The author writes, far down in the article after extensively criticizing Feynman, “None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain”. I feel this is disingenuous. Surely the author understands that what most readers will take away from articles like this is “historical figure X who had a great reputation for decades, actually did terrible things [and so maybe he shouldn’t have that great reputation].”
IMO, the only way that a nuanced portrayal of such historical figures could be given, is to write a more general biographical overview of the person and include the negative aspects in there among all the other facets. Not writing an article that focuses specifically on the negative aspects, that does have the effect of, firstly, character assassination, and secondly, shaming people today who continue to admire the figure for his/her overall achievements (because "how could you possibly admire someone who did unacceptable behaviour X to group Y?").
Think this is as much about the author's negative experiences of the culture in scientific research as it is about Feynman. Anyone who has read the book will know something of both sides of Feynman, here she is saying that despite him describing his womanizing side as fun and playful it genuinely harms people like her who are trying to succeed as female scientists.
“Why do we bemoan the exit of sexual harassers, and those who otherwise harm their colleagues, from the scientific community? Instead, we should mourn the loss of all the promising scientists that they forced out, whose contributions will never be known.”
Yet she was not forced out. Was that her choice? Should we also mourn the lost contributions of others forced out for weakness? Are we to support those forced out due to “unfair” weaknesses while agreeing to dismiss those forced out by “fair” weaknesses?
The sexual/gender dynamic of social interaction is only one aspect that may be abused. There are far too many others to even try to list. And while trying to take the path of fairness and equality is something folks can intelecualize, in practice people are kinda selfish and shitty!
She was not forced out, but many others have been. Not all driven out are women, or minorities, or gay, trans, poor, shy, short, loud, ill, or what-have-you. But that is the way to bet.
The key developer of the Moderna vaccine was shat on her whole career. She had to leave academia to get (commercial) funding for the final work. Treated better, she might have got it done a decade or more earlier, saving possibly millions of lives.
There is a treasure trove of work by women, abused minorities, and the rest, abandoned when they were driven out of science for crappy reasons, waiting to be rediscovered.
And there is a massive shitpile, preserved by overprivileged nobodies, one-hit wonders, and tenured posers, waiting to be binned. That work is easier to preserve in less quantitative fields like psychology and history, but there is plenty to go around. Drive them out.
I haven’t read anywhere that said that the Moderna developer was shat on because of her gender. What I read was that the scientific establishment didn’t believe that there could be a viable delivery mechanism. So please don’t use that as evidence to push your point. You are arguing with emotion here instead of facts.
There have definitely been minorities, women, etc... that were driven out of science and some work that should have been more recognized.
From what I can tell, the people doing the driving out are actually the nobodies. The nobodies are taking the mantle of moral outrage and weaponizing it to drive out people who disagree with them.
Apparently you have not read any histories of her work.
And, obviously it is and always was the nobodies and has-beens driving out people who would shake things up. It has always been easiest to blight the careers of outsiders. The people working are busy, you know, working.
The majority of them are obviously not minorities. There is plenty of competition for scarce placements, grants, and facilities, and everyone needs all available boosts to get enough of all of those just to work.
We need to ensure all of these available boosts are for quality work.
You show your bias. You don't know what I have read. I have read histories of her work. Several in fact. Get your facts straight instead of trying to hide them in the name of your narrative.
I knew that she was demoted for not showing progress. How would I know that?
The key tech was encapsulating the RNA in a lipid shell. How would I know that?
I also know that her daughter was an Olympian rower. How would I know that?
This work was touted in the press for months because it was the basis for the two RNA based vaccines for COVID-19 used in the US. How would I know that?
I have been following/commenting on COVID-19 on Hacker News since early last year. Go look at my comments.
Other biographies already exist including the very popular autobiography mentioned in the article. It seems unfair to give a pass to the authors of those biographies for not painting a full picture, but then to object to anyone pointing out the negative aspects that were missed.
As the author notes (and as people note on the other front-page Feynman thread today), some of the negative aspects are found in Feynman’s very own autobiographical writings. It is therefore hard to claim that they are overlooked.
I would say that they are "negative", with scare quotes... There's really nothing negative in that book. I don't know about other sources about Feynman's life, but his own autobiography does not really speak ill of him, at least if that information is taken at face value. The quotes that appear in TFA with much fanfare are only descriptions of thought processes, not of actions.
