Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
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Maybe for him these two were the same. There is something cold about his recommendation, though. I'm not sure what motivated him. Impressing himself with important discoveries? I never in all his talking about missile trajectories and weapons-related work came across any evidence of ethical considerations. Godement's Algebra with its inspiring political and ethical conscience - its author was man as well as mathematician - made me vividly aware of how a work of mathematics/physics can either be ethical, or it can pretend that ethics are not its concern. Or rather, like a heartless child, act without ever even considering consequences. Maybe Hamming was just working on the important problems in his field, and disregarding all else, and thought that was enough.
My own PhD supervisor had a similar attitude, though it runs against how many others approach a problem I feel. For example, I'm unconvinced that starting a project with a thorough literature review is necessarily the best plan. It can shroud your thoughts, make you miss the same things everyone else has and make you feel that all the work has already been done.
This is quite a helpful example. I have spent much of my career concerned about avoiding duplication of effort at all costs, and a significant counterweight just clicked with me.
Comparing parallel experiences for new insights is a core competency of our brains. It's true with many other animals as well.
One can't be at peak productivity or creativity while constantly comparing their work to others. A very basic trap that even Nobel Prize winners get stuck in apparently.
We build on what other people build. Some many times I had to read other people code which I think made me a better engineer. If I work in isolation, not sure if I can improve the quality.
There is a strong culture of building on top of the work of others, and in some cases people build really neat stuff that they could never have done on their own by pulling in years of work in the form of libraries and datasets and etc, but that way of working isn't for everybody. You might end up spending more time trying to keep up with the latest and greatest everything instead of developing your own ideas.
I think of Minecraft as a pretty good example. While everyone else was focused on making photorealistic shooters on game engine X Notch was all like "what if everything was cubes that went on forever", and he ended up making something super unique (and extremely popular).
Or Chuck Moore with all his wacky Forths. Not the billionaire that Notch is, but he seems pretty happy.
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.
"The Feynman algorithm was facetiously suggested by Murray Gell-Mann, a colleague of Feynman, in a New York Times interview."
"Guidance: Think".
The same math teacher also had at least one exam where all the correct answers except one happened to be exactly 3.
Your point about working/collaborating/trusting in others is a twofold thing. Environments where everyone thrives to their max are very rare and hard to protect. Centrally here, being aware of what you need and how you can work with (or without) others is the crucial thing, and yes, reverse Dunning-Kruger happens to the best of us.
UPDATE: A bit of humility keeps every scientist's personality on the way towards self-improvement and breakthrough.
If you pay attention to what the others are doing, you are working inside what is socially acceptable in your group and usually you are not going to go against the stablished truth. Hence you will not be able to add any breakthrough to your area of expertise.
Feynman as the post says, experienced this social anxiety once he had the fame. He was able to recognice that you can not truly advance in new topics if you don't ignore social preasure, even if it's self inflicted.
Of course that means that you risk being called a crank, or not getting tenure, or grants for your proyects.
There is huge value in incremental knowledge, but to be Einstein, Watson or Feynman you first need to publish something new that most people will not recognice as valuable at first, if ever...
Edit typos.
Depends on what you think 'works' means. You get stuff done but chances are (and these chances are quite significant) no-one will care. If you are a genius (even if you don't recognize that yourself) this works because what you do will be recognized by others. Like writers doing their thing despite what others (including publishers) say; the talents become famous, the much larger group that are not so talented (or, unfortunately, for other reasons) are never read.
If you're interested in how evolution works, check out The Selfish Gene.
I don't think I would dare to introduce radically new stuf (I'm no scientist so it's easy for me to make this statement), at least in the area that puts food on the table, and this is what most people do. It's natural.
You need to be antisocial or obsessed or have no need to public suport due to a special situation(rich, political suport, personal inconditional suport from the boss, being an outsider).
Most of them will be wrong just the same and considered cranks, made fun off and forgotten.
We still need this kind of people even if we wont be like them.
The exactly same suggestion from "our friend" is treated differently then suggestion from "that suspicious dude/girl". It may be difference between mild criticism and "it is ultimate proof he is dumbo". It makes big difference in practical results. It may be difference between "jesus, did you had to say that" and "you are not gonna get responsible position ever again or at least you are not gonna go to that meeting again".
Keeping one's eyes open to contradictory/heretic/... evidence seems to be a common trait among the giants.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/13/donald-tru...
"“In conditions of uncertainty and risk,” the researchers explained, “some instances of optimism lead people to make better decisions by helping avoid more costly mistakes and contribute to survival and flourishing.” Even so, it’s true only to a point. “Excessive optimism,” they concluded, “can become problematic and lead to poor strategic planning, disillusionment and disappointment, and risky behaviours""
Trump also wrote, according to the article:
"“Someone asked me if I thought I was a genius,” he wrote in 2009 in Think Like a Champion. “I decided to say yes. Why not? Try it out. Tell yourself that you are a genius.”"
