Feynman: making the extraordinary look easy
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
> Such behavior is chronicled in a notorious chapter of his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (“I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing”).
This suggests that the attitude discussed was how Feynman thought about woman. However, the chapter is about trying out that attitude as a temporary experiment — and Feynman quickly rejects the approach precisely because is feels too sexist/dehumanizing (iirc, it's been a while since I read the source).
None of that is to disagree with the article's overall point – I don't have an informed opinion on the matter. But I did find that quote a bit misleading.
There was an interesting article in The Baffler a little while ago on his polarizing history and personal views. I don't really agree with the conclusions it came to (it was very much of the position that he was undeniably irredeemably awful), but it was really the first long-form critique of him that seemed like it actually was familiar with the target, and has really been something I've thought about every time I've seen Feynman mentioned since, in any context.
It should be noted that the author literally wrote a book about Feynman, so definitely would have read a ton of his work.
Who hasn't said something of this sort or spirit at one time or another. Both men and women. Even if it wasn't part of some thought experiment, it's an irrelevant anecdote...
it's universal i think
On the other hand, I'm in one of the departments Feynman had an appointment with for a few years. Some of the older faculty overlapped with him and have fun stories to share. However, one of the lasting memories of his stay was how he was predatory towards the undergraduate women. In fact, it was to the point that some people speculate that he was forced to the leave the department after sleeping with too many of his students.
I still look up to Feynman for his science, but there were some real problems with how he treated women. Even if the article didn't do a great job of presenting the evidence for it. Besides Surely you're Joking is Feynman as portrayed by Feynman. He's famously a showman and isn't going to create an image of himself in the book that he doesn't think is likeable. Interestingly, from what I remember reading, he also did a lot to support the female scientists in his life including his sister.
I did some googling though and apparently his time at Cornell is talked about in Lawrence Krauss's biography "Quantum Man". Here's a brief review of it [1]. Apparently as a professor he would pretend to be an undergrad to sleep with students. He also apparently slept with the wives of multiple faculty (I might have remembered it wrong and this was the reason he was rumored to have been forced to leave over).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/quantum-man-...
These folks are so selective in what they present, and the slant never changes.
"In high school, though Feynman excelled in academics, he began to foster insecurities around masculinity. Later in life this would curdle into juvenile braggadocio and poisonous attitudes towards women, with him making degrading remarks about those he met, and which persisted throughout his life. Such behavior is chronicled in a notorious chapter of his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (“I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing”). Yet, this markedly contrasted with his unwavering respect for the many talented women he supported: starting with his sister and including his first wife Arline. He was impressed and influenced by Arline’s skills as an artist and music teacher. The marriage ended tragically early when Arline died of tuberculosis. Years later, Feynman leant valuable support to the Blake scholar Jenijoy La Belle, the first female faculty appointment at Caltech, who had been denied tenure. One of the few professors outside of the humanities who came to her defence, he published an influential letter of support in the campus newspaper, and thanks in part to this, she received tenure and enjoyed a long career."
I'm confused. The article is 90% about his career as a scientist, and is nothing but laudatory. 10%, if that, is about his relationships with women, and even the critique given there is tempered w/the observation that he had a strong and loving relationship with his wife.
So, how is this a hatchet job? Reads more like a normal biographical article.
What exactly is your critique here?
Edit: I think it was from this address: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/broadcasts/face-to-face/... I haven't come across it other places, but it doesn't surprise me.
(Very likely you already knew this and were asking about the "ugly tourist" part.)
In this sense he was a guide, saying, "Don't worry, this is a journey we can go on together, and parts of it you have traveled before". He makes you believe you can understand something (or frankly tells us when we can't), which seems the ideal mental state for difficult subject matter.
Isn't what is remarkable about Feynman worth celebrating? Perhaps even more so because he was only a human being.
Now he lived in a more sexist culture than we do, so maybe that has something to do with it?
This is how he is characterized:
> known for his [...], sexism along with generous support for women academicians
But to answer the question, the reason for this to not make it taboo is simple - it is part of history and world. When you make it taboo, people end up having naive simplistic ideas over how world worked back then.
For what it's worth, I think it's clear that Feynman was, at the very least, what-we-nowadays-tend-to-call-sexist. That is, he saw women as sex objects and talked about them as sex objects, and so far as I can tell saw nothing wrong or improper about doing that. See, e.g., That Chapter of "Surely you're joking...", a bit of which is quoted in the article. (The article's decontextualization makes it look worse than it actually is, but it's still not great.) It's harder to tell whether he was sexist in the narrower sense of thinking that women are generally e.g. intellectually inferior to men. I'm pretty sure he wasn't sexist in the even narrower sense of thinking that women simply can't do the things that traditionally used to be men's jobs.
[1] Making a guess on the basis of username.
> I'm pretty sure he wasn't sexist in the even narrower sense of thinking that women simply can't do the things that traditionally used to be men's jobs
I think that part is addressed by "generous support for women academicians", support he gave to his sister and "unwavering respect for the many talented women he supported" and "support to the Blake scholar Jenijoy La Belle" all in the article.
