Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-breakthrough-disregard-others/

by rendx • 7 years ago

267 80 7 years ago

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LeonB2• 7 years ago

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.

otras• 7 years ago

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.”

LeonB2• 7 years ago

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.

hooloovoo_zoo• 7 years ago

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.”

garmaine2• 7 years ago

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

chimprich• 7 years ago

If he really didn't care what people thought, he wouldn't have told anecdotes and written books telling people how he didn't care what people thought about him. He wanted other people to think that he didn't care what other people thought.

In general, caring about what other people think is a good thing. The alternative is to be a sociopath.

dang• 7 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497442

jneplokh• 7 years ago

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.

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

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

threatofrain• 7 years ago

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.

NotSammyHagar• 7 years ago

You have also made an important point, equal to Feynman's.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

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.

taeric• 7 years ago

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.

vast2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

nabla9• 7 years ago

Software is different. It's an implementation not an idea. You can't compare it to math, computer science, and physics, because irrelevant details matters.

Software is build relative to other software and used relative to other software. If you reinvent something already in use that is slightly incompatible with what already exists, you must also recreate all the other stuff from scratch.

Constant reinventing in software that starts from scratch with simple and clean software, then decade later it's finally useful but full of cruft just like the previous innovation with little or no benefit over it.

Another problem with software is the amount of uneducated innovators. Starting from 'scratch the itch' and not doing research is not a good idea.

dorusr• 7 years ago

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.

pontifier• 7 years ago

The subtlety feels a bit more complex to me. It seems as though it's more about not blindly accepting the conclusions of others.

Creating his own understanding of underlying truth was his true talent.

DuskStar2• 7 years ago

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.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

No. Pay attention to what other people do that help what you're doing. That raises the mean by reducing drag.

pavas• 7 years ago

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.

DuskStar2• 7 years ago

A research infrastructure that could support improving the variance of results without significantly impacting the mean would be an enormous boon to the world.

jjeaff• 7 years ago

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.

dfeliej• 7 years ago

I came to suggest something similar.

I often wonder how much this applies today. Academic science is currently heavily driven by funding of popular, low-risk research.

Also, without meaning any disrespect to Feynman or the advice, it's easy enough to say something like "disregard what others are doing" when you've won a Nobel. It's another thing to say this to people in just about any other inequivalent scenario, which is nearly everyone.

lacampbell• 7 years ago

The more experienced I get at programming, the more I find that disregarding others is the correct choice. I have a background and intuition informed by 'common wisdom', but enough confidence to go against it when it seems to make sense without second guessing myself.

Well, at least sometimes. I am getting better at it.

For a master of his domain like Feynman that affect would surely have been amplified. He can back himself to go on a tangent, against the backdrop of the backdrop of the fundamentals of his field.

watwut3• 7 years ago

I had opposite development. At first, those who disregarded others looked like geniuses and heroes. Over time, I started to see damage they caused. Well timed doing your thing is indeed good thing, but those who routinely disregard others slow overall speed of the whole team down.

watwut3• 7 years ago

I don't think this was about disregarding everyone around all the time. This was something that helped Feynman to move in that particular situation when he was weighted down by other peoples expectations and what not.

The story is at the point where he is already honored, known and has "outstanding popular touch". That is when he read a book and calls the wife in the middle of the night to say: "I think I’ve figured it out. Now I’ll be able to work again!"

This does not mean that people should disregard others all the time routinely. It means that there are situations where you have to disregard others expectations, advice and what not.

denzil_correa• 7 years ago

It means that there are situations where you have to disregard others expectations, advice and what not.

And that’s the tricky part. In order to understand, which situation to disregard and which not.

kragen3• 7 years ago

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, the best-supported institutionally, or whatever combination of those turns out to be the deciding factor. Your chance of being in that 97% who have totally wasted their efforts? 97%.

And if you're doing something really mainstream, like writing the next big client-side JavaScript framework, the one that will replace React, watch out! Your chances are a lot worse than that, because there are hundreds of thousands of people who fight with React every day and are frustrated with its shortcomings. Your chances are literally millions to one, unless you work at Microsoft or Google and have management support to beat those Facebook fuckers.

But if you're doing something offbeat, working on a problem† that's mainstream enough to be interesting if you're successful but not mainstream enough that dozens of people are already spending their weekends trying to solve it, you have a much better chance of finding a niche for your project. Maybe it's non-mainstream because people take for granted that it can't be solved (in which case they might be right, as with the reactionless drive — the objective here is to be weird in your project goal, not your epistemology); maybe because they don't understand why it would be important to solve it ("Where's the market?"), and you do; maybe, as with OpenSSL, it's an important problem, but there's no way to get paid for solving it.

