Learning and growth
Richard Feynman
Do not fool yourself
Richard Feynman (1918–1988 · United States) — Do not fool yourself.
What actually happened?
He taught for a year in Rio and found students who could recite everything and use none of it. In a lecture he read out a definition of triboluminescence, the light emitted when crystals are crushed, and the room recognised it instantly. Then he asked why, when you crush a lump of sugar in the dark, you see a flash. Nobody connected the two. At the end of the year he told the assembled faculty and the education ministry that no science was being taught in Brazil at all.
If you cannot teach it, you have not got it
A technical term compresses. Forbid it and you have to unpack the idea yourself, and the places you cannot unpack are the places you were storing a label. It is the cheapest accurate self-test there is.
Describe your work to a relative. Each time you retreat into the trade word, mark it. That list is your real syllabus.
The easiest person to fool is you
Fooling yourself takes no bad faith, only a stake in the answer. When you want a conclusion, evidence for it becomes strangely easy to find. So honesty here is a method requirement rather than a moral one.
Before the review, write the case against your own proposal first. Written second, that column always comes out shorter.
Reality before public relations
Challenger was not an engineering shortfall. It was an organisation that preferred a good-looking argument to a cold seal. Wherever people report upward, the same substitution is on offer every week.
When the numbers disappoint, notice whether you are changing the judgement or the sentence. The sentence gets you through this meeting only.
Derive it once instead of remembering it ten times
His way of learning was to throw the result away and rebuild it, going back whenever he got stuck. Slow, and what comes out transfers. A remembered answer serves only the question it came from.
Rather than learn the conditions under which a formula holds, reconstruct once where it came from. The conditions then explain themselves.
How do I use it today?
Take one thing you believe you understand and explain it aloud to somebody outside your field, using no terms of art. Mark every place you stall; that list is what you have to go back to. And before any judgement where you gain if it goes your way, write the case against it first.
Deep read
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Lines to keep
After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists.
Knowing the name of a thing is not knowing the thing.