Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#32When you do what everyone else does, you get where everyone else gets.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#33"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.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#34This 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, get…
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.
Hey, I'd love to be your little pet Newton. Trouble is, I can't get anyone to pay me to sit at home and navel gaze to my heart's content. Quite the contrary, the only thing people really pay me for is to get my ideas steamrolled into flattened pancakes, set on fire and tossed in the garbage, while they implement their own ideas, steal all the fun parts, then when play time is done, they dump these brittle kiln-baked balls of mud in my lap to spit shine and praise in front on non-technical product/project managers.
Every manager, without fail, steals the fun parts, coding up "the cool projects" that stimulate their curiosity.
And (THIS IS NOT A LIE), every single time I have witnessed a subordinate present an idea for some kind of concept that improves upon existing process, a manager will go out of their way to prevent that idea from happening, and instead do something else. If it were a suggestion to mass produce highly profitable peanut butter sandwiches, boss will find a way to eradicate the idea, and substitute a contradiction to reduce the subordinate's relevance. "Peanut butter? Certainly not. We shall make hot dogs instead and top them with beluga caviar and BBQ mayonnaise."
This is every boss. All of them. One build a real time javascript animated 3D spinning globe that connected cities with glowing, streaming comet trajectories, each time a real user completed a sale.
Another hand rolled an XML web service because he wanted to teach himself how.
Yet another would rewrite any and all JS AND clojure code in like 90 minutes, simply because it was faster for him to apply his superficial implementation than bother considering a subordinates version worth reasoning, learning and understanding work someone else invested.
Every job. Never mattered which.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#35“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.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
He’s talking about a chapter from Feynman’s autobiography where he explicitly practiced being an uncaring asshole and was surprised at the effectiveness.
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.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#37Similarly 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.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
From it’s wiki: “Of note is the story of his first wife, Arline, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died while Feynman was working on the Manhattan Project; the book's title is taken from a question she often put to him when he seemed preoccupied with his colleagues' opinions about his work, which echoed his earlier words to her.”
Ah ok. The lesson I'm thinking of is in his first memoir, "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" in the chapter "The Dignified Professor" where he was feeling quite down because he believes he can't live up to the expectations people have of him. He makes a breakthrough in his thinking, when he realized that he's not responsible for other people's expectations. That's their mistake not his.
This is so liberating to realize this in our own lives. This applies to personal as well as business growth.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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 wh…
Just accusing consultants it too simple. This mindset is prevalent in whole software culture. Think leftpad.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#40This 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, get…
In fields like art, programming, and physics, you'd better be doing something weird . If you're doing something mainstream , the same thing thirty other people around the world are doing, you're all competing to make the same thing — paint the same painting, write the same text editor, prove the same theorem about black holes. Twenty-nine of you are going to get scooped by whoever is the hardest-working, the smartest…
Iterate a few times and expectation and mean start to matter