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The Best Teacher I Never Had

gatesnotes.com

413 pointsfrostmatthew97 comments

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All the lectures as transcripts, not videos: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Playlist of Feynman lectures on video at Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9H...

I think the messenger lectures are different from the Feynman lectures on physics

The Messenger lectures are the basis for Feynman's book the Character of Physical Law, which I would highly recommend.

>Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free.

This just floored me. I hope that some day I will acquire the generosity and perspective to use a small part of my assets for something like this.

Make sure you're a ruthless monopolist first.

compared to other "great" businessman like Jobs, Gates is least evil of the bunch imo

Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as large as his.

Absolutely. But imo most of us (including myself) find it difficult to spend a token amount of our earning or net worth for a public good.

It wasn't a public good, it was a Microsoft marketing campaign to push people onto the Silverlight platform.

MS never made the Feynman Lectures free for all to read.

It was a public good and it required silverlight.

Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.

Really? I thought giving to charity was a fairly common and widespread practice around the world.

If you're looking for ideas on where your money could make a difference, think about open source projects you use regularly, local food banks, EFF, Amnesty International, or check out the Awesome Foundation!

And if you need help rationalizing it to yourself, consider that you could make a concrete, tear-inducing (positive) difference in somebody's life for the cost of a dinner at a decent restaurant or an Xbox game.

The opposite, I think. People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake).

The money was irrelevant, just as you think, but Bill spent his precious attention to give us Feynman instead of the nearly limitless other opportunities that money gave him. That rocks.

I didn't like his business practices. I very much like his philanthropy. One doesn't "cancel out" the other or any of that nonsense. They plot on different axis.

"People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake)."

Do you have any source for that? That doesn't fit a lot of very famous billionaires, at least.

Well isn`t this some sort of selection bias going on here? To draw your conclusion, I would think you are talking about the louder, more visible types of billionaires.

Not necessarily a randomly selected subset of billionaires.

That's a good point.

And yet, I'd still like to see some kind of reason to think that that's how the other billionaires behave.

I don't necessarily agree with you, but I don't feel like this comment is unproductive or otherwise violates HN rules. The downvotes seem unwarranted.

Well, I rather pay than having to install Silverlight in order to watch it.

For those who need an explanation for the above comment. The site in question:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/#data=2%7C%7C%...

Silverlight is needed to see the "free" videos of Feyman's lectures. That's how Gates did it.

Did Silverlight ever work on iOS or Android? Doesn't look so. The site was monopolistic even as it was made if it's only 5 (edit: 6) years old.

http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/...

I thought they killed it 3 to 4 years ago. I never know with Microsoft.

They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

Helping fix https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/8118 may get you access to these.

Or, even more probably, won't help, if the DRM is also used. Then you need to reverse engineer the DRM too. DRM was the main reason for the Silverlight use. Which can even better explain why nobody is interested in making the downloader or muxer, especially after Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in 2013(!)

Some people are just never happy...

Pardon me for not tripping over myself to thank Gates for liberating the Feynman Lectures by locking them up in an encumbered proprietary format for his company's own benefit.

We can say what we want about copyright law, but at least copyright is based on the idea that the protected material will eventually become accessible in the public domain. DRM offers us no such bargain.

I don't know why you are being downvoted. Releasing something for free should not be an excuse to use DRM and to push one's platform. Such videos could have been made available through other means.

Especially 6 years after the fact plus with Silverlight being deprecated and for Linux Moonlight is abandoned.

On HN, you tend to get modded down for one of two reasons: 1) you're wrong about something; or 2) you're right about something.

Can't take it too personally either way.

You don't have to thank him, it just doesn't make sense to complain. As far as I understand, you have more access to those lectures than you did before, even if you have to deal with Silverlight.

Agreed...a worthwhile goal...

Gates was heavily influenced by Feynman, and for good reason...

One of my favorite Feynman quotes: "The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."

As we practice acquiring true compassion, the more difficult of the two to master, we can easily try for everyday laughter....life ought to be fun...

It often feels that to learn anything you have to let go of you in subtle way to be able to align with the world and take a deep accepting look at it. Only then you're enlightened. And yeah it feels a lot like compassion or love.

> The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter

You can see this influence in Windows ME

I laughed.

He did the same with the Da Vinci notes if I recall correctly.

