI recommend everyone read "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman." The parts on Brazil were particularly interesting.
- samim 5y ago
- jack_riminton 5y agoYou're confusing greatness with your approximation of goodness
- thombat 5y agoA more nuanced description: the men who directly instigated the US atomic bomb effort were refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe with knowledge of the discovery of the fission and potential chain reaction of uranium in Germany in 1939, which meant that an atomic bomb was quite likely to be possible. Once Germany had been defeated and the largely-ruined Japan plainly had no realistic pathway to developing such a weapon mmany of these same men argued for the bomb not to be used [1] but as the British found with their strategic bombing of Germany, a weapon propounded as a saviour and developed at staggering expense is difficult to lay aside, even if both its utility and morality are questioned. [1] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/leo-szilards-fight-stop-bomb https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/leo-szilards-fight-st...
- Synaesthesia 5y agoI don't think many of the scientists would have agreed to surprise attack Japan on population centres. It was a decision taken by the senior military, and came as a shock to most.
- jart 5y agoHow many people didn't die due to Pax Americana?
- CamperBob2 5y agoBomb somebody else's harbor next time, kthxbye.
- lordnacho 5y agoI get the feeling this anecdote leaves out some important information. Perhaps whether people were giving hints about how confident they were on their contribution, or whether there was an aha-reaction to something insightful that was said. But also it's important to separate oneself from ideas that appear in one's head and not be too closely invested in them.
- jokoon 5y ago"Some people are better than others. Some are great, some are losers". I really dislike the wording of that title.
- slingnow 5y agoGood to know. Thank you.
- somishere 5y agoHonestly, my reading of this wasn't as clear cut as most of the other comments here. That said, I'm a devotee of the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller .. satirists both
- mseepgood 5y ago
- juanci_to 5y agoMaybe I don't know the necessary context, what is the point you are trying to make with this statement?
- elb2020 5y agoJudging from his book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, he was not a very modest person himself, with regard to his own accomplishments and ideas, maybe that's why he was shocked by the modesty and restraint of other men with (presumably) similarly great talents.
- vixen99 5y agoDoesn't it depend on whether you feel he had a substantially realistic view as to his talents or not? Few would disagree that he was correct on that score. Moreover Feynman told a number of stories against himself - of how he turned out to be quite wrong about something. We may agree that false modesty is not much better than hyping one's non-existent qualities.
- mrjangles 5y agofor some reason, a great many people on the internet don't seem to understand that it is not "his book". It was written after his death by his friend.
- pacman128 5y agoIt was published 3 years before his death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Feynman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
- mrjangles 5y agoOh wow my mistake. Yes it is actually the sequel "what do you care what other people think" that was written after his death. Yeah knowing he wrote it, I guess it does come off a little more egotistical than I at first assumed. Still a good book though.
- dhbradshaw 5y agoI think you have to distinguish between being socially humble and being humble about truth. Feynman was humble in that he tried to learn what was true instead of assuming that he already knew. He was always looking to improve his understanding. Being humble in the search for truth can sometimes even seem arrogant socially. It means that you'll regularly question not only your own beliefs but those of other people as well.
- sgt101 5y agoJust because you are best at arguing doesn't mean you are right...
- rawoke083600 5y agoMy ex-gf will disagree ! :P
- PicassoCTs 5y agoOne can not overstate how important it also is, that the public is suspended for this type of meetings. Meaning no gathering of material for self-aggrandizing or as ammunition for department warfare. No PR-stunts and no humiliation for gaps in knowledge. The person and ego has to be suspended for a moment and the "competition" of man go take a hike, replaced by a competition of ideas. Fairness has to be upheld, as in everyone in the round has to be a good sport and accept his/her idea to be less likely. Todays self-obsessed culture makes such a round nearly impossible, except - ironically for near anonymous internet forums.
- spiderfarmer 5y agoI was at a conference in Amsterdam once with a lot of talks from CEO's of fast growing companies. The day was very inspirational. The speakers were obviously very competent and the questions from the CEO's in the audience were interesting and they all received great answers. To top it off the chairman of the day summarised the whole event in a speech that I still remember to this day. It was so charming, intelligent and erudite. I was floored.
- testmasterflex 5y agoName of the conference? :)
- spiderfarmer 5y agoI can't find it. It doesn't exist anymore. Something like "High Growth Conference" in 2010-ish. Chairman of the day was Harry Starren.