The article basically goes out of way to point out instances where he was supportive to women with ambitions.
Offtopic: To me personally, mentioned negative attitudes mostly spoken to having certain sense of entitlement or naivety around bar women. He kind of expected them to be different species. The one where a girl falls in love with dude she just met and will have sex cause the guy she knows for 10 minutes is so awesome. Obviously it does not work like that, leading to disappointment and resentment over having to basically pay for sex.
To be clear: I see more sexism in the Los Alamos chapter,where a 'Girl' is only good enough to do computations, until the computer replaces them.
While the bar-chapters quoted here paint a bleak picture, it does so of both sexes, and Feynman remarks how things didn't work as he wasbrought up to expect.
I am indeed male,even if 'hyperman' was a happy artefact of an algorithm that shortened my 4 word full name to 8 characters to create a student logon name. My classmates liked it and it stuck
In the past there were two kinds of Feynman articles:
1) Glowing, without reservation, and notably ignoring some of his sexist views, statements, and actions
2) Conflicted and accusatory - tainting a wonderful educator and brilliant innovator as irredeemable. Someone who we should stop worshipping because of his problematic points of view.
The truth is both. And this article acknowledges and leans into it. We should strive to celebrate the best of Feynman, and apply his joy and wonder of science into our lives. But we should be aware of his more prickly and selfish aspects, and seek to not fall into the same trappings.
I think this article is great, and is a good template for approaching other flawed legends.
I am not familiar enough with Feynman's life to hold a particularly nuanced opinion, but it seems like just that one line intentionally taken out of context seems to be the issue. A one-line summary of the same chapter in the book could show that he was a womanizer without taking a particularly inflammatory quote out of context.
In an unlikely coincidence, that particular chapter of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! was one of the few that I had read.
Sure he was in a more sexist society. But the reason this still matters is that it represents the sexist culture that's still around in science today. It's not about the man it's a bigger discussion on an institution.
I still enjoyed the book immensely, mind you, and I have no doubt some of the anecdotes were genuine, but that was the general impression I had by the end.
I recall the story of the Oak Ridge plant, where they think he is a great Genius yet he clearly illustrates he is not.
wait, here it is:
I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there's an evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll explode. So they explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any one valve gets stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves everywhere.
Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here, the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second floor, bluuuuurp--going through the stack of blueprints, downup- down-up, talking very fast, explaining the very very complicated chemical plant.
I'm completely dazed, Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It's a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think it's a window, but no, it can't be a window, because it isn't always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.
You must have been in a situation like this when you didn't ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they've been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll say "What are you wasting my time all this time for?"
What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it's a valve.
I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say "What happens if this valve gets stuck?" --figuring they're going to say "That's not a valve, sir, that's a window."
So one looks at the other and says, "Well, if that valve gets stuck--" and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other. They turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say "You're absolutely right, sir."
So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out. And Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said, "You're a genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the plant once and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207 the next morning," he says, "but what you have just done is so fantastic I want to know how, how do you do that?"
I told him you try to find out whether it's a valve or not.
So... self-aggrandizement? self-deprecating? educational? or just entertainment?
1) As smart as you think you are, or as smart as you think OTHERS are, EVERYONE goes through moments when they feel stupid, overwhelmed, and overmatched intellectually.
2) Even the smartest people are bad at some things (e.g. reading blueprints)
3) Ultimately you have to be comfortable with asking stupid questions, ESPECIALLY when people think you're smart. (Note - he didn't ask hoping he asked something smart, or provided value. You have to have the intellectual confidence to look stupid sometimes)
4) Your instincts will still help you even in situations where you are overmatched or under-prepared. Have the humility not to over rely on them, but don't hold back ideas - you never know when they might be helpful.
These lessons are universal for any professional.
I don't understand why people on this forum are so uncomfortable when it comes to nuance about interpersonal behaviour across genders.
Feynman was a brilliant genius and educator. He also had some fucked up attitudes towards women he considered sexual targets (less so those he saw as intellectual peers). These are both facts.
The second does not negate the first. We have to understand and embrace both.
My suspicion is people get into such deep denial about it because they themselves hold indefensible positions. But recognizing problematic behaviours does not taint the entire person. Acknowledging that you have opportunities for improvements with egalitarian treatment of other genders and races does not make you a bad person. Feynman can't change - his attitudes are frozen in stone, or at least in the written word. The rest of us can though.
Decades of multi-channel social and psychological conditioning would be my guess, the same way most beliefs are formed within the human mind.
In particular, I like how TLS slid it in there as a joinder to his life's work, because it totally fits there.
Well done HN, well done.
That being said, I suspect another answer would be 'Imagine some kind of complex disaster investigation, who would the nation call on to help solve it?'
That he was brilliant and also seemingly very broad, is probably less common now along both axis simply because there's so much more stuff now in every field.