TLDR: View the videos on youtube and not on microsoft website

For a moment i too thought the same, but it got spoiled soon. To view the videos you need to have sliver light and it takes a long time for just the page to download. Why cant it be just a downloadble file.

The gifts Bill Gates gives always come with a little string attached. In recent years his propaganda became strong enough that most people don't see that anymore.

To be fair, until recently Netflix/Amazon etc used Silverlight, Microsoft could hardly elect to use some other video technology while they were pushing SL.

No, it's not fair. The purpose of Netflix is to earn money from the viewers. Silverlight was used only for DRM.

The claimed purpose of Gates' project was "to make the material freely available" for all learners as a gift (1). He didn't have to use DRM for that if he really bought the rights. As it was executed (Silverlight was never popular, only Netflix users had to install it) it appeared as just an advertising campaign for Silverlight.

Note that research.microsoft.com otherwise never had to follow the commercial limitations of the rest of Microsoft, regularly publishing PDFs (duh, research) or using other non-Microsoft technologies at the time they were "verboten" on other Microsoft sites.

Apparently, they "enhanced" the lectures with comments. These comments are also to be forever lost, remaining locked in in the limiting technology instead of being published in any common format like HTML or PDF.

1) Microsoft's news release from 2009:

https://news.microsoft.com/2009/07/14/microsoft-research-and...

"Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science."

You can look at as them strings, some business savvy, maybe just good old fashioned dogfooding.

Also don't forget that if posted to Youtube, they'd be unavailable in several countries where Youtube is blocked.

... Gift horses.

You're allowed, I've heard, to post to YouTube and post to another site ... amazing I know. /s

Arn't these lectures (at least for the most part) available on YT? I just had a very nice lunchbreak watching Feynman on YT.

YT can delete them at any moment if some complaint comes, unless it's published by the legal owner. And Gates, who apparently bought the rights, decided to publish it only on his site and that was the only place for some years.

Name a known public good or act of charity that didn't have any strings attached. I doubt that you can.

In the case of all of his gifts coming with strings, which would clearly include his charitable work - if he didn't attach strings to eg the $150+ billion he's going to give away, it'd be a disaster. The same is true for essentially all philanthropy. If you want to make sure charitable efforts are not wasted, strings are inherently necessary.

In this case, it would have enabled wider availability if it hadn't been stuck under silverlight, however you're free to reject the gift. At worst it's a very mild inconvenience in exchange for something that's very valuable, and people here are reacting wildly out of proportion to the issue.

Putting strings on your gift to ensure it'll be put to good use is one thing. Now, putting strings on it to ensure you'll get more money from people using your "gift", and then insist on calling it a gift, that's an entirely different thing.

There's no chance that he made an economic profit from the extra Silverlight installs.

Stop being a hater; start doing something useful for society.

At the time of Feynman's death, there were two quotes on his blackboard (along with a to-learn list, and several formulas). The first one is "What I cannot create, I do not understand", followed by "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved". Since the years I've known those quotes, I have those as my personal motto for software development.

Also give me a cute excuse to boo-boo Java-land and framework heavy ecosystem ;)

Thanks for those. Here's a fantastic elaboration: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...

Seems you took the wrong lesson, rejecting solutions instead of trying to understand them.

The creation quote always justifies my NIH strikes.

In 1984, I misread the syllabus for my Physics class, and, as a consequence, bought 'The Feynman Lectures in Physics'. It turned out to be a brilliant mistake, as Feynman was much wiser and funnier than the required textbook. One of the best intellectual moments of my early college life was to read his perspective [0] on how physics fit in with the other sciences, echoed nicely later by Randall Munroe [1].

[0] http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html [1] https://xkcd.com/435/

[1] Stephen Wolfram is missing. But I guess he is too far out.

I guess he'd need A New Kind of Comic.

> Stephen Wolfram is missing

Don't believe the hype.

You can find the Messenger Lectures with subtitles here http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messen...

Thanks! I just can't get over how much like a Brooklyn gangster he sounds. I think I much prefer reading his lectures, where I can mentally substitute a proper cambridge accent. The knowledge seems to be absorbed better that way. Also, he walks around too much: this tends to dissipate the focus. But, I do like the antics with his hands/body and facial expressions!

