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Comment by almostgotcaught | Hacker News Reader

i hate when people quote random celebrities as authoritative on any topic, let alone as a counterpoint to actual authorities (google the authors of this study).

Edit: hn is just as anti-intellectual as any other place these days but y'all style yourselves as intelligentsia because your celebrities are special.

I'll repeat: check out the qualifications of the authors of this study and compare them to Feynman's on this subject. Any reasonable person would conclude that comparing them is exactly like comparing Kim Kardashian and Feynman's on QED.

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Did you just call Richard Feynman a "random celebrity", who isn't authoritative on the subject of science?

Hint: I might need to google the authors of the study, I don't need to google Richard Feynman...

> don't need to google Richard Feynman...

My friend that is the textbook definition of celebrity status.

"Celebrity" in colloquial use implies someone "famous for being famous", like Kim Kardashian.

To use such word with regard to one of the most talented and innovative physicists of the 20th century debases the entire conversation.

> debases the entire conversation.

If my eyes rolled back any further in my head I could look into the past.

But you've proven your own point: you know him because he's known but because you're actually familiar with his work.

So again: textbook celebrity worship masquerading as intellectualism.

"you know him because he's known but because you're actually familiar with his work"

I cannot parse your statement, either there are some missing words, or some problem with your English.

Anyway, from my previous comment, you couldn't have any idea about how I got to know Feynman and his work. I haven't mentioned it at all.

FYI, I got acquainted with his work in 1996 when I enrolled into the university. I was studying maths, my dormitory roommate was studying theoretical physics, and he had several Feynman's books that were very interesting to me, though I must admit that sometimes the underlying apparatus was really complicated for an 18 y.o. greenhorn. But the principles were clear enough.

Linus Pauling's authority in chemistry doesn't make his cuckoo theories about Vitamin C any less cuckoo. Feynman may have been an important physicist, but that doesn't make him knowledgeable about education!

And, to be honest, there's a reason why there are memes about physicists' competence in other fields, like https://xkcd.com/793/.

Feynman was extremely knowledgeable about pedagogy, and his lectures are considered some of the finest works in the field.

I'm very aware of the "spherical cow" joke about physicists, but this isn't a "random celebrity".

As well as the texts based off his lectures. [1] His ability to teach was completely unreal. Those 'books' dramatically deepened my understanding of physics.

[1] - https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Feynman himself said that his Lectures were a failure of pedagogy.

Doesn't matter - hn is 100% certain Feynman was a virtuoso educator.

Probably because a lot of us have read or watched his work and know first hand that it was extremely high quality. It's not like you have to take people's word for it.

But not high quality for teaching children. They arw great supplemental resources that teach intuition. Nothing less, but also nothing more.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics was used as the textbook for Caltech's introductory physics course for nearly two decades, and it is still used in some universities. I learned physics from it and have met many Caltech alumni who used it as their textbook, all of whom felt they learned a great deal more than "intuition" from it. So I am guessing you've never actually tried to learn something from it if you feel that way.

This is not quite accurate. I mean it is, but only in the same sense that a top 5 chessplayer in the world might regularly bemoan, with no irony intended, his inability to play chess well. There's a lot more context to his comments here. [1]

Seriously, if you are at all interested in physics - read the lectures and they will, with 100% certainty, deepen your understanding. Even on the most fundamental topics. For instance my entire worldview around the conversation laws changed thanks to those lectures, which in turn ties directly into the nature of energy.

[1] - https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/popular_misconc...

He taught a two-year introductory physics course at Caltech from 1961 to 1964, which gives him some experience with the matter though. He was known as "The Great Explainer", due to his ability to help people understand and more importantly, be inspired by science and the world around them*. His materials from those lectures were converted into "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", a highly regarded physics textbook. so I wouldn't have chosen education as my example.

In support of 793 however, he didn't do well with bureaucracy so I'd not listen to his advice on how to run something that favored rigorous rule following even when the rules don't make sense**.

* https://www.commoncraft.com/honor-richard-feynman-great-expl...

** https://laurakornish.com/2019/04/no-joking-matter-feynman-on...

He is celebrity. He is not authoritative about subject of teaching math to kids. He is authoritative about his area of physics. He also is authoritative about writing popular books for physics that demystify physics to adults. But again, not about kids and math.

My parent comment is especially jarring because Feynman's findings agree with, and propose a mechanism for, the findings of the study. The comment seems to imply that there's some great tension between "arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic mathematics" and "the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant". Or between "These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths" and the less academically worded "There, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature."