So, young Feynman was not particularly good at flirting, and then he received advice from other people which he thereby tried to apply. This process and its mixed results are therefore described with comic detail. Then he also drew some naked women with a pencil. If that is the best case against Feynman, he's still safe. Really, the only legitimate negative thing that you can extract from that book is that he was a bit obsessed with positive attention when young, which may have made him be a bit insufferable. But who isn't at 20. And that's it.
I'm not sure Feynman is still safe. For example, there is the matter of his visiting topless bars. A common position today is that women who choose sex work should not be shamed (because that denies their own agency, and in the case of prostitution keeping things underground only helps trafficking), but at the same time the men who visit sex workers should be shamed for objectifying the female body.
This double standard is true, but it's only fair considering the opposite double standard that stood forever and still stands, about women who get around vs men.
But there are are all kinds of double standards in both directions so this one is true but not especially remarkable, and if one would complain about it's unfairness, one better be just as incensed and outraged about all the others, and on balance, I think the women get rather more shafting than men.
I don't think it looks very good to cry about this unfairness.
Feynman did some things that were obviously great. Feynman also did some things that were obviously terrible. Neither of these conclusions requires a "nuanced" portrayal.
There's a sort of hidden assumption that we need to assign a univariate reputation to people (historical and otherwise), which brings up the difficulty of how to combine these two observations on incomparable axes into a single conclusion. That doesn't require "nuance" either; the fundamental problem here is trying to figure out if thing X outweighs thing Y. That combination isn't going to be particularly informative about the actual person under discussion; it'll mostly just tell you what coefficients you're using when weighting the two observations.
Surrounding every negative observation by positive observations is neither scientifically honest nor informative about the observation itself. It just says that the writer thinks the negative observation shouldn't carry as much weight. In this case, the author is making no such judgment and presenting the facts directly, which I think is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
> The author writes, ... “None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain”. I feel this is disingenuous.
I read that statement very differently.
Her essay is about the pervasive and accepted sexism in physics and astronomy. Her use of Feynman is of course a hook, but also shows that this is a longstanding, accepted trend, and accepted in such a way that those who wish to lionize him simply ignore it.
She shows that people objected in the past but were brushed off.
She also shows that people who object today are brushed off. And that other professors are given the same treatment (e.g. people who objected "ruined [Ott's] career" rather than considering that he ruined his own.
And by saying "None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain" she is being explicit that he was embedded and part of a longstanding culture. You're even selectively ignoring the rest of the paragraph in which she expands on this very point.
You can't change the past but you can change the present and this is what the author is asking for.
What a load of crap - "Feynman is a sexist whose behaviour did undeniable harm". Harm to whom? The women that I assume found that "undeniably harmful behaviour" pleasant enough to willingly sleep with him?
If the author wants to make a statement about personal experience of sexism or harassment in the modern science-workplace - that's fine. Don't shoehorn Feynman into it just to drive clicks and pretend to get offended on behalf of someone else just because of their delicate sensibilities.
We remember people for their meaningful contributions, not for _everything_ they did. Take a look at any historical statue, for instance. What does it do? It captures some moment in time that we find significant. That thing becomes something we can look up to and strive to emulate. Whatever else that person was doesn't matter. What matters is what we can take away, learn, emulate and incorporate. It may not be the entire truth, but it is what is useful.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to this blog. Has the author ever done something selfish, irresponsible, criminal, etc? There's probably something. But none of that has any effect on the content of the text.
Sure, but the author is arguing that we do in fact remember Feynman for everything he did and documented in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, including the negative things, and that people have looked up to and tried to emulate all of his behavior, and that it's left an unfortunate impact on the culture of his institution and his field.
In the past, there were fewer prohibitions against college professors dating students. While some student-teacher relationships may have been problematic, others were not. That's how some people got married and started families. Now, the rules have changed, yet the writer insists we should judge Feynman through a modern lens, as if all the rules and taboos of 2021 were in place 40 years ago. Now, in every conversation Feynman is mentioned, we are supposed to include the word 'sexist' or 'misogynist' because someone took offense? This rewriting of history is sickening.
It's not a rewriting of history though. It's all stuff that actually happened. It's just a more complete telling of history. The purpose of pointing this stuff out is so that it doesn't get duplicated.
