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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I know too many physics grad students who self-consciously model themselves on him, but wouldn't recommend the Feynmann books to young people. It's too easy to end up as a pile of somebody else's quirks without his unique brilliance and humanity. Wait to read Feynmann until you have a fully formed ego.

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I read the Feynman books as a young person (middle school?) and I came away with a different and very positive impression. What inspired me about him was his insatiable curiosity and how that was expressed. As a kid, the silly stories are funny, and they have a certain appeal just for that, but they are stories in which the protagonist is a curious, brilliant, child-like scientist, which is something to aspire to. That didn't lead to any later attempt to model my own behavior on him as a physics student, and I can't think of examples of people that I saw that had done that.

The same could generally be said about anyone under 25 and philosophy books. Read the literature classics, sure (they're about philosophy and politics too), but reading treatises on someone else's hard-won idiosyncratic view of the world without the emotional barriers and critical filter erected by years of trial and error may just turn the young person into a parrot, or worse, a nihilist without a cause.

As someone who was serially consumed by various philosophers when I was younger, I totally disagree.

Going all in on a philosopher at least once, especially when you're young, is the best way to really appreciate philosophy. It's the difference between understanding what the philosopher thought and understanding what it's like to truly think those thoughts and be immersed in the value system.

I have read philosophy before turning 25 and hence, and I both agree and disagree with this advice. On the one hand, I’ve certainly had my fair share of realizations of how daft I was when I read the works when I was younger and how quick I was to adopt the ideas of others without really understanding them. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be able to contend with a vast number of texts that I do now without the background and terminology I absorbed by being a bit arrogant and tackling some of the works that I had when I was younger.

In general, you can bolster your defenses against unwitting influence if you have a good teacher guiding you and reminding you to be critical. This is more or less the point of dialectic.

Your last advice is critical, but I've seen people fall into voids and make twitch decisions and statements about important things in their lives with consequences spanning years, because they have a philosopher's aura around their fledgling heads. Besides, we can still be plenty arrogant at 25, 30 and 40 but with a bit more consistency.

Out of curiosity, what would a nihilist with a cause look like?

I know, I know, but a cause could be just sustained senseless but concrete suffering, as opposed to imagined sorrow.

I see your point on holding some space for self-exploration before we cargo cult other's beliefs as our own. A couple counter-thoughts: (1) There is no forming of ego without external influence. I'd much prefer a younger person be influenced by the enthusiasm for life of Feynmann when compared to the thousands of other options. I imagine influence to be a zero-sum game. Better to have it add up to enthusiasm. (2) We see different aspects of a book at different points in our lives. We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer (partial quote of FN). Rereading books that influence our younger years is a form of self-discovery.

Cargo culting Feynman's beliefs would be ironic indeed. :)

That makes sense. However (and this is just my isolated experience) I found some good teachings in Feynman in my teens/early 20s without really ending up mimicking his style or behaviors. Some anecdotes in Surely You're Joking were comforting--for example, that you can pick up new skills very late into adulthood that are typically thought of as only accessible by starting early, if you approach them with curiosity.

And some were politically inspiring: with the Challenger disaster, he was an outside mind investigating a systemic problem where people's incentives were en masse preventing them from seeing an ossified power structure. At least that's how he described it, and I'm convinced the lesson was valuable even if it was more complex than that.

Could you elaborate on how people model themselves on him ? I have never read Feynmann. I am in university right now and was going to pick up one of his books soon.

He was anti-authoritarian to the core, a prankster, and undeniably brilliant. But copying the first two doesn't make you the third. Picking locks and doing physics problems at the strip club won't help you become the next Feynmann. He could get away with that stuff because he was uniquely brilliant. Also, being obviously-smarter-than-you is tiresome, even in people who can legitimately cop that attitude. Feynmann himself got on people's nerves sometimes, but we should also remember that his cheeky anecdotes aren't all there was to the man, and he had a lot of good working relationships.

I'm curious how much that has to do with being around students as much as Feynmann's influence.

> Picking locks and doing physics problems at the strip club won't help you become the next Feynmann.

Those also sound a lot like stereotypes of the smart wannabe-cool (or wannabe-smart cool?) people in films and TV. Just look at the awful stereotypes of smug-smarter-than-all young guy in Goodwill Hunting for example. Or any movie where people write equations on glass with a marker.

That said, I'm not around physics grads much so I'm not expert. Although the one physics grad I know well fits into your categorization well. Nothing worse than a "quirky intellectual" without the intellectual part down.

If that's all the people you are referring to took from his books there was probably no hope for them anyway, at least at that stage in their life - it does sound like it's just immaturity you are talking about.

I think there are some good lessons for a young person in his playful curiosity about the world & the anti-authority message was mostly about not taking things for granted & not to be afraid to push further for a more complete answer and question things just because they have always been done a certain way.

another good reason is that he sexually harassed a lot of women and is a bad role model in at least that one very important way, so it should be read pretty critically.

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