
Feynman: making the extraordinary look easy - samclemens
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/feynman-making-the-extraordinary-look-easy/
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codesections
The article quotes Feynman's memoirs is a highly misleading way. It says:

> Such behavior is chronicled in a notorious chapter of his autobiography,
> Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (“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”).

This suggests that the attitude discussed was how Feynman thought about woman.
However, the chapter is about trying out that attitude as a temporary
experiment — and Feynman quickly rejects the approach precisely because is
feels too sexist/dehumanizing (iirc, it's been a while since I read the
source).

None of that is to disagree with the article's overall point – I don't have an
informed opinion on the matter. But I did find that quote a bit misleading.

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djaque
Taking a look back at the book, I think you're right. They are misrepresenting
him in this one quote. He was referring to the gross mindset he was trying
out.

On the other hand, I'm in one of the departments Feynman had an appointment
with for a few years. Some of the older faculty overlapped with him and have
fun stories to share. However, one of the lasting memories of his stay was how
he was predatory towards the undergraduate women. In fact, it was to the point
that some people speculate that he was forced to the leave the department
after sleeping with too many of his students.

I still look up to Feynman for his science, but there were some real problems
with how he treated women. Even if the article didn't do a great job of
presenting the evidence for it. Besides Surely you're Joking is Feynman as
portrayed by Feynman. He's famously a showman and isn't going to create an
image of himself in the book that he doesn't think is likeable. Interestingly,
from what I remember reading, he also did a lot to support the female
scientists in his life including his sister.

~~~
ramraj07
Is there any evidence or reporting to this end? This seems quite the fact
(other than him choking his wife) and would love to learn more about.

~~~
djaque
My knowledge of it is just through department oral history.

I did some googling though and apparently his time at Cornell is talked about
in Lawrence Krauss's biography "Quantum Man". Here's a brief review of it [1].
Apparently as a professor he would pretend to be an undergrad to sleep with
students. He also apparently slept with the wives of multiple faculty (I might
have remembered it wrong and this was the reason he was rumored to have been
forced to leave over).

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/quantum-
man-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/quantum-man-richard-
feynman-review)

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nscalf
I’m so sick of these hatchet jobs on long dead people. If you are not
empathetic enough to put yourself in the position of a different society,
you’re probably not empathic enough to criticize a persons character.
Additionally, I don’t care if he was sexist. We don’t like Feynman because he
was a feminist. We like Feynman because he led the charge in scientific
discovery and progress. No one is perfect.

~~~
adamsea
For context, this is the _entirety_ of the portion of the article which
critiques Feynman's behavior towards women. It's not even 1/5 of the article.

"In high school, though Feynman excelled in academics, he began to foster
insecurities around masculinity. Later in life this would curdle into juvenile
braggadocio and poisonous attitudes towards women, with him making degrading
remarks about those he met, and which persisted throughout his life. Such
behavior is chronicled in a notorious chapter of his autobiography, Surely
You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (“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”). Yet, this markedly contrasted with his unwavering respect for the
many talented women he supported: starting with his sister and including his
first wife Arline. He was impressed and influenced by Arline’s skills as an
artist and music teacher. The marriage ended tragically early when Arline died
of tuberculosis. Years later, Feynman leant valuable support to the Blake
scholar Jenijoy La Belle, the first female faculty appointment at Caltech, who
had been denied tenure. One of the few professors outside of the humanities
who came to her defence, he published an influential letter of support in the
campus newspaper, and thanks in part to this, she received tenure and enjoyed
a long career."

I'm confused. The article is 90% about his career as a scientist, and is
nothing but laudatory. 10%, if that, is about his relationships with women,
and even the critique given there is tempered w/the observation that he had a
strong and loving relationship with his wife.

So, how is this a hatchet job? Reads more like a normal biographical article.

What exactly is your critique here?

~~~
westoncb
It's already been pointed out elsewhere in the comments, but the quote about
"those bar girls are all bitches" is badly taken out of context, since that
was something he'd said in connection with a thought experiment he was
performing.

