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Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

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Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Yes, they failed to credit her: https://pubmed.gov/13054692

In his own book, Watson admitted he had seen her work before publishing his result.

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#72
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#73
If you read Feynman's nobel acceptance speech (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/lectu...) 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.

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#74
post #24
post #6

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. T…

> 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.

There's a difference between a software firm that has the infrastructure to develop new products and a, for example, financial firm, that will consume products and maybe tie all of that together with their own custom solution. If it already exists, and being consumed and actively developed, it's way more efficient to just buy a license than to create your own solution.

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#75
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

By what metric do you measure her work and the work of Watson and Crick?

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#76
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When does weird become too weird? I’m building a non-instant messenger, for example.

Email is a cesspool, this is a genius idea.

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#77

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.

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…

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

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#78
post #4

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.

Depends on the audience. "Not caring about what other people think" may (but usually isn't) helpful advice to -most- pro musicians/composers... or other creatives hoping to land and retain an audience.

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#79
post #75
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By what metric do you measure her work and the work of Watson and Crick?

The fact that she did all of it, and Watson had a friend in the same department she was in let him know when she got her data so he could force his way in and threaten her until she showed it to him, then rush home to publish first? Then spent the rest of his career trash talking her after she died young?

My fellow biology grad students when I was in grad school starting in 2005 pretty universally regarded Watson as a waste of oxygen.

Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

#80
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what metric do you measure her work and the work of Watson and Crick?

The fact that she did all of it, and Watson had a friend in the same department she was in let him know when she got her data so he could force his way in and threaten her until she showed it to him, then rush home to publish first? Then spent the rest of his career trash talking her after she died young? My fellow biology grad students when I was in grad school starting in 2005 pretty universally regarded Watson as…

This is not an accurate summary of events. The Xray image helped but required spiral maths and modeling.

On forgotten people what about Raymond Gosling (Franklin's PhD student) who took the famous photo:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51

Watson was shown Gosling's photo by Gosling new supervisor after transferring from under Franklin's supervision.

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