There should be no cult of personality. We can absorb someone's intellectual output without lionizing the individual. The entire concept of celebrity is toxic and best left in the past.
the drawing displayed in the article is from 1975. i'm sure there are plenty of people on this very forum born well before 1975. we're not talking about judging someone from ancient mesopotamia here...
i think the dude was socially and politically average for his generation but his generation is still around (though petering out).
>This rewriting of history is sickening.
really? did you throw up after reading the article? this is hyperbolic and reactionary. what's happening here is a reexamination of things up until recently taken for granted (boys will be boys). i don't see anything wrong with revisiting things and reassessing. in this case especially because feynman's strip club antics are very often trotted out as some kind of wonderful thing he did that made him more relatable than other science luminaries.
And that he used some of his students as nude models. Talk about a power dynamic issue there. What if they refused? Did they even feel like they could refuse?
This is going to sound like a dumb question, but what if the girls in the bars in Albuquerque really were playing coy to get free drinks?
He's being honest about his opinion of a certain set of women that was honed by experience. Gave no indication of generalizing that opinion to all women.
I'll admit he's always seemed like kind of a sleaze, but at the same time, we have almost completely lost the ability to parse the cat-and-mouse pattern of sexual activity in that era. Judging somebody about this retroactively seems like a bad idea. It's like reading Middle English (e.g. Chaucer): you kind of have an idea what's going on, but you also don't.
Having read about Feynman, as well as his books, my superficial takeaway is there was Feynman before his first wife's death, the "wicked" middle, and then his final, successful marriage. A lot of the stories are from the middle.
Being exceptionally intelligent doesn't mean he was wise in the ways of life. Like many people, he was flawed, and after the traumatic death of his wife his participation in life was marred by his that lack of wisdom and perhaps his own intellectual approach to beating the "game".
We irresponsibly expect perfection from heroes. If heroes aren't perfect, how can the average person be held to that metric? You'd have to cancel all of humanity (we really are shit, TBH).
About the bar women. I think he just described the hyperbolic uncensored mindset in his head like a form of heuristic. Like how we think some neighborhoods is dangerous because gangs are killing people constantly. Our mind like to exaggerate to make it easier understanding the main point. Secondly about Curie he may have been joking, he's known for that, or he was serious. Whatever the intent it wouldn't be acceptable today we should condemn that. In my opinion these kinds of jokes should be resorted for your nearest friends who understand you better.
I was shocked at the Bas-relief celebrating Richard Feynman. It is hard to imagine a scientist created so much adulation around themselves that their followers, scientists themselves, came up with religious worshipping imagery. And it does not appear to be a joke. I was scoffing at the Feynman cult as I thought it was an exagerated depiction but I feel that I was completely wrong. The most valuable of us have great achievents but are avoiding public attention, not to mention adulation and are modest to a fault. Where they get their most payback from is mere passion and dedication to their field.
It is disappointing that such a seminal figure in physics and astronomy and who helped inspire generations of folks to science and to look at the stars was not above being a creep.
I also didn't enjoy Surely Joking, for the exactly the same reasons.
In part this is in Feynman, in part this is on society being more accepting of this behavior back then. People pick behavior by immitating what's around them.
I for one am glad that expectations for conduct, but also available role models are at a higher standard today.
Why is there only one comment on here about Feynman's pretty obvious sexism? Why are the rest attacking the author or anti-sexism in general? Or commenting on how his actions or similar action push women out of STEM fields?
Why isn't there a list of sexist scientific heros on Wikipedia? Seems like a good place for it. Name and shame them easily, efficiently, publicly, and with sources.
> Why isn't there a list of sexist scientific heros on Wikipedia?
Because sexism isn’t, generally, the kind of matter of fact appropriate to an encyclopedia.
> Name and shame them easily, efficiently, and publicly.
Political propaganda of that type isn’t Wikipedia’s purpose. There have been Wikipedia-imitators that embrace that, but they don’t tend to attract as much of an audience.
But its already there. Racism, sexism, and other -isms no longer favored as heroic. Lookup Darwin, von Braun, Mr. Feynman, etc. A list doesn't seem like it would be a big jump.