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- PoignardAzur 5y agoAn idea I'm coming around to is that the "great men" dynamic Feynman is talking about isn't actually a property of individual people, it's situational. Like, being humble, competent in your field, mature enough to actively listen to other people, etc, all help. But there are also more subtle factors like compatibility, company culture, project parameters, etc, that are also necessary to have that dynamic where everybody cooperates in discussions. Getting those subtle factors to align is hard, sometimes it's down to conditions you can't control, and it's definitely not as simple as "just" getting great people in a room.
- teddyh 5y agoIn the words of Richard Hamming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR89bl7hTOS3F3wuoGj7id3Xy&index=32#t=22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...
- csours 5y agoSeveral comments here about what is the missing X factor - why did these guys get along. The quoted story takes place during World War II, and they were developing nuclear technology, specifically The Bomb. It's very easy to look back and criticize the outcome, but AT THE TIME, these people thought that they had to do this to preserve their way of life and defeat evil. I think this is a critical component of any moonshot - you have to have competition or some motivation that feels like an external compulsion.
- avazhi 5y agoNot sure who, besides the Japanese at the time, have really criticised the outcome. Even now the Japanese seem to at least understand why it had to happen. It was the difference between Nazi fascism winning global hegemony or not. I don’t think there’s a serious argument that it shouldn’t have happened.
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- psd1 5y agoI'm not well read on the topic, and I do tend to agree with you, but I can imagine an argument like: - nuclear threat is a serious cost to productivity and well-being - the bomb merely brought forward a conclusion that was already looking inevitable There's an obvious counter that some nation likely would have developed nuclear weapons independently - America was merely the first. Nonetheless, I think it's not a given that the bomb was a positive.
- pegasus 5y agoThere are very convincing historical arguments on why the bomb was both unnecessary and also why it didn't in fact play any role in Japan's surrender (it sound unlikely, but conventional bombing raids were annihilating Japanese cities at such a clip that Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't even register as anything different with the decision-making group; they decided to capitulate when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and all hopes of avoiding unconditional surrender were dashed). Google brings up plenty of reading material.
- narrator 5y agoIf I want to make a serious effort to know the truth of a controversial matter, I make it a point to argue without using fallacies or relying on cognitive biases. This kind of arguing tends to work better in traditional forums instead of newsy forums like HN and Reddit. One can spend a long time researching one's argument and come back several days later with a well researched and formed argument and bump the thread back to the top. In HN and Reddit, by the time one has done this research, everyone has moved on.
- max_ 5y ago>It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best---summing it all up---without having to say it three times. Can we attribute this to the fact that in physics, everything can be validated mathematically? Hence less room for debate.
- zb 5y agoNo, because he’s clearly describing an engineering problem, not a physics problem.
- hallway_monitor 5y agoRight, so it can be validated experimentally, but this team had a real goal and a real deadline. To succeed they needed to get things as right as possible as quickly as possible. They needed to be efficient.
- paulio 5y agoI just sat through 3 hours of meetings. I wish this had been read before we started.
- chandmk 5y agoI am wondering what would have happened if the committee chooses another idea instead of Compton's. Would Compton leave the committee? Would Feynman resent the decision? Or they wouldn't do that that is why they are called "great men"?
- civilized 5y agoFeynman is impressed because the committee remembered the best argument and got to the right decision without Compton having to insist on himself. Compton made the best argument, once, and won. If the committee didn't choose Compton's idea, it would just be an average lame committee where quality of thought isn't a priority. There's a reason "design by committee" is an epithet. People thinking in groups normally suck at it.
- morelandjs 5y agoThis was the value I saw in my PhD. It has opened doors to jobs where the people I work with are brilliant and generally objective in their evaluation of competing ideas. It is an absolute treat to work in an environment like that. On many occasions, I worked with people who just knew more than me on a certain topic, and I was enthusiastic to take a back seat and learn from them.
- HWR_14 5y agoI'm curious, does one really need a PhD outside academia? Does sufficient experience make up for it?
- morelandjs 5y agoDefinitely don’t need it, but it does introduce you to cool people.
- thenerdhead 5y agoThere is something magical when everyone leaves their ego at the door and is willing to build upon each other’s ideas like improv. In the end, you’re left committing to only one idea and everyone is supporting it because that’s the only way it’s going to be successful. This is known intrinsically by everyone participating. What this quote is missing is all the context. They were fighting for time and had to make a decision to get started on experiments. Many of these contributors were doing experimental work and Feynman was doing theoretical work. Also he was 24 years old at the time.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThis made me almost cry. In most companies the person who is the loudest or most persistent wins. The merit of an idea is almost irrelevant.
- erwincoumans 5y agoIt is a great pleasure to be among people who respect each other, listen, focus on the topics instead of on ego/politics. Sad if most companies are not like that, I must have been lucky to be in the right teams then.