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SNACKeR99
Feynman is not known as the "Great Explainer" for nothing. It occurred to me
recently that one of his great gifts was in setting the stage for the learning
process. He had a knack for a visceral initial presentation of the subject
matter that was going to be discussed, often with analogies to the physical
world we experience. This had two main effects on the listener, 1) the feeling
(whether true or not) that the subject matter was somehow going to be
relatable and familiar, and 2) providing a strong central mental image around
which to further hang ideas as the discussion went on, rather than staying in
the realm of the abstract for a long time with no grounding point.

In this sense he was a guide, saying, "Don't worry, this is a journey we can
go on together, and parts of it you have traveled before". He makes you
believe you can understand something (or frankly tells us when we can't),
which seems the ideal mental state for difficult subject matter.

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mrunkel
I find this constant sniping tiresome and boring. Yes, even people with great
minds are humans, with all the failings that come with it. We are almost all
lonely and seeking comfort and praise.

Isn't what is remarkable about Feynman worth celebrating? Perhaps even more so
because he was only a human being.

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hyperman1
What is 'sometimes sexist attitudes' doing there? I've read his memoirs and
his lectures, and I saw some of his challenger stuff on youtube. I dont really
see this.

Now he lived in a more sexist culture than we do, so maybe that has something
to do with it?

~~~
watwut
Simultaneously you acknowledge that sexism existed and simultaneously you want
to make it taboo. It is not personal offence to you that sexism existed or
exist nor something outrageous to talk about it.

This is how he is characterized:

> known for his [...], sexism along with generous support for women
> academicians

But to answer the question, the reason for this to not make it taboo is simple
- it is part of history and world. When you make it taboo, people end up
having naive simplistic ideas over how world worked back then.

~~~
gjm11
Why do you say that hyperman1 "want[s] to make it taboo"? I don't see that at
all. I think he[1] is just saying: the article says Feynman was sexist, but I
haven't seen evidence of that and find it hard to believe.

For what it's worth, I think it's clear that Feynman was, at the very least,
what-we-nowadays-tend-to-call-sexist. That is, he saw women as sex objects and
talked about them as sex objects, and so far as I can tell saw nothing wrong
or improper about doing that. See, e.g., That Chapter of "Surely you're
joking...", a bit of which is quoted in the article. (The article's
decontextualization makes it look worse than it actually is, but it's still
not great.) It's harder to tell whether he was sexist in the narrower sense of
thinking that women are _generally_ e.g. intellectually inferior to men. I'm
pretty sure he wasn't sexist in the even narrower sense of thinking that women
simply can't do the things that traditionally used to be men's jobs.

[1] Making a guess on the basis of username.

~~~
hyperman1
Thanks. Your interpretation is indeed what I intended.

To be clear: I see more sexism in the Los Alamos chapter,where a 'Girl' is
only good enough to do computations, until the computer replaces them.

While the bar-chapters quoted here paint a bleak picture, it does so of both
sexes, and Feynman remarks how things didn't work as he wasbrought up to
expect.

I am indeed male,even if 'hyperman' was a happy artefact of an algorithm that
shortened my 4 word full name to 8 characters to create a student logon name.
My classmates liked it and it stuck

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deanCommie
Despite what the other comments are saying, I think this article strikes a
perfect tone, and is showing how we as a society can look at the heroes of our
past and see them holistically - accolades and flaws together.

In the past there were two kinds of Feynman articles:

1) Glowing, without reservation, and notably ignoring some of his sexist
views, statements, and actions

2) Conflicted and accusatory - tainting a wonderful educator and brilliant
innovator as irredeemable. Someone who we should stop worshipping because of
his problematic points of view.

The truth is both. And this article acknowledges and leans into it. We should
strive to celebrate the best of Feynman, and apply his joy and wonder of
science into our lives. But we should be aware of his more prickly and selfish
aspects, and seek to not fall into the same trappings.

I think this article is great, and is a good template for approaching other
flawed legends.

~~~
uep
I generally agree with you, and I like that it doesn't harp on this aspect
when talking about his life, but doesn't pretend it's not there either.

I am not familiar enough with Feynman's life to hold a particularly nuanced
opinion, but it seems like just that one line intentionally taken out of
context seems to be the issue. A one-line summary of the same chapter in the
book could show that he was a womanizer without taking a particularly
inflammatory quote out of context.

