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Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

It feels like, in every one of Feynman’s arithmetic stories I’ve read, he always says how lucky he was that someone used a specific number.

At some point it stops being luck.

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Murray Gell-Mann did say once that he was annoyed by Feynman's tendency to invent anecdotes about himself. He wasn't lucky in the sense that he was a brilliant scientist but he also had a huge ego which he needed to validate publicly.

I don't doubt the claim, but this story is so specific ("the cube root of 1729.03") that it seems plausible there may be at least some truth to it. And it starts off with him being soundly beaten in adding and multiplying, so it's not totally egotistical. (I get that it's still pretty egotistical, since the parable is that he understands the actual numbers while the salesman is just using a rote, mechanical process without fully understanding the underlying theory.)

I could definitely see him totally making this up by working in reverse (decide to teach a lesson about mechanical vs. fundamental understanding, start with a tough operation, pick a mentally tractable number like a bit over 1728, tack on the simpler arithmetic contests before it to contrast and build tension), so I'm not saying it's a good argument for it being real. Just that it's tough to say one way or another.

It may be annoying, but I'll grant he earned it. The world is full of gigantic egos with little of substance to say.

That’s my favorite thing about reading Feynman’s autobiographical works or anecdotes about him. There’s a feeling that he must be embellishing, but the stories are never entirely outside the realm of plausibility.

If I remember correctly, according to Leonard Mlodinow's Feynman's Rainbow, Gell-Mann wrote that in Feynman's obituary for the Physics Review. It "raised quite a few eyebrows".

He says the same in this interview too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnMsgxIIQEE&t=109s

When I read his book I got the distinct impression that he grooms anecdotes. That is, he will subtly manipulate a situation (or the recounting of it) in order to make a better story. His stories are highly entertaining as a result.

A lot of us do this to some extent, don’t we? I mean, I’m no Feynman, but I have done some things thinking, if this works out, it’s going to be a great story. Sometimes there really is no other good reason for doing them.

I like, and respect t Feynman, but feel most of his stories are a humble brag.

I can only take so much of his writing. On a psychological level, I have thought about it over the years, and come up empty. I probally don't know enough about the man.

What got me thinking about it was one of his stories about the kid who could tell you what's wrong with your radio with his hearing.

I understand needing to protect your ego later in life when you didn't get the respect you deserved. In the stories, the trait started very young.

And maybe I'm completely mistaken? It just might be his way writing that has me wondering?

I get the opposite impression. The facts of many of these anecdotes would force you to believe that he must have unfathomable genius. But he honestly seems to believe that luck played a huge role; sometimes, the only role. I remember one story where someone puts a huge blueprint in front of him of some kind of plumbing installation of immense complexity. It’s not working right. He feels overwhelmed, so, just to have something to say, he points at random at a valve and asks what it does. That turned out to be the key that let them solve the issue. He thinks this is just blind luck, because he had no idea what anything did in the diagram. I think it’s more likely that his genius subconscious saw something.

I agree with you except for that last sentence—but in that anecdote he didn’t even know if the symbol he was pointing at was supposed to be a valve or a window. I think a much more likely explanation is just selection bias: if he’d asked “what happened if this valve gets stuck?” and they’d replied “oh, this pressure release over here will activate” the anecdote would have simply been too boring to make it into the book. Take the “best of” anecdotes from a busy lifetime and add a flair for storytelling and of course you’ll get an inflated view; the alternative would be a lot less likely to produce discussions on HN.

Or, when you enough special cases, you're almost always lucky to hit one of them.

Which is another way of saying what you're saying, I think.

Feynman actually touches on this in the same chapter, a few pages before the anecdote quoted in the article:

> I had a lot of fun trying to do arithmetic fast, by tricks, with Hans [Bethe] [...] He was nearly always able to get the answer to any problem within a percent. It was easy for him—every number was near something he knew.

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

it's like the math equivalent of being fielded softball questions

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