
Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017) - rendx
https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-breakthrough-disregard-others/
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DuskStar
This 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.

~~~
pavas
I 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.

~~~
jjeaff
That is probably what is desirable for the field as a whole. But as an
individual, not a good idea to shoot for high variance.

~~~
scottlocklin
Anyone who wants high mean low variance career should become an accountant or
a dentist: the payoff is vastly better, and it takes a comparable amount of
intelligence.

This low variance attitude is why we can't have nice things. We have more
"scientists" alive now than at any time in human history, and it is boring and
useless with virtually no downstream results.

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taeric
It 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
> 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
They’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
Just accusing consultants it too simple. This mindset is prevalent in whole
software culture. Think leftpad.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Leftpad 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.

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LeonB
This 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.

~~~
hooloovoo_zoo
Eh, 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
He’s talking about a chapter from Feynman’s autobiography where he explicitly
practiced being an uncaring asshole and was surprised at the effectiveness.

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notimetorelax
Not 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
No 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.

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W-Stool
I'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.

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jneplokh
Not 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
> 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

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threatofrain
But #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.

~~~
asdfman123
I 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.

~~~
WalterBright
Giving advice to others is rarely helpful, even if it is excellent advice.

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madhadron
> 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
Care to elaborate? Specifically, is there any doubt about Watson's
contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure?

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pbnjay
Well since Rosalind Franklin did the majority of the work, yes.

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emiliobumachar
Did 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.

~~~
jrhawley
It'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)

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dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497442)

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mhh__
I feel that these Feynman-isms can hide just how good of a scientist he was.

~~~
icelancer
The 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.

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wwarner
If you read Feynman's nobel acceptance speech
([https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/lectu...](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/lecture/))
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.

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morelandjs
The 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.

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agumonkey
Similarly 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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kstenerud
When you do what everyone else does, you get where everyone else gets.

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mcnamaratw
This 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.

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User23
"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.

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ToddBonzalez
“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
Franklin 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.

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halfway
A directive seemingly at odds with the spirit of social media.

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cos2pi
Who is the author of this blog? My searching hasn't been able to turn up a
name.

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elasolova
Thanks for the post. It is exactly what I need right now.