A thousand hackers writing a thousand versions of the same library in the same way are only epsilon more productive than one hacker. A thousand hackers writing a thousand different libraries are almost a thousand times as productive.

Winning the lottery? Well, that's pretty much out of your control — but if you do decide to waste your money on the lottery, don't pick a number lots of other people are picking. Then you'll have to split the already-improbable winnings N ways.

But what if you're determined to solve a mainstream problem anyway, one where a thousand people are also trying to solve it? Then you need all the outcome variance you can get! If, of those thousand hackers, 500 are using a very conservative approach that is guaranteed to solve the problem with some quality metric 10 ±1 in 26 weeks ±2 weeks (these being the standard deviations, not some kind of 95% confidence interval), while the other 500 are using all kinds of wild approaches that give them quality metric exp(ln(4)±ln(4)) in time exp(ln(52)±ln(4)) weeks, it's pretty much guaranteed that the "winner" is going to be someone with a totally insane approach that hacked together a library with quality 49 in only 14 weeks. It's not going to be one of the 26-week plodders, because 14 weeks is 12 standard deviations out on their distribution (vs. 0.95 out on the crazy hackers' distribution), and quality 49 is 39 standard deviations out (vs. 1.3 out on the crazy hackers' distribution).

In fact, it's even worthwhile to sacrifice expectation to get higher variance in these situations. If your only hope of winning is to beat everyone else in a single round, you should do whatever will increase your minuscule chance of a home run, regardless of how it affects your chances of striking out.

It's still not socially optimal for people to behave this way — note that here you have 1000 hackers whose aggregate productivity is only about 20× the productivity of an average plodder — but if you've gotten suckered into competing for a mainstream niche, that's the way to play the game.

All of the above is for the simplified situation where you're working on a project by yourself. In a teamwork situation, the relevant actor is your team, not you individually. Do not write your code in Clojure if the rest of the team is working in Ruby. Do not try to solve only problems that nobody else on the team thinks are important.

And this advice definitely does not apply to a situation where doing the same thing someone else already did is valuable. If you're making a sandwich, there's no reason it needs to be different from the sandwich someone else is making across the street. They're two different sandwiches. If someone eats the sandwich across the street, it's gone and it can't feed your customer. They're going to be happy if you make them a sandwich they like, even if it's a little worse than the sandwich across the stret; even if there are many just like it, this sandwich is theirs. This is very different from the situation in software, where one sandwich feeds everybody in the world at once, except people with celiac disease. Nobody is going to be happy that you wrote a web browser from scratch for them instead of just installing Firefox.

† I recognize that a painting is not "solving" a "problem", but many of the same principles apply.

hamilyon2• 7 years ago

Iterate a few times and expectation and mean start to matter

dmitryminkovsky4• 7 years ago

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

nkozyra• 7 years ago

Or, more tersely: We're not all brilliant enough to disregard others, but we all still inherently wish to disregard others.

asdfman1232• 7 years ago

I think the advice here is "get as good as you can, get as smart as you can, and then, when you decide to set off on embarking on a calculated risk, try to forget all the noise around you and stay the course."

I feel like the problem is there's a lot of wannabes who skip the steps of actually gaining competence and then disregard the advice of others. That's not going to work. The first step is years of hard work. For instance, crank physicists who don't really understand graduate level physicists are not going to accomplish anything by disregarding the advice of others.

However, if you know what you're doing, don't second guess yourself when embarking down a risky path. It's probably not as dangerous as it may seem.

golergka• 7 years ago

increases the variance of outcomes more than the mean

So, it makes sense to apply it in circumstances where worse outcomes cost you the same as just bad ones, but best outcomes bring in much more than ordinary good ones.

nine_k• 7 years ago

An approach that increases variance + survivor bias = a number of exalted recommendations: "for that brilliant person it worked like a charm, despite everyone's doubts!"

Obviously when the same approach went someone to a spectacular ruin, that someone is an obvious crackpot who insisted on a wrong thing despite everyone's opinion. It's not worth a story, so nobody mentions these losers.

mhh__• 7 years ago

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

icelancer• 7 years ago

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.

W-Stool• 7 years ago

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.

halfway• 7 years ago

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

kstenerud• 7 years ago

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

User23• 7 years ago

"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.

ToddBonzalez• 7 years ago

“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.

haihaibye3• 7 years ago

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.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

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.

elasolova• 7 years ago

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

mcnamaratw• 7 years ago

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.

madhadron2• 7 years ago

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.

emiliobumachar2• 7 years ago

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

pbnjay2• 7 years ago

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

cos2pi• 7 years ago

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

wwarner• 7 years ago

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.

morelandjs• 7 years ago

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.

Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)

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