Nobody's quoting Feynman "as a counterpoint to actual authorities". Feynman's excerpt provides first-hand testimony from a teacher on the front lines that fully validates what the study found.

Feynman is no random celebrity. In addition to be a renowned physicist, his famous "Feynman Lectures" and his thoughts on pedagogy are similarly legendary.

The Feynman Lectures are great at giving you an intuitive understanding, but is no substitute for the regular curriculum. You don't find many people who read only the Feynman Lectures who can then go on to solve physics problems well. You do find many who read the regular textbooks and who can.

You have to bear in mind that the lectures in The Feynman Lectures on Physics were only one third of an introductory physics course, the other parts being recitation sections (in which homework problems, quizzes and tests were given and discussed), and labs. Lecture attendance was optional - many people prefer reading to listening - but the recitation sections and labs were mandatory, because they were considered much more important. Nobody learns physics from just reading lectures.

In this case, Richard Feynman is just writing about his personal experiences of a well-known phenomenon. https://profkeithdevlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lockh... ("Lockhart's Lament") would perhaps be a better reference, but nearly anyone who's been through the education system would be able to tell you this.

> Richard Feynman is just writing about his personal experiences

Let's see

1. The personal experiences of a guy with no formal training in pedagogy or education

2. A research paper in nature written by expert education economists

Hmmmmmmmm

I wanted to upvote your other comment because it caught a detail of "how much" that may have slipped past the other commenter's or other reader's minds but...

0. The Kardashians

The distance between 0 and 1 is vast compared to the distance between 1 and 2. Feynman was a professor and also beloved for his ability to bridge across the academic to pragmatic divide that is the subject of this paper.

What is the relevance of this point? No one has linked a Kardashian's take on anything? So who cares if the distance between 0 and 1 is larger than the distance between 1 and 2 - we are only discussing the distance between 1 and 2.

The original comment you responded to made no comparative claims. It simply offered another person's attempt to describe. Feynman is fairly famous but nonetheless an authoritative source relative to most of the population (probably more so than both of us, though I don't know you do have little basis beyond priors [sorry if you have greater credibility than Feynman, I didn't know]). Feynman is less authoritative on the subject than the authors of the article but still... Being well known doesn't remove the authority level that Feynman does have on the topic.

I should, perhaps, have used:

0. Average person

Richard Feynman is famous for being an educator, and he's clearly quite good at it. Who cares if he has no formal training? I reckon he deserves at least a 1.2 on this scale.

> Richard Feynman is famous for being an educator

It's amazing how deep the celebrity worship goes. No he's famous for being a mathematical physicist (his Nobel is in physics not education). He was actually a very mediocre educator - you can read his own assessments of his success/failure in teaching the "famous" intro courses.

Or you can ask literally any physics major that's actually had to use those books (they are horrible for actually learning from).

Most Nobel winners are not famous. I never said he was a stellar educator: I said he is famous for it, and that he is quite good at it.

And why should I simply assume that "Education Economists"* really know the subject they purport to talk about? Because they are credentialed members of university departments with some label? Because a few of them won some Bank of Sweden award?

Just because a particular department or field of study exists in academia does not magically give them the imprimatur you think it does.

* Btw, I know for a fact that a few of them are not "education economists"

> And why should I simply assume that "Education Economists"* really know the subject they purport to talk about?

I'm glad we've arrived at Fox News level takes. At least we can all admit what we are here.

Wow, it's really a no-brainer when you phrased it that way.

Unfortunately it destroyed your argument.

It's not a counterpoint. The Feynman excerpt and the paper support each other.

The paper's abstract ends, "These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths." The Feynman excerpt is about the issues caused by a lack of practica in education and how they should be resolved.

The paper's authors wrote, "These findings call for a maths pedagogy that explicitly addresses these translational challenges through curricula that connect abstract maths symbols and concepts to intuitively meaningful contexts and problems." And provide 2 examples of Randomized Control Trials of math courses in Brazil and India respectively that address the challenges successfully.

Even if you remove Feynman's name, it's still interesting that a Theoretical Physics professor and educator wrote clearly about a very similar issue they encountered over 60 years before the paper in question was published.

Regardless of the people involved, being asked to consider someone’s opinion on a matter is a world apart from claiming they are an authority on the topic.

You delievered this comment as if he had just quoted kim kardashian.

More to the point, if Kim Kardashian delivered an essay with similar arguments I don't think we should care that it was written by a Kardashian.

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