#10 is extremely thought-provoking, I wonder how much lost intuition is buried in “flavor of the month” scientific fields and approaches of history. Do you have examples of special features of Feynman’s and Watson’s (say) approaches?
The main distinguishing thing about Feynman, at least from reading Feynman’s two autobiographies, seemed to be how irreverent he is. He doesn’t do science because it’s super important, he does science he finds fun or interesting. He is constantly going on rants about the default way of looking at things (at least his inner monologue is) and ignoring authority, whether by blowing up at the science textbooks he was asked to read, ignoring how presidential committees traditionally functioned, or disagreeing with doctors. He goes to strip clubs because he likes interacting with pretty girls. It’s really quite different from the rather stodgy utilitarian/outside mindset I tend to reference by default, and I think reading his autobiographies me a lot more of what Critch calls “Entitlement to believe” .
When I adopt this “Feynman mindset” in my head, this feels like letting my inner child out. I feel like I can just go and look at things and form hypotheses and ask questions, irrespective of what other people think. I abandon the feeling that I need to do what is immediately important, and instead go look at what I find interesting and fun.
From Watson’s autobiography, I mainly got a sense of how even great scientists are drive a lot by petty desires, such as the fear that someone else would beat them to a discovery, or how annoying your collaborators are. For example, it seemed that a driving factor for Watson and Crick’s drive to work on DNA was the fear that Linus Pauling would discover the true structure first. A lot of their failure to collaborate better with Rosalind Franklin was due to personal clashes with her. Of course, Watson does also display some irreverence to authority; he held fast to his belief that their approach to finding the structure of DNA would work, even when multiple more senior scientists disagreed with him. But I think the main thing I got out of the book was a visceral appreciation for how important social situations are for motivating even important science.
When I adopt this “Watson mindset” in my head, I think about the social situation I’m in, and use that to motivate me. I call upon the irritation I feel when people are just acting a little too suboptimal, or that people are doing things for the wrong reasons. I see how absolutely easy many of the problems I’m working on are, and use my irritation at people having thus failed to solve them to push me to work harder. This probably isn’t a very healthy mindset to have in the long term, and there are obvious problems with it, but it feels very effective to get me to push past schleps.
Some of those are definitely stretching. =P
#10 is extremely thought-provoking, I wonder how much lost intuition is buried in “flavor of the month” scientific fields and approaches of history. Do you have examples of special features of Feynman’s and Watson’s (say) approaches?
Yeah, I agree on the stretching point.
The main distinguishing thing about Feynman, at least from reading Feynman’s two autobiographies, seemed to be how irreverent he is. He doesn’t do science because it’s super important, he does science he finds fun or interesting. He is constantly going on rants about the default way of looking at things (at least his inner monologue is) and ignoring authority, whether by blowing up at the science textbooks he was asked to read, ignoring how presidential committees traditionally functioned, or disagreeing with doctors. He goes to strip clubs because he likes interacting with pretty girls. It’s really quite different from the rather stodgy utilitarian/outside mindset I tend to reference by default, and I think reading his autobiographies me a lot more of what Critch calls “Entitlement to believe” .
When I adopt this “Feynman mindset” in my head, this feels like letting my inner child out. I feel like I can just go and look at things and form hypotheses and ask questions, irrespective of what other people think. I abandon the feeling that I need to do what is immediately important, and instead go look at what I find interesting and fun.
From Watson’s autobiography, I mainly got a sense of how even great scientists are drive a lot by petty desires, such as the fear that someone else would beat them to a discovery, or how annoying your collaborators are. For example, it seemed that a driving factor for Watson and Crick’s drive to work on DNA was the fear that Linus Pauling would discover the true structure first. A lot of their failure to collaborate better with Rosalind Franklin was due to personal clashes with her. Of course, Watson does also display some irreverence to authority; he held fast to his belief that their approach to finding the structure of DNA would work, even when multiple more senior scientists disagreed with him. But I think the main thing I got out of the book was a visceral appreciation for how important social situations are for motivating even important science.
When I adopt this “Watson mindset” in my head, I think about the social situation I’m in, and use that to motivate me. I call upon the irritation I feel when people are just acting a little too suboptimal, or that people are doing things for the wrong reasons. I see how absolutely easy many of the problems I’m working on are, and use my irritation at people having thus failed to solve them to push me to work harder. This probably isn’t a very healthy mindset to have in the long term, and there are obvious problems with it, but it feels very effective to get me to push past schleps.