Because at some point you just have to say times were different. I know, it sounds horrible, but I don't mean this in some "things were different when Grandma was growing up" kind of way. Societal norms actually do shift, and the past becomes incomprehensible through a modern moral lens.
Here's an example I'm sure someone will mistake for flamebait. The ancient Athenians: pederasty is indefensible if you apply today's standards to it, but at the time, people would have wondered what the heck was wrong with you if you were a man who wasn't practicing it during certain walks of life.
In light of that, an information source that aims to be free from bias can't keep a list that says "Philosophers who were also Pedophiles" that has all the ancient Athenians on it, because that would be assuming what makes sense today made sense then.
Wasn't that "bitches" quote pretty obviously self-critical? Does the author think he was writing that with pride? I read it it as "this is how ignorant I was". (I read the book not just this article). It seems pretty...unsophisticated to attack that.
So the author says she and other female students were touched in appropriately and in an unwanted manner and most discussion here is concerned with her criticism of Feynmann.
Doesn't it make more sense to be primarily concerned with professors inappropriately touching students, of any kind, in any way, shape or form?
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadIMO, the only way that a nuanced portrayal of such historical figures could be given, is to write a more general biographical overview of the person and include the negative aspects in there among all the other facets. Not writing an article that focuses specifically on the negative aspects, that does have the effect of, firstly, character assassination, and secondly, shaming people today who continue to admire the figure for his/her overall achievements (because "how could you possibly admire someone who did unacceptable behaviour X to group Y?").
Yet she was not forced out. Was that her choice? Should we also mourn the lost contributions of others forced out for weakness? Are we to support those forced out due to “unfair” weaknesses while agreeing to dismiss those forced out by “fair” weaknesses?
The sexual/gender dynamic of social interaction is only one aspect that may be abused. There are far too many others to even try to list. And while trying to take the path of fairness and equality is something folks can intelecualize, in practice people are kinda selfish and shitty!
The key developer of the Moderna vaccine was shat on her whole career. She had to leave academia to get (commercial) funding for the final work. Treated better, she might have got it done a decade or more earlier, saving possibly millions of lives.
There is a treasure trove of work by women, abused minorities, and the rest, abandoned when they were driven out of science for crappy reasons, waiting to be rediscovered.
And there is a massive shitpile, preserved by overprivileged nobodies, one-hit wonders, and tenured posers, waiting to be binned. That work is easier to preserve in less quantitative fields like psychology and history, but there is plenty to go around. Drive them out.
There have definitely been minorities, women, etc... that were driven out of science and some work that should have been more recognized.
From what I can tell, the people doing the driving out are actually the nobodies. The nobodies are taking the mantle of moral outrage and weaponizing it to drive out people who disagree with them.
And, obviously it is and always was the nobodies and has-beens driving out people who would shake things up. It has always been easiest to blight the careers of outsiders. The people working are busy, you know, working.
The majority of them are obviously not minorities. There is plenty of competition for scarce placements, grants, and facilities, and everyone needs all available boosts to get enough of all of those just to work.
We need to ensure all of these available boosts are for quality work.
Here is the person you are speaking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karikó
I knew that she was demoted for not showing progress. How would I know that?
The key tech was encapsulating the RNA in a lipid shell. How would I know that?
I also know that her daughter was an Olympian rower. How would I know that?
This work was touted in the press for months because it was the basis for the two RNA based vaccines for COVID-19 used in the US. How would I know that?
I have been following/commenting on COVID-19 on Hacker News since early last year. Go look at my comments.
You just discredit yourself.
So, young Feynman was not particularly good at flirting, and then he received advice from other people which he thereby tried to apply. This process and its mixed results are therefore described with comic detail. Then he also drew some naked women with a pencil. If that is the best case against Feynman, he's still safe. Really, the only legitimate negative thing that you can extract from that book is that he was a bit obsessed with positive attention when young, which may have made him be a bit insufferable. But who isn't at 20. And that's it.
This is getting quite ridiculous.
But there are are all kinds of double standards in both directions so this one is true but not especially remarkable, and if one would complain about it's unfairness, one better be just as incensed and outraged about all the others, and on balance, I think the women get rather more shafting than men.
I don't think it looks very good to cry about this unfairness.
