Feynman, Harassment, and the Culture of Science
caltechletters.org
caltechletters.org
IMO, the only way that a nuanced portrayal of such historical figures could be given, is to write a more general biographical overview of the person and include the negative aspects in there among all the other facets. Not writing an article that focuses specifically on the negative aspects, that does have the effect of, firstly, character assassination, and secondly, shaming people today who continue to admire the figure for his/her overall achievements (because "how could you possibly admire someone who did unacceptable behaviour X to group Y?").
Yet she was not forced out. Was that her choice? Should we also mourn the lost contributions of others forced out for weakness? Are we to support those forced out due to “unfair” weaknesses while agreeing to dismiss those forced out by “fair” weaknesses?
The sexual/gender dynamic of social interaction is only one aspect that may be abused. There are far too many others to even try to list. And while trying to take the path of fairness and equality is something folks can intelecualize, in practice people are kinda selfish and shitty!
The key developer of the Moderna vaccine was shat on her whole career. She had to leave academia to get (commercial) funding for the final work. Treated better, she might have got it done a decade or more earlier, saving possibly millions of lives.
There is a treasure trove of work by women, abused minorities, and the rest, abandoned when they were driven out of science for crappy reasons, waiting to be rediscovered.
And there is a massive shitpile, preserved by overprivileged nobodies, one-hit wonders, and tenured posers, waiting to be binned. That work is easier to preserve in less quantitative fields like psychology and history, but there is plenty to go around. Drive them out.
There have definitely been minorities, women, etc... that were driven out of science and some work that should have been more recognized.
From what I can tell, the people doing the driving out are actually the nobodies. The nobodies are taking the mantle of moral outrage and weaponizing it to drive out people who disagree with them.
And, obviously it is and always was the nobodies and has-beens driving out people who would shake things up. It has always been easiest to blight the careers of outsiders. The people working are busy, you know, working.
The majority of them are obviously not minorities. There is plenty of competition for scarce placements, grants, and facilities, and everyone needs all available boosts to get enough of all of those just to work.
We need to ensure all of these available boosts are for quality work.
Here is the person you are speaking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karikó
I knew that she was demoted for not showing progress. How would I know that?
The key tech was encapsulating the RNA in a lipid shell. How would I know that?
I also know that her daughter was an Olympian rower. How would I know that?
This work was touted in the press for months because it was the basis for the two RNA based vaccines for COVID-19 used in the US. How would I know that?
I have been following/commenting on COVID-19 on Hacker News since early last year. Go look at my comments.
You just discredit yourself.
So, young Feynman was not particularly good at flirting, and then he received advice from other people which he thereby tried to apply. This process and its mixed results are therefore described with comic detail. Then he also drew some naked women with a pencil. If that is the best case against Feynman, he's still safe. Really, the only legitimate negative thing that you can extract from that book is that he was a bit obsessed with positive attention when young, which may have made him be a bit insufferable. But who isn't at 20. And that's it.
This is getting quite ridiculous.
But there are are all kinds of double standards in both directions so this one is true but not especially remarkable, and if one would complain about it's unfairness, one better be just as incensed and outraged about all the others, and on balance, I think the women get rather more shafting than men.
I don't think it looks very good to cry about this unfairness.
There's a sort of hidden assumption that we need to assign a univariate reputation to people (historical and otherwise), which brings up the difficulty of how to combine these two observations on incomparable axes into a single conclusion. That doesn't require "nuance" either; the fundamental problem here is trying to figure out if thing X outweighs thing Y. That combination isn't going to be particularly informative about the actual person under discussion; it'll mostly just tell you what coefficients you're using when weighting the two observations.
Surrounding every negative observation by positive observations is neither scientifically honest nor informative about the observation itself. It just says that the writer thinks the negative observation shouldn't carry as much weight. In this case, the author is making no such judgment and presenting the facts directly, which I think is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
I read that statement very differently.
Her essay is about the pervasive and accepted sexism in physics and astronomy. Her use of Feynman is of course a hook, but also shows that this is a longstanding, accepted trend, and accepted in such a way that those who wish to lionize him simply ignore it.
She shows that people objected in the past but were brushed off.
She also shows that people who object today are brushed off. And that other professors are given the same treatment (e.g. people who objected "ruined [Ott's] career" rather than considering that he ruined his own.
And by saying "None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain" she is being explicit that he was embedded and part of a longstanding culture. You're even selectively ignoring the rest of the paragraph in which she expands on this very point.
You can't change the past but you can change the present and this is what the author is asking for.
There should be no cult of personality. We can absorb someone's intellectual output without lionizing the individual. The entire concept of celebrity is toxic and best left in the past.
the drawing displayed in the article is from 1975. i'm sure there are plenty of people on this very forum born well before 1975. we're not talking about judging someone from ancient mesopotamia here...
i think the dude was socially and politically average for his generation but his generation is still around (though petering out).
>This rewriting of history is sickening.
really? did you throw up after reading the article? this is hyperbolic and reactionary. what's happening here is a reexamination of things up until recently taken for granted (boys will be boys). i don't see anything wrong with revisiting things and reassessing. in this case especially because feynman's strip club antics are very often trotted out as some kind of wonderful thing he did that made him more relatable than other science luminaries.
That's quite an understatement! It used to be expected that a college professor would end up marrying one of his students.
In part this is in Feynman, in part this is on society being more accepting of this behavior back then. People pick behavior by immitating what's around them.
I for one am glad that expectations for conduct, but also available role models are at a higher standard today.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to this blog. Has the author ever done something selfish, irresponsible, criminal, etc? There's probably something. But none of that has any effect on the content of the text.
Doesn't it make more sense to be primarily concerned with professors inappropriately touching students, of any kind, in any way, shape or form?
That’s a pretty high barrier to credibility in a text explicitly titled Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. ;)
If the author wants to make a statement about personal experience of sexism or harassment in the modern science-workplace - that's fine. Don't shoehorn Feynman into it just to drive clicks and pretend to get offended on behalf of someone else just because of their delicate sensibilities.
He's being honest about his opinion of a certain set of women that was honed by experience. Gave no indication of generalizing that opinion to all women.
I'll admit he's always seemed like kind of a sleaze, but at the same time, we have almost completely lost the ability to parse the cat-and-mouse pattern of sexual activity in that era. Judging somebody about this retroactively seems like a bad idea. It's like reading Middle English (e.g. Chaucer): you kind of have an idea what's going on, but you also don't.
Being exceptionally intelligent doesn't mean he was wise in the ways of life. Like many people, he was flawed, and after the traumatic death of his wife his participation in life was marred by his that lack of wisdom and perhaps his own intellectual approach to beating the "game".
We irresponsibly expect perfection from heroes. If heroes aren't perfect, how can the average person be held to that metric? You'd have to cancel all of humanity (we really are shit, TBH).