The researcher's thoughts:
"“For most people,” said Norem, who specializes in optimism, pessimism and personality psychology, “there’s a point at which, if that’s all they bring to the table, it breaks down.”
The question is where that point is for Trump. He is so clearly not most people. In the words of Mitch Horowitz: “He is a kind of Frankenstein monster of the philosophy” of positive thought.""
The whole article is really worth reading.
"Does this work for Feynman, because he is a genius? in the same way that lots of successful people offer tidbits of advice that wouldn't apply to someone in different circumstances, or perhaps with a different level of intellect."
My response post is answering to that part of the question by referring to the article, which is worth reading exactly because it discusses that problem: when and where can it be said that somebody is just delusional, even if he gets to be a president of the only remaining "superpower".
More globally, the attitude described in the article is a broad phenomenon, which is also worth considering. In short, please read the article linked, don't react based only on your initial emotion. I guess you'll understand the post differently. I thought my quotes were a good selection, still I think you really missed the point if you complain that I compare them as equal.
As you see in the article and my quotes, Trump operates under the assumption that he's a "genius." Reading the other news, even when somebody (to be precise, a Secretary of State!) calls him a "moron" he responds with the IQ challenge (sounds like a joke but it's not):
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/10/donald-trump...
The previous article, here again for clarity,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/13/donald-tru...
is however clear about the eventual problems of being delusional. Much bigger problem for everybody else than for the person himself.
If you’re not doing things that you think are important and should be done because you are worried about the opinions of peers or sacred cows, you should dare to be bold. Keeping people happy isn’t always the right way. That’s what makes you a leader.
That said, jumping off a table is a risk that can be managed. Jumping off a cliff is not likely to end well!
By following curiosity however, knowledge in a specific direction as set by your heart compounds. You can become superhuman at being you. (there is some luck involved in whether those skills can transfer into money/power/etc for the given time period)
This is why early success can kill genius because a false God is created, the regard of others. By desiring and aiming, the target is missed. Because genius isn't about hitting targets or any sort of finite game with a goal. It's about the continuous burning of compounding interest, discovering and expanding our knowledge of the universe and life.
Willpower is powerful but myopic, like the electromagnetic force. Curiosity or self driven passion is like gravity, much weaker in small amounts but continuously compounding at all scales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
Disregard or failure to give credit to others where credit is due?
For a while she actively campaigned against DNA being a double helix, see e.g. her 'obiturary' for the double helix [1] which preceeds Watson and Crick’s paper. Might her insistence that DNA is not a double helix have misled Wilkins and others?
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/files/201...
This is the relevant section from the Wikipedia article, which like most Wikipedia articles on contentious topics should be taken with a grain of salt and not substituted for original sources:
Recognition of her contribution to the model of DNA Upon the completion of their model, Crick and Watson had invited Wilkins to be a co-author of their paper describing the structure.[186] Wilkins turned down this offer, as he had taken no part in building the model.[187] He later expressed regret that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the discovery.[188] There is no doubt that Franklin's experimental data were used by Crick and Watson to build their model of DNA in 1953. Some, including Maddox, have explained this citation omission by suggesting that it may be a question of circumstance, because it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC report they had seen.[78]
Indeed, a clear timely acknowledgment would have been awkward, given the unorthodox manner in which data were transferred from King's to Cambridge. However, methods were available. Watson and Crick could have cited the MRC report as a personal communication or else cited the Acta articles in press, or most easily, the third Nature paper that they knew was in press. One of the most important accomplishments of Maddox's widely acclaimed biography is that Maddox made a well-received case for inadequate acknowledgement. "Such acknowledgement as they gave her was very muted and always coupled with the name of Wilkins".[189]
Twenty five years after the fact, the first clear recitation of Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, The Double Helix, although it was buried under descriptions of Watson's (often quite negative) regard towards Franklin during the period of their work on DNA. This attitude is epitomized in the confrontation between Watson and Franklin over a preprint of Pauling's mistaken DNA manuscript.[190] Watson's words impelled Sayre to write her rebuttal, in which the entire chapter nine, "Winner Take All" has the structure of a legal brief dissecting and analyzing the topic of acknowledgement.[191]
Sayre's early analysis was often ignored because of perceived feminist overtones in her book. Watson and Crick did not cite the X-ray diffraction work of Wilkins and Franklin in their original paper, though they admit having "been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London".[81] In fact, Watson and Crick cited no experimental data at all in support of their model. Franklin and Gosling's publication of the DNA X-ray image, in the same issue of Nature, served as the principal evidence:
Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication.[192]
she got it wrong.http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/2013/04/2...
