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Comment by shmde | Hacker News Reader

Didnt he cheat on wife with his PhD students, had numerous flings and flirted with other peoples wives ?

Presumably, the allegations were during his second marriage. This letter was to his first wife.

If the love of my life were to be cut down in the prime of her life, I imagine I'd be emotionally scarred for life. Sure, I'd make every effort to move on, but I just can't imagine the amount of emotional scar tissue that would remain permanently.

The second wife was the one that reported him to the FBI for being "a communist" or something like that?

Yeah allegedly because Feynman took Oppenheimer’s side while his wife didn’t in the whole debacle.

I've read a lot about Feynman and have never read that. Would love to see a source.

I have heard about it, but have no opinion on if it is true or false.

https://cirosantilli.com/feynman-was-a-huge-womanizer-during...

Edit: Note that I have no opinion here, just answering someone's request for a source.

A cursory Google reveals...

> Neither were Feynman's escapades limited to bars; more than one of his biographies have documented affairs with two married women, at least one of which caused him considerable problems.[0]

Charlie Munger seems to be a source for claims that he would sleep with the wives of his undergrad students[2].

And then there are these passages[1], which appear to be from his own autobiography. This isn't necessarily cheating, but assuming that what he's written is true, they serve to make the accusations of infidelity more plausible.

> "... You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”

>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; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

>I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.”

>I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE! ... You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”

This Baffler[3] piece also focuses on this subject...

>He worked and held meetings in strip clubs, and while a professor at Cal Tech, he drew naked portraits of his female students.

>Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him. His second wife accused him of abuse, citing multiple occasions when he’d fly into a blind rage if she interrupted him while he was working or playing his bongos.

[0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

[1]https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman-...

[2]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/richard-feynman-a-woma...

[3]https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...

There's an alternative universe where Feynman came of age in the 90s.

Instead of learning to play the bongos he dropped a series of EP's detailing how he really felt about the opposite sex.

We'll never know what we missed in this timeline, the Tom Lehrer of gangstah rap was never born in our universe.

We alway cut great minds a lot of slack. I have a mental experiment for this: imagine a man beats his wife. Terrible right? Now imagine the same man cures cancer. Well suddenly everyone is curious about the complexities of his marriage. That’s morality for most people.

It's interest balancing. If you do a lot of good, more evil is excusable in the mind of the average person. It doesn't make the bad things less bad, but it makes the person more human, as opposed to them being a virtuous angel, which nobody likes.

Albert Einstein being a perfect example.

I was thinking of Sir Isaac Newton but yeah Einstein probably has some ghosts in his closest.

Gosh! A male mammal is obsessed with it's female counterpart. What could explain such odd behaviour?

It's funny how we like to think we're not animals when we really are.

It's not wrong to have those animalistic instincts, it's how you act on them and treat/speak to your sexual counterparts that is important.

Name one other mammal that has shown an understanding of their behavior’s long term emotional impact on their life partner…

It's worth including the conclusion Feyman makes in his autobiography about that episode:

> But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.

I don’t condone or defend anything he did, but following some of those links back, there seems to be a game of telephone, inflating the claims slightly each time. Munger for example seems to have said he was flirty with his students wives, but not actually sleeping with them. The nude drawings of students appears to have been in the context of an official art class, and not his students.

Regardless, this behavior was clearly inappropriate and should not be tolerated at a university. It does not appear to be actually criminal or predatory, unless I am still missing something.

so what?

Not all couples subscribe to monogamy. There is no reason to be judgemental about this in the absence of other information.

I’m polyamorous. Being poly involves clear communication and consent of all parties involved. It involves respect for the other people. If Feynman was sleeping with his students wives and openly denigrating women, that sounds much more like the behavior of someone cheating than the behavior of someone practicing ethical non monogamy. Remember that back then, ethical non monogamy was much less common. The foundational books on the subject came out in the late 1990’s or after, and before that people didn’t even have the language to describe and negotiate what they were doing. It was much more common for one person inclined to this behavior to just cheat.

Feynman has been a huge influence on me. His outlook on science and the world helped shape my own. But we can’t ignore the flaws of our heroes, and it really sounds like he had a dark side.

Where are the flaws? That the guy was attractive and managed to seduce others? He may have gone with other people's wives but that is on the wife to say no, not on him.

If he knew the woman was married, he shares in that blame. At some point you know you are pushing someone else into doing something wrong, so you share that blame.

This is how the crime of "Solicitation of Murder" came to be.

Ethical non monogamy requires ethical behavior. If you’re seeking out students wives, that is predatory and unethical behavior. If you’re also denigrating women that is unethical behavior. While it’s possible that Feynman, the students, the students wives, and Feynman’s wife all consented to this behavior, it seems unlikely.

I do not believe “that is on the wife to say no, not on him”. If these allegations are true, he was a teacher engaging in predatory behavior. That is simply unethical due to the power imbalance. And the fact that he was asking people to cheat is unethical.

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