- tomohawk 5y agoWe have a better way of doing things now-a-days. Whatever politico has enough sway with the social media companies makes it known what the proper narrative is, and then any other point of view is simply labelled as misinformation. That way we don't have to put up with the misinformed views of great men.
- dkarl 5y agoWhat strikes me is not a bunch of people keeping their ego in check -- that helps because it ensures that all points will be heard, but it doesn't ensure coherent decision-making. What strikes me is that everybody was able to keep track of what were the major points and minor points, so they could talk through the whole range of possible objections and decide that they were all less valid or less important than the points in favor. This is how engineers talk, searching for flaws and weighing the ones they find. I think it's important for engineering decision-makers to be comfortable with this culture. It's disheartening when you have a great conversation like the one Feynman describes, the engineers are in agreement, and then the person in charge stands up and says, "Look, if everybody hates this idea, we can't be lazy and go forward with it just because we don't have a better one," or, "I guess we can't make a decision on this, because there's too much negativity and people are just going to nit-pick every idea to death!" No, no, talking through every possible objection to an idea is how you can tell that people are starting to zero in on it as the most likely best solution. The closer an idea gets to acceptance, the more thoroughly you vet it. The more it becomes clear that an idea is the best way forward, the more you start to prepare for dealing with the reality of it. This makes practical sense, but not political sense, so it seems weird and unnatural to a lot of outside observers, who expect respect to be communicated by agreement, and emerging consensus around an idea to be expressed by a shared avoidance of mentioning the downsides.
- Datenstrom 5y ago> talking through every possible objection to an idea is how you can tell that people are starting to zero in on it as the most likely best solution. The closer an idea gets to acceptance, the more thoroughly you vet it. The more it becomes clear that an idea is the best way forward, the more you start to prepare for dealing with the reality of it. Sounds a lot like the Braintrust described in the book "Creativity, Inc." which was accredited with a large portion of the credit for Pixar's success. > This makes practical sense, but not political sense The book says that to create the kind of environment that a Braintrust can function in takes a deal of care and one thing was all politics needed to be removed. Great book though highly recommend it.
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- janandonly 5y agoI recently read “Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!“ and it’s a good little book filled with stories like these.
- Datenstrom 5y agoCommented on another post before reading in classic HN fashion, but the environment of the committee described sounds very much like the Braintrust Pixar leadership uses to create their stories. Any leaders looking to cultivate an environment that supports that kind of productive decision making can likely find some great tactics in the book "Creativity, Inc."
- dav_Oz 5y agoIt's a great angle on the communication side of science. I think the notion of "great man" like the genius of "Einstein" or "Newton" is seriously skewed. If you take a closer look at their correspondence and upbringing, they both were very well "connected" in their own ways beforehand. This picture of a loner sitting bored at a Patent Office and all by himself coming up with 4 groundbreaking papers (photoelectric effect, brownian motion, special relativity) in 1905 - [or Newtons "annus mirabilis" after fleeing Cambridge University because of the plague in 1665 and "quarantining" himself for 2 years in his native village (by his own account (!) there he singlehandendly developed integral calculus, dicovered the composite nature of light and finally refined his gravitational theory)] - readily highlights the individual instances of "genius" which I do not want to dismiss here - but entirely blanks out how those free floating ideas were able to circulate and bounce off each other giving rise to those great insights in the "quiet" moments of those "geniuses". Only after their recognition of "genius" they seemed to develop some really unhealthy stubbornness. Newton - beginning in 1686 with his publication of the Principia - "disputing" any influence Hooke might have had and at his height of power letting his "Royal Society" create a comittee to decide against Leibniz "priority" regarding "calculus" in 1712). Einstein beginning with the Bohr debate (1927 onwards) and productively contributing to the EPR paradox in 1934 (further developed by Bell to the infamous "Bell's theorem") felt more and more "misunderstood" and isolated himself to work on his own "unified field theory" and from then on did not participate in any of the "quantum mechanics" of his time.
- neuro_image2 5y agoI wish there was anything close to this in healthcare. Most medical group meetings are: a)A small number of people that understand the issue (generally specialists) being drowned out by: b)A large number of people with a vague understanding of the issue (related specialists and generalists) c)A number of people with no understanding of the issue with the most political clout (administrators) And then a final decision made by the least knowledgeable, most political administrator with the most vested interests.
- KKKKkkkk1 5y agoNarrator: What these guys didn't know is that Compton talked it over with the chair before the meeting. If you've worked in a bureaucracy, you'll know that the important decisions are not made in meetings.
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