There's a sort of hidden assumption that we need to assign a univariate reputation to people (historical and otherwise), which brings up the difficulty of how to combine these two observations on incomparable axes into a single conclusion. That doesn't require "nuance" either; the fundamental problem here is trying to figure out if thing X outweighs thing Y. That combination isn't going to be particularly informative about the actual person under discussion; it'll mostly just tell you what coefficients you're using when weighting the two observations.
Surrounding every negative observation by positive observations is neither scientifically honest nor informative about the observation itself. It just says that the writer thinks the negative observation shouldn't carry as much weight. In this case, the author is making no such judgment and presenting the facts directly, which I think is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
I read that statement very differently.
Her essay is about the pervasive and accepted sexism in physics and astronomy. Her use of Feynman is of course a hook, but also shows that this is a longstanding, accepted trend, and accepted in such a way that those who wish to lionize him simply ignore it.
She shows that people objected in the past but were brushed off.
She also shows that people who object today are brushed off. And that other professors are given the same treatment (e.g. people who objected "ruined [Ott's] career" rather than considering that he ruined his own.
And by saying "None of this is to paint Feynman as a villain" she is being explicit that he was embedded and part of a longstanding culture. You're even selectively ignoring the rest of the paragraph in which she expands on this very point.
You can't change the past but you can change the present and this is what the author is asking for.
If the author wants to make a statement about personal experience of sexism or harassment in the modern science-workplace - that's fine. Don't shoehorn Feynman into it just to drive clicks and pretend to get offended on behalf of someone else just because of their delicate sensibilities.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to this blog. Has the author ever done something selfish, irresponsible, criminal, etc? There's probably something. But none of that has any effect on the content of the text.
There should be no cult of personality. We can absorb someone's intellectual output without lionizing the individual. The entire concept of celebrity is toxic and best left in the past.
the drawing displayed in the article is from 1975. i'm sure there are plenty of people on this very forum born well before 1975. we're not talking about judging someone from ancient mesopotamia here...
i think the dude was socially and politically average for his generation but his generation is still around (though petering out).
>This rewriting of history is sickening.
really? did you throw up after reading the article? this is hyperbolic and reactionary. what's happening here is a reexamination of things up until recently taken for granted (boys will be boys). i don't see anything wrong with revisiting things and reassessing. in this case especially because feynman's strip club antics are very often trotted out as some kind of wonderful thing he did that made him more relatable than other science luminaries.
That's quite an understatement! It used to be expected that a college professor would end up marrying one of his students.
He's being honest about his opinion of a certain set of women that was honed by experience. Gave no indication of generalizing that opinion to all women.
I'll admit he's always seemed like kind of a sleaze, but at the same time, we have almost completely lost the ability to parse the cat-and-mouse pattern of sexual activity in that era. Judging somebody about this retroactively seems like a bad idea. It's like reading Middle English (e.g. Chaucer): you kind of have an idea what's going on, but you also don't.
Being exceptionally intelligent doesn't mean he was wise in the ways of life. Like many people, he was flawed, and after the traumatic death of his wife his participation in life was marred by his that lack of wisdom and perhaps his own intellectual approach to beating the "game".
We irresponsibly expect perfection from heroes. If heroes aren't perfect, how can the average person be held to that metric? You'd have to cancel all of humanity (we really are shit, TBH).
That’s a pretty high barrier to credibility in a text explicitly titled Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. ;)
In part this is in Feynman, in part this is on society being more accepting of this behavior back then. People pick behavior by immitating what's around them.
I for one am glad that expectations for conduct, but also available role models are at a higher standard today.
Because sexism isn’t, generally, the kind of matter of fact appropriate to an encyclopedia.
> Name and shame them easily, efficiently, and publicly.
Political propaganda of that type isn’t Wikipedia’s purpose. There have been Wikipedia-imitators that embrace that, but they don’t tend to attract as much of an audience.
Here's an example I'm sure someone will mistake for flamebait. The ancient Athenians: pederasty is indefensible if you apply today's standards to it, but at the time, people would have wondered what the heck was wrong with you if you were a man who wasn't practicing it during certain walks of life.
In light of that, an information source that aims to be free from bias can't keep a list that says "Philosophers who were also Pedophiles" that has all the ancient Athenians on it, because that would be assuming what makes sense today made sense then.
Doesn't it make more sense to be primarily concerned with professors inappropriately touching students, of any kind, in any way, shape or form?