The issue with Watson's original account is here in the Johnson's text:
After negotiations between both labs, papers by Wilkins and by Franklin and Gosling appeared in the same issue of Nature along with the one by Watson and Crick. (They can all be found on a website at Nature, and an annotated version of the Watson-Crick paper is at the Exploratorium’s site.) Toward the end of their paper, they flatly state that “We were not aware of the details of the results presented [by the King’s scientists] when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments.” Yet they go on to write in an acknowledgment, three paragraphs later: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.”
The sentences seem to contradict each other, and in any case Watson made a point, in his book The Double Helix, to describe the pivotal moment when he saw Photo 51.
So the controversy continues. Was it ethical for Wilkins to show Watson his colleague’s work without asking her first? Should she have been invited to be a coauthor on the historic paper? Watson hardly helped his case with his belittling comments about Franklin in The Double Helix.
The bigger issue from the original Hacker News post is Watson and also Feynman's portrayal of their work as highly independent of their colleagues: "disregarding" others.
I'd appreciate it if you could state clearly whether you think
- F. got it wrong, or
- she knew/assumed early on that it was a helix, but lied about it?
Thank you.
As to whether the X-rays should have been seen by Crick/Watson, The research was publically funded. Publically funded research should be open and transparent. Or do you disagree with transparency of taxpayer money? Would it have even been legally possible for F. to refuse the communication of her tax-payer funded results?
Imagine being in a software team and disregarding what others are doing? Screw the rest of the team, I'll work on my own better solution and ignore the parts that are already working well!
You might end up with a good solution to the problem, but you'll also manage to piss off a lot of people ^^
A more valuable 'quote' from Feynman would be to "Test everything yourself". Don't just take for granted the results of others but verify it yourself. That (in the field of software) can be quite valuable :-)
Still, loved reading that blogpost!
If you are competent, have a realistic estimate of your competence, this might not be a bad idea if what you need is a purely technical solution. In many big organizations (lets leave them nameless) most of your time might be going in navigating the politics, guess-estimating different people's internal incentives and how to steer with or around them, not enough time might remain for thinking about the actual technical problem. In these organizations its necessary to take care of these things, because even if you figured out a great solution that ticked all the technical boxes, including technical compatibility with others, all that will come to nought if it is not in alignment with the social and political aspects.
This.
Just _yesterday_ some xls-to-json library that has been used in the past was choking on an innocent-looking file. After fiddling with the thing for over an hour, including using LibreOffice to change the file format, I still could not get the library to read the file.
In five minutes I had a Python script which read the CSV version of the file and converted it to the necessary format. I chanced writing the script because that I knew that I could. In other situations, gambling company time on "I _might_ be able to help" usually leads to wasting company time.
Exactly that has been the goal of large scale programming. To find a way to structure programs so that you will be able to disregard others.
More accurately: to minimize communication needed to build software.
IMO it's more about "don't follow the path others take, where it's easy to make the same assumptions they did. work through things from first principles yourself".
SpaceX was started because he sat on a plane and worked out the cost to orbit is limited only by fuel costs if you can make things reusable.
It's something I've considered frequently since.
Though I'm nowhere near as smart as Feynman or Musk.
I also wonder how much working through stuff like that might actually contribute to making people smart. It would be a valuable thing to find out.
You are right, schools don't encourage it enough imo.
I think the application of 'disregard others' to this case would be to ignore what other software teams working on the same problem are doing.
I think there's an extent to which this is actually healthy. If we're to build modular code, we shouldn't concern ourselves with the internal workings of modules built by others. We do need to agree on how the modules will interact, but if we need to concern ourselves with how their parts work then we're insufficiently modular.
This maps to the social interpretation of this advice as well. You need a healthy interpersonal interface to accept useful input while ignoring useless input.
Scientists and researchers are primarily working to build their own brand and to make a contribution which can be tied To them.
A team of s/w emgineers is working to build a cohesive whole. Much different goals and incentives.
Likewise, software engineers have incentives to carve out fiefdoms within their company as a path towards recognition and promotion; building one's own team/department within a company begins with these kinds of contributions.
It applies to anyone attempting to do something new, which does exclude most software engineers. Goals and incentives matter, of course, but are secondary here, I think.
And that'w why no software engineers working on teams will ever win a nobel prize.
I don't mean to be disingenuous, but did you ever stop to think why team work is so drummed into us?
It's not because teamwork produces better results, it's so corporations can treat us as interchangeable cogs. They want knowledge spread across a whole team to 'de-risk' their projects in case someone leaves.
They know full well that the best work is done by expert individuals, but they choose to promote teamwork anyway.
Teams can certainly achieve things that are too large for an individual. And yes, what you said do exist (and on some projects it is even a good thing).
