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Comment by alexmolas | Hacker News Reader

Richard Feynman was a math genius, this is why he could derive groundbreaking results "effortlessly". There's this narrative around Feynman that he derived new physics results just for the fun and out of intuition that I believe is pretty wrong. If you read Feynman's work you'll see it's full of heavy maths and it's not intuitive at all (at least if you're not a genius like him). I don't think that the way he worked can be applied to everyone, because when you're not a genius and you do things for the fun of it it's very probable you'll end up wasting your time. This is why usually you have advisors that help you to find important problems that need to be solved.

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> X was a Y genius, this is why they could Z.

This is a non-explanation. Chalking something up to genius is just a specific kind of chalking it up to magic. "Here's this person, how does their mind work, what goes inside on it? Magic! They're a genius!"

It may be so that the way Feynman worked followed from the way he thought. If so, that doesn't mean we just throw up our hands and recommend it to people who fit our genius-pattern. Instead, we need to explain genius, which involves treating it like any other object of scientific study. Once we do that, then we can figure out how to cultivate it. That's what this article should inspire.

I don’t know if its intrinsic or because he started learning/playing with math from an early age but in any case there’s no doubt his mind worked “differently”.

There’s people I know that can quickly understand complex ideas that would take regular people several hours/days to grok. Some humans just have different kinds of brains; either they’re born with it or through their love/training their brain is great at understanding knowledge. I don’t think thats very controversial?

The entire point of Feynman's worldview is that he is not "great", he is just an individual, and plays to his individual interests. Those interests become strengths because of the natural interest.

It is not about being the best. It is about contributing something that you actually care about.

> when you're not a genius and you do things for the fun of it it's very probable you'll end up wasting your time. This is why usually you have advisors that help you to find important problems that need to be solved.

Also add if there are not great examples to learn from. Most radical ideas require mastery of the topic. Incremental work can be done copying and simply adding one on top. Advisors have gone through all of this experience. Most people underestimate power of good mentors.

Feynman didn't think he was a genius, he said that he was just an ordinary person who worked very hard. The story in the article actually points this out; he was just curious which led to very beneficial working methods. The idea of geniuses is more of an excuse than an explanation.

Ordinary people tend to not do very well with the Stokes formula. Much less with infinite sums (which is essentially what Feynman. diagrams are for).

Lots of geniuses are unaware of the difference between their intelligence and other people’s.

You can't just start calling people who have a few years of math and physics training geniuses... Infinite sums is a very simple concept once you have some math background and Stokes theorem isn't that complicated either (once you have the right training).

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