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> Richard Feynman on explaining technical matters to the average person Richard Feynman lecture on computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https:

by type0 2y ago

> Richard Feynman on explaining technical matters to the average person Richard Feynman lecture on computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

koolba 2y ago
Every time I’ve watched that video I wonder what it would have been like to be in the audience and correct Feynman that 8x7 != 16.
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
But, Feynman also tells this interviewer that he can't really explain how magnetic attraction and repulsion work. "I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
- mistercow 2y ago
  I think this is a really important part of simplified explanations. You can get pretty far explaining things to people based on the questions that come to them naturally, but eventually you’ll hit a point where understanding requires asking a very long series of the right questions. At these points you have to be willing to say “to go further in this direction, we have to cover several dozen hours of background material” rather than trying to find an immediate practical connection that doesn’t exist.
  - OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
    That clip was part of a longer interview with Feynman and he did a lot of those. If he were that concerned about oversimplifying or getting into circular arguments (magnets, rubber bands, elasticity, back to electromagnetism) I think he would not have done them in the first place. I am a great admirer of Feynman and overall appreciate what he has done to explain physics and the scientific approach to the public. In this case, I wonder why he agreed to the interview at all. Robert Frost addressed some of this is "Education by Poetry." I don't pretend to grok all of his talk but he talks about how we use metaphor to explain and understand but that metaphor has its limitations [1]. "Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere." [1] https://www.poetrysoup.com/poetry/resources/documents/education-by-poetry-robert-frost.pdf https://www.poetrysoup.com/poetry/resources/documents/educat...

by type0 2y ago

> Richard Feynman on explaining technical matters to the average person Richard Feynman lecture on computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

koolba 2y ago

Every time I’ve watched that video I wonder what it would have been like to be in the audience and correct Feynman that 8x7 != 16.

OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago

But, Feynman also tells this interviewer that he can't really explain how magnetic attraction and repulsion work. "I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

mistercow 2y ago
I think this is a really important part of simplified explanations. You can get pretty far explaining things to people based on the questions that come to them naturally, but eventually you’ll hit a point where understanding requires asking a very long series of the right questions. At these points you have to be willing to say “to go further in this direction, we have to cover several dozen hours of background material” rather than trying to find an immediate practical connection that doesn’t exist.
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  That clip was part of a longer interview with Feynman and he did a lot of those. If he were that concerned about oversimplifying or getting into circular arguments (magnets, rubber bands, elasticity, back to electromagnetism) I think he would not have done them in the first place. I am a great admirer of Feynman and overall appreciate what he has done to explain physics and the scientific approach to the public. In this case, I wonder why he agreed to the interview at all. Robert Frost addressed some of this is "Education by Poetry." I don't pretend to grok all of his talk but he talks about how we use metaphor to explain and understand but that metaphor has its limitations [1]. "Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, but it has not failed everywhere." [1] https://www.poetrysoup.com/poetry/resources/documents/education-by-poetry-robert-frost.pdf https://www.poetrysoup.com/poetry/resources/documents/educat...