The grandfather of my best friend from high school had the privilege of having Feynman as one of his seminar instructors whilst at Cornell. In fact, he remembered the famous lecture described in "Surely You're Joking" where Feynman showed up to teach after getting a black eye in a bar fight the preceding weekend.

According to his account, Feynman walked into the lecture hall, turned to face the crowd (at which point, his black eye was noticeable), and asked "So... any questions?"

were there any questions?

To the best of my recollection: no, there weren't. :)

In the very first chemistry class of a very reputated college in France, where every student discovered the new, extremely fast pace of the teaching, with an authoritarian teacher, on a lesson I already knew from high school, I, alone in the lecture, raised my hand to answer a question. And just made a very appropriate, contextual pun on paar with the answer. Teacher smiled. Asked someone else. That gave me quite a reputation for the next 5 years. The guy who makes a pun to a stern teacher.

I love lecture hall situations, where you mix respect, intrigue, the stress of succeeding, and you get to meet the real humans.

I miss lectures as well. A great lecture is my favorite way to learn - it's way more informative than a great textbook. I had a great teacher for my first circuits class in college. I wish I'd made the time to take some of his upper level classes in advanced analog design; he was able to make the material really engaging in the first class since microwave design was his specialty.

If you don't have silverlight, another place that may or may not work for you but has the Messenger lectures in a different format is:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087

Richard Feynman has by far the best explanations I have ever seen from anyone in my life. His explanations are fascinating and deceptively simple. His explanation of electricity in this video has fundamentally changed the way that I see the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be...

Pretty sure "the friend" was Ann Winblad, who he was seeing at the time, and that this was a trip they took to the Outer Banks of NC.

It's all been written about in more detail in past books and magazine articles.

For more see this ancient WIRED piece: http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/

Ask HN: If you were building an online school, how do you find great teachers and how do you convince them to create and offer their lessons online?

You pay them handsomely rather than the pittance they receive from most schools. Great teachers are worth it.

This. And give them autonomy, and extra time for training/curriculum development/introspection when they want it.

How do you do that? Isn't it true that with the way teachers are organized you pay everyone the same based on some blanket criteria like seniority? So you can't pay the good ones handsomely without also paying the bad ones well, which breaks the bank. If you try you get some combination of union/legal/government action that ties you up.

In principle the solution is trivial. You raise the bar for becoming a teacher (supply will grow as well if salaries are much higher and there are these benefits like respect and autonomy). And then if some bad teachers do get in, the institution uses personalized oversight (in the form of "good" teachers observing and critiquing "bad" ones), and any problem teachers are given a smaller load with additional training. In other words, you invest to make all the teachers good.

The question is whether public schools have the funding to do this, and that's a more political question.

So far "raising the bar" has just meant more hoops to jump through and make-work/rubber stamp masters programs just for teachers.

I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect a math teacher to be on par with the average person who gets a math Bachelor's. The reality today is that math teachers take special "watered down" math courses with lowered expectations and less work. I know because I witnessed it first hand.

Funding is not really relevant. You can't do that in a big institution. Much less with fixed grants from government.

"If you were building an online school", you could do that. But if you manage a public school, you have no chance.

Right. It's political because school funding is tied to land and house taxes and such.

Teachers are not all organized like that. Just the ones for public schools.

Isn't that the majority of them? I don't know the numbers. That's why I'm asking.

"If you were building an online school", by definition you'd be organizing the teachers yourself.

Another thread said it. Pay them well.

You pay me a nice salary and let me interact with students who want to learn and I will gladly develop great curriculum and deliver excellent results.

> ... let me interact with students who want to learn

the key to being a great teacher is engaging the ones that don't want to learn.

I respectfully disagree that motivating students and educating them must necessarily be done by the same person. The best teachers should be reserved for the best students if we want to get the best results. Forcing your best teachers to babysit wastes their time and drives them into better careers.

That'll entirely depend on how you define the word "great", and just means you and the GP are talking about different kinds of teaching, done by different teachers, aimed at different students.

I have been nominated for teaching excellence awards by students who didn't want to learn when they entered my classroom. I am considered by many to be a great teacher based on my student evaluations and peer feedback.

But it's tiring and taxing, and it takes time away from interacting with the people who do want to be there.

These little quips like yours usually come from people who have never taught a diverse group of students before, and they are condescending to people who dedicate their lives to teaching others.

