One thing that can paralise you as a researcher is to be too concerned with what others are doing, that is for sure. Some journals even discourage or eliminate claims of priority (eg Phys Rev). The time you spend worrying about the work of others could be more productively spend expressing your ideas.
Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
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Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#12Disregard others is a high risk high reward move. And doing it too much would ruin your career.
Most of the time, listening to others can avoid your stumbling into dead ends, reinventing the wheel, or losing touch with important problems.
Of course, the biggest breakthroughs will often come from disregarding the existing paradigm, but the art is both believing in the current theory (so you can make progress within it) and disbelieving that it is the full story (so you can make the breakthroughs).
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#13Yeah well Feynman supposedly publicly claimed the HBT result was wrong before later apologizing, and also is quoted as having claimed he learned that he doesn't have to feel responsible for the world. Sounds like he's not exactly the picture of an unconditional advice sage. The advice to disregard others needs to have conditions placed on it. When is ignorance ever a good idea? More important than that is to love yourself and live with confidence instead. That was probably the real issue at hand.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#14To me this runs counter to the Feynman quote “What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket”. I always took it to mean that if you don’t know what others have done you will be very limited by the bounds of your imagination.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#15Dangerous Idiot Strategy: Do X, which sounds cool. (Where X may be "Disregard Others")
Genius Strategy: Do X, which happens to sound cool, in carefully constrained contexts and timeframes*, where X is low-risk & likely high-reward.
*Genius may be required to correctly set constraints.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#16I interpret this as "disregard what other people say when their words cause you to doubt or second-guess yourself for no good reason".
In other words: have confidence.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#17I always wondered where I stumbled across this story. This blog has plenty more details including the Caltech archive that I remember reading when I wrote this years back:
https://jondouglas.dev/disregard-others/
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#18For a genius, yes. For most people it is important to get help and cooperate a lot. Also notable is that this reads differently after controversy surrounding James Watson
Yeah, it's kind of funny reading this. Disregard others. By which we of course mean disregard Rosalind Franklin's foundational work on the structure of DNA.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#19Way too many of you idolize Feynman and it shows. Could he be a good role model? Sure!
However, I'd caution you against rosey-eyed or overgeneralized interpretations, and against adopting wholesome whatever works for someone else!
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
#20Dangerous Idiot Strategy: Do X, which sounds cool. (Where X may be "Disregard Others") Genius Strategy: Do X, which happens to sound cool, in carefully constrained contexts and timeframes*, where X is low-risk & likely high-reward. *Genius may be required to correctly set constraints.
I think this is missing the point. The article isn't saying that Feynman always disregarded others. He'd hit a wall in his career, and the way to break out of it was to employ this psychological trick, consciously or not, to regain self confidence. And clearly it worked.