I don't think there are easy general answers, except that all the energy promoting team working is there because nobody likes it. If it's a good or a bad thing, that will probably change every time.
Also why is it so weird to see your company wants you to be replaceable? It’s up to YOU to differentiate yourself.
I was just pointing out that they over-promote the 'effectiveness' of teamwork.
They sell it based on improved problem solving, when they really want it for operational reasons.
Multiple software engineers working to solve the same problem in isolation will arrive at different solutions. Some may work better than others, but that's irrelevant; what's important is that these different engineers will have all achieved a complete understanding of the problem and its solution, and when they collaborate on a new, more complex problem that builds on what they've already done, they each bring their own unique perspective to the table.
This is why side projects are so absolutely crucial to a software engineer's mastery of his or her craft; by working through a problem alone, the engineer not only gets a better understanding of the problem, but is also able to apply diversity of thought to a team's problem set.
My favorite is, Wheeler: “Feynman, I know why all electrons are exactly alike!” Feynman: “Why?” Wheeler: “There is only one electron!” [looping through space-time, we see the cross sections]. Ahh....
Same could go with starting a company or product - competition needs to be paid attention to, but if you do it too much it will lead you astray. The product may end up chasing or copycatting while missing out on some innovation that is entirely new and possibly important.
It can also be the opinion of others. A lot of people, especially when you're doing something that goes out of the ordinary, will judge you for not researching more conventional things. You end up trimming your research so that it pleases people more.
My favorite practice of his was keeping toy problems in your head at all times. Whenever you see a new problem or technique, thing how it relates to a set you already know.
My favorite behavior of his was uniform respect for everyone. He never assumed that someone else couldn't understand. If anything, he felt he couldn't explain. Subtle but important difference.
I have always encouraged colleagues to read less scientific articles, especially if it is incremental science. It encourages you to think inside the box and you will come up with the same solutions everyone else is.
Of course there is more to it, work methodically, formulate problems before solving them, etc. But I'm glad Feynmann agrees with me on this one.
In science it is not obvious whether or not your work will be important or recognised as important until much later.
From the point of view from the entire community it makes sense for individuals to go big risk, but for individuals sometimes you also need to manage your risk differently
In principle those to things could be unrelated, but in practice it can be hard to separate those two aspects.
In other words, believe in yourself and everything seems a little easier.
Of course this advice isn't good for those who work in a team.
I've spent a lot of time trying to deal with imposter syndrome. I guess I saw the parallel.
I'm not a fan of the way it takes over the default WikiPedia URLs, however. And the Firefox plugin hasn't been updated since 2016 and isn't compatible with newer versions of Firefox so I don't use it on a regular basis anymore.
If you disregard others, you could be inventing the same things as others, or even less smart versions of those things.
In a field where one successful work defines a career, this looks like a good move.
Shameless plug: I've written my own crypto library¹. Not just for the lulz, I fully intend to use it in production. To do that, I had to disregard the crypto community, that basically says anyone who does that deserves to burn in Crypto Hell the time it takes them to count to 2^256. (I might exaggerate a tad).
They say that for a reason however. I had to seek and listen to external advice eventually. Which, judging by the holes they poked through my library, was invaluable.
I think there are two phases. The "I'll show them" phase where you hide under your cave doing your thing, and the phase where you actually show some results and confirm whether this was a worthwhile endeavour.
Feynman is clearly saying disregard others while you are doing the work, not disregard others when you present it for feedback and criticism. That is the spirit with which I responded.
As a developer, there is a third option where your work is simply ignored. If it is functional for you and you are satisfied with your own work, then sure, feel free to disregard others lack of interest, like an artist who values their own work but meets a deafening silence. But please don't disregard serious criticism.
Showing "them" would be pure social validation and, according to your parent, not recommended. Showing "that" would be sanity protection, just as you understand it.
Very little. The chosen primitives are naturally resistant to timing attacks, thanks to the utter absence of secret dependent branches and secret dependent indices. I did have doubts about constant time comparison (code generated under -O3 was crazy), which I solved by changing the API.
Locking the memory is not implemented, only discussed in the manual (Monocypher wants to stay portable).
Zeroing out memory is neither implemented nor discussed. I'm not sure what to make of it, actually. If it is useful, then wiping the contexts is not enough, you likely also have to wipe temporary buffers above the top of the stack (I don't think anybody does this). In any case, if the attacker can read your memory, you're probably screwed anyway.
Now if some attacker can read your memory only after you've processed your secret stuff, a `crypto_wipe()` function would have its uses. But if you've processed secret stuff once, you're likely to do it again, and then crypto_wipe won't save you.
I'm also afraid zeroing out memory gives a false sense of security. I'm more in favour of segregating the sensitive stuff in a separate process, like Qmail.
Could there be an algorithmic reason for this surprising behaviour, or is this a manual intervention?