Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

i remember being very affected by this book and his principle of ‘not fooling yourself.’

there were other things as well–like his surprisingly good lock-picking skills, which came in handy an even more surprising number of times, his various hacks for how to seem like you’re good at solving problems, his critique of education, his analogy of his skills and what he knows as ‘tools’ in his ‘toolbox’ (a concept which i later heard from [[ hank green ]] and now realize was probably the second time i heard it)–but they can all be derived in some way from this one principle of ‘not fooling yourself.’

ah- now i remember: i was holding this book in my lap on the deck of an airbnb in silver lake, which was just down the road and glimmering with the shine of the setting sun. i was there with my mom, and possibly other people, too. it must’ve been summer or early fall, because i was only wearing shorts and a t-shirt. i sat facing the lake, vaguely aware that behind it lay the much bigger lake michigan (which i just checked is 30% bigger than denmark¹). a gentle breeze blows in over the lakes. i was probably nearing the end of the book, because i was having a hard time putting it down. he was laying out his principle of ‘not fooling yourself’.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself– and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

it’s extraordinarily easy to fool yourself. i do it everytime i write any sort of academic paper. i use words that make it seem like i know what i’m talking about, that i’m saying something, but very often i am not. this was my biggest problem in [[ writing ]].

many academic texts are also guilty of this.

feynman was at some conference:

“There were a lot of fools at that conference–pompous fools–and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools–guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus–THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more” relatable af. reminds me of scholarship applications, actually all applications, actually not just academics…anymore…

“When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”

it’s a fun book to read. funny at times, philosophical. feynman has many adventures, fueled by his child-like wonder. looking back now, he embodied many of the philosophies that i later found. he was free

some of his quotes on education

A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way–or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one which have probably had an outsized impact on my cynical views of the current state of education, see also this book on education and this shorter essay: the disadvantages of an elite education Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. i felt this a lot in high school–what are we even learning here? i felt that i was learning very little and thought for a long time that that was how it was going to be. really i should’ve read more books. i wish i spent the time reading more books. but i guess i didn’t know any better then.

i’ve been reminded again, since meeting you, just how important it is to have people in your corner who make you feel not alone in this world. feynman, for instance, had his dad, and arlene.

but because of statistics, you typically meet these people in books² before you meet them in-person. feynman is one of those people for me, and many of my other friends who i identify as 同类. some people never make those connections in-person. that is a tragedy.