In an unlikely coincidence, that particular chapter of Surely You're Joking,
Mr. Feynman! was one of the few that I had read.

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batlamenace
I'm not sure a lot of the comments here have read Feynman's memoir. As much as
he was a brilliant scientist, his attitude towards women does show. That
chapter is chilling, it reads like a post on an incel group.

Sure he was in a more sexist society. But the reason this still matters is
that it represents the sexist culture that's still around in science today.
It's not about the man it's a bigger discussion on an institution.

~~~
umvi
The impression I got after reading "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" was
not that Feynman was sexist (though I did raise my eyebrows a few times), but
that he laundered his vanity via _manufactured_ anecdotes about himself. When
I say _manufactured_ , I don't mean "false", I mean he subtly (but actively)
manipulated the (otherwise ordinary) situations he found himself in such that
they would turn into interesting or even unbelievable anecdotes starring...
well him!

I still enjoyed the book immensely, mind you, and I have no doubt some of the
anecdotes were genuine, but that was the general impression I had by the end.

~~~
m463
Well, from what I've read, I think he still does it all to #1 educate and #2
entertain. (and #2 is a multiplier for #1)

I recall the story of the Oak Ridge plant, where they think he is a great
Genius yet he clearly illustrates he is not.

wait, here it is:

 _I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading
blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to
me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the
plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there 's an evaporator
working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or
something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll explode. So they
explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any one valve gets
stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves everywhere._

 _Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here, the
uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up
through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second
floor, bluuuuurp--going through the stack of blueprints, downup- down-up,
talking very fast, explaining the very very complicated chemical plant._

 _I 'm completely dazed, Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the blueprint
mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It's a
square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think
it's a window, but no, it can't be a window, because it isn't always at the
edge. I want to ask them what it is._

 _You must have been in a situation like this when you didn 't ask them right
away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they've been talking a little
bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll say "What
are you wasting my time all this time for?"_

 _What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it 's a valve._

 _I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses
in the middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say "What happens
if this valve gets stuck?" \--figuring they're going to say "That's not a
valve, sir, that's a window."_

 _So one looks at the other and says, "Well, if that valve gets stuck--" and
he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up and
down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other. They
turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say
"You're absolutely right, sir."_

 _So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out. And
Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said, "You're a
genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the plant once
and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207 the next
morning," he says, "but what you have just done is so fantastic I want to know
how, how do you do that?"_

 _I told him you try to find out whether it 's a valve or not._

So... self-aggrandizement? self-deprecating? educational? or just
entertainment?

~~~
deanCommie
My take on this fabulous story is he is imparting the following key lessons:

1) As smart as you think you are, or as smart as you think OTHERS are,
_EVERYONE_ goes through moments when they feel stupid, overwhelmed, and
overmatched intellectually.

2) Even the smartest people are bad at some things (e.g. reading blueprints)

3) Ultimately you have to be comfortable with asking stupid questions,
ESPECIALLY when people think you're smart. (Note - he didn't ask hoping he
asked something smart, or provided value. You have to have the intellectual
confidence to look stupid sometimes)

4) Your instincts will still help you even in situations where you are
overmatched or under-prepared. Have the humility not to over rely on them, but
don't hold back ideas - you never know when they might be helpful.

These lessons are universal for any professional.

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troughway
I guess it's finally Feynman's turn to be roasted over the coals for some
inappropriate remarks he made somewhere.

In particular, I like how TLS slid it in there as a joinder to his life's
work, because it totally fits there.

Well done HN, well done.

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amelius
Who would be the "Feynman(s)" of our time?

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kingkongjaffa
One answer would be 'science is done in a much more collaborative way now' so
singular titans of a field is much less of a thing.

That being said, I suspect another answer would be 'Imagine some kind of
complex disaster investigation, who would the nation call on to help solve
it?'

That he was brilliant and also seemingly very broad, is probably less common
now along both axis simply because there's so much more stuff now in every
field.

~~~
rowanG077
The only person I can think of is Elon Musk. But he isn't really a scientist.

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neonate
[https://archive.md/Ke60c](https://archive.md/Ke60c)

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known
twitter.com/ProfFeynman

