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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

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161–170 of 285 posts

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#161
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it possible. I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a completely different experience from closing tickets in an office. I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just because they're fun. They might not pay t…

You can't really make a learning system that doesn't play. Physical play is how we train, develop and calibrate our bodies; mental play does the same for our minds. If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and draw and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will surprise me a lot more than the other way around.

> If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and draw and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will surprise me a lot more than the other way around.

I agree, it would be sad if AI wasn't able to play with human culture. Culture is crystallized intelligence.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#162

I read (listened to, technically) this book a few weeks ago because I've always been inspired by the idea of Feynman and didn't know much about him. Honestly, I actually like him less after having read it. As I guess I should have expected, because its subtitle is "Adventures of a Curious Character", it's unfortunately for me filled with many more random personal anecdotes, often involving naked women, prostitutes, g…

One thing to remember about this book that is easy to miss is that it's not a memoir or autobiography in the usual sense. You may have seen this book, and its sequel, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, described as being "by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton" or "edited by Ralph Leighton" or "as told to Ralph Leighton". It turns out that it was not written as a book, but his friend Ralph Leighton (son of the physicist Robert B. Leighton) took several hours of (recorded) conversations with Feynman talking to him, and selected parts of them to go into the book.

So although the book is sold as "by Richard Feynman" (which is true in some sense: it's in the first person, published when he was still alive, and he really did say everything that's in the book), it would be more accurate to call it a book by Ralph Leighton, and an appropriate title may be "Things my friend Richard Feynman told me about himself that I thought were fun". (This also explains the subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character"—this is not Feynman calling himself that, but Leighton describing his friend that way.)

Now consider that (1) Ralph Leighton was not a physicist but Feynman's "close friend and drumming partner", and (2) Feynman was a natural conversationalist, automatically adapting his style depending on whom he was speaking to, whether it was a friend, or undergraduate physics students, or he was talking about computers to a New Age crowd at Esalen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA), and you have this result. The friendly conversational style increases the appeal of the book and gives some insight into the speaker, but the technical detail of Feynman's core work, which was very important to him, gets diluted.

(One of my professors disliked the book for giving the impression that you get a Nobel Prize just living a life of having fun and playing around, while in fact Feynman was known to work very hard, at all hours of day and night. He liked to re-derive by himself anything he learned till he was satisfied he understood it, and that took prodigious amounts of pen-and-paper calculation. This may partly be Feynman projecting an aura of effortless brilliance, but I think it's more likely a combination of the fact that hard work doesn't seem hard if you enjoy it enough, and that going in detail about how hard you worked does not make for very good conversation.)

It is true that many memoirs are written this same way (dictating to someone else), but I think this book shows the effects more than most: including the selection of topics, as you observed.

(BTW the audio material that went into the books is available too, as "The Feynman Tapes", and listening to it may give a different impression than listening to an audiobook of someone else reading the text of a book itself transcribed from audio: https://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com/ )

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#163
post #76
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it possible. I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a completely different experience from closing tickets in an office. I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just because they're fun. They might not pay t…

You could argue that having fun is the end goal of things. Why do we do things that we consider important? Why is it important? Somewhere down the line everything we do should enable someone having fun. If not, then why bother?

> Why do we do things that we consider important?

Fundamentally, to survive. To self replicate. We're self replicators.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#164
post #74
post #6

"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim…

Not everybody is Feynman ofcourse. You have to accept the risk that giving freedom for creativity won't end up with anything useful.

But you'll still end up having fun. So a win, whatever the "outcome". (If such a thing matters then you're probably not at play.)

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#166
post #152
post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

Is this really a matter of tooling versus programming, or is it a matter of wanting to create rather than wanting to re-use the work of others? Even purely in code, you always (EDIT: usually) have the choice of implementing a solution yourself or finding the work of someone else, packaged into a library, which solves the problem for you. Implementing the solution yourself may be the most satisfying way to scratch tha…

> Even purely in code, you always have the choice of implementing a solution yourself or finding the work of someone else, packaged into a library, which solves the problem for you.

In my experience, this isn't remotely true, especially if you're constrained to use a particular language and don't want to pay the overhead of wrapping another language

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#167
post #34
post #6

"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim…

I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it possible. I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a completely different experience from closing tickets in an office. I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just because they're fun. They might not pay t…

> Do things that don't matter. Aside from the doors it can unlock, it's just damn fun.

I found this discussion about open-endedness being very illuminating about doing stuff that are just fun. A revolt against objectives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=2192s

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#168
post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

> I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system Now that CV-driven development is the standard, we are forced to learn new bloated "devops" tools and services every year. This type of knowledge expires very quickly. Also these tools and services do not develop communities: business users drop last-year tools like hot…

[deleted]

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#169
post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

> Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all these things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that much, I just randomly got interested in this particular topic and decided to play around with it". Over the years/decades, that adds up!

"Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a throughly spiky person"

-Bruce Sterling

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#170
If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted.

In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary.

The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.

-- Attributed to J. J. Thompson by Lord Rayleigh, c. 1940

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