> These little quips like yours usually come from people who have never taught a diverse group of students before, and they are condescending to people who dedicate their lives to teaching others.

I've been a high school teacher the past 12 years.

Then you should know how condescending it sounds to have someone say the equivalent of "Well if you were good at your job you could make everyone learn."

> "Well if you were good at your job you could make everyone learn."

I never said this.

I think you'll find this already happens: http://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/teacher-makes-1-million-se...

Freedom and money.

At BetterLesson[1], we have found them and made all their excellent lessons available online for free (Grades K-12). These lessons are mainly for teacher consumption, but have some great teaching strategies for all to learn. Some examples: http://betterlesson.com/lesson/432502/intro-to-trigonometry-... http://betterlesson.com/lesson/448934/adding-and-subtracting...

[1] http://betterlesson.com/master_teacher_projects

In short, implement a free market system! Elaboration, let the students choose teachers, and based on the data you get from that, pay the teachers, and have this data out in the open, so teachers can see what influences their remuneration.

That just creates a system to be gamed. :-(

Would this not reward teachers who give the students the best experience, rather than the best education. I think it would be naive to expect students to be rational actors* in this market.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice-theory.a...

A lot of well deserved praise for Feynman but this video stuck with me for some reason and I always pictured the guy as a bit arrogant and snobbish.

youtube.com/watch?v=3D2RaDVkylY

I liked that video. Learnt something.

I just watched the same video and it was one of the most insightful things that I have seen recently. Feynman is simply acknowledging that there are a few things in physics which are very difficult reduce to layman concepts. The other bit, about "why questions", is also quite interesting. I have come to believe that a lot of questions which sound very interesting, like "why do I exist?", don't really have good answers, and probably will never have. e.g. if it did turn out that we are living in a matrix, the question will simply reduce to "why does the matrix exist?" and soon. Thats what Feynman is trying to point out that "Why something happens?" is not a complete question unless we agree to some understanding beforehand. Otherwise you just go deep into the rabbit hole.

Listen carefully for the questions of the interviewer. He first asked "what is it, the feeling, between the two magnets," Feynman asks "what do you mean the feeling, what do you want to know," "I want to know what's going on," Feynman answered "well they repel each other," then the interviewer really asked "what does that mean, or why are doing that, or how are they doing that."

So Feynman tried to answer the "why" question. The shortest answer would really be "they just do it." There's no "purpose" it's just one manifestation of the electromagnetic force which is behind almost everything we see or feel. It's true, he didn't answer the "how" and that's why some viewers feel "injustice."

Fascinatingly, it's hard to answer "how" without knowing what he who questions already knows. Because the same electromagnetic force is behind almost everything we "see or feel," not just magnets.

If I'd guess the background of average person asking that question, the person would know that the electromagnetic force exists, as "I've heard the name," but not more than that. And he would be intrigued that he "feels" the repulsion between the two objects even if there are "no batteries," he'd actually want to know how it can be that the magnets "work" all the time and "at the distance." But even that isn't true, they don't "work," looking as a physicist, we do the work while pushing the magnets against each other to feel their repulsion, the force exists all the time. So what would be the satisfying answer?

I guess something like "the force you feel is everywhere, but you don't see that particular behavior. In these static magnets the tiny particles in the material can be easily nicely lined up that when you press them to each other you can feel the force differently than with the other materials, where the lining up normally doesn't happen or can't happen."

The interviewer also asked "how when we turn them then they stick to each other." That needs much more talk I'm afraid, unless you just say "they have poles" where you don't really explain the mechanism behind.

I've watched Feynman's videos where he explained some aspects of electromagnetism in a popular way ("that's how we don't fall through the floor" is the catchiest sentence in the talk), he was surely able to "explain the magnets" similarly (although not all the details in the short answer, he actually did a year long lectures for non-physicist students), but here he elaborated the problems in "why" questions.

Once a person already has decent knowledge, he can really enjoy the explanations like this:

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/EfmdR6VWvRM

Who is the Feynman of programming / CS education ?

Well, there's "Feynman lectures on Computation"...

Unreal. Watching him speak about computers, while wearing his logo'd t-shirt, makes me imagine him giving this talk at a recent meetup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

Richard Feynman is my all time favorite person.

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