Ask yourself why you considered him a hero. You don't know this person. He's a person, just like you. I went through a similar process a couple years ago.
Relevant quote regarding Feynman:
…in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.
It's complex. You can respect their achievements while separating the other half. And until you really know someone, it's not good to lump the two halves together in your mind.
> Even people without famous achievements have good and bad aspects.
Exactly! Is there a single person who doesn't have good and bad aspects? Nope. The balance isn't the same between everyone, sure, but 'no one is perfect'.
But the point isn’t the individual. The questions we need to ask are - why did people feel empowered to do what they did? Why wasn’t there anything in place to hold these people accountable for their actions? And what are the larger patterns and their consequences (e.g. widespread sexism and sexual harassment pushes women out of the workforce/positions of power)
Usually the answers are the same. People feel empowered most often by the prevailing attitude of their societies. If we want to see less of something then we (all) need to speak up against it. Can we raise our hands when someone asks us if we ever went against prevailing culture and stood up for someone (or ourselves), even at a grave cost?
Also some are psychologically disturbed due to various reasons and those people need therapy and mere reactionary punishment will not improve matters in the long run (for society).
Seems like the same question as that religious one about what would keep a person honest in lieu the wrath of a higher power/promise of eternal life/whatever external motivator.
Wow, I wasn't aware. I did some searching and his own writing is even more damning (the chapter "You Just Ask Them?" in "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!")
> Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
He was a product of his time. That section (unsurprisingly) is preceded by him acting gentlemanly, as he always had, and failing to attract anyone. Gender roles work both ways, and that was apparently how society there and then in that social context expected men to act.
He was not really gentlemanly before, he was slimy. He attempted to play innuendo and manipulation game, but he was bad at it. He was not nice guy as in "polite helpful man nice to people around indiscriminately". He was a guy that buys drinks to random women he just met hoping they will have sex with him afterwards. The actual 1950 gentlemen was supposed to buy stuff to show how good potential provider he is, then girl supposedly falls in love, then they marry and he provides while she cares about house, children and him. There was no such intention in these interactions.
Then he moved on to directly state his intentions, which actually worked, because those women were actually open to having one night stands. But that move was not possible for him unless he convinced himself that women in question is worth less then nothing.
But, if his nice guy play would work and they would really fall in love with his nice guysness and then had sex with him, they would be really hugely disappointed next morning cause he was in it for sex only. So I guess it is very good thing all players except him were experienced enough to recognize the situation and seen through his nice guy act.
I'd argue that is still the case. As long as people working at bars don't earn a fair wage and as long as tipping culture remains a thing, I won't trust anyone's kindness over there as genuine, and more as a tool to get more tip money.
I remember when The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists came out and was a fairly big deal, as far as those things go. All I could think was, didn't Feynman write about this 20 years ago?
The fact that he said "during the next day" makes it sound like the rest of the story might change the situation. Can someone who has read the book please weigh in?
The context of the story is that he keeps buying drinks for women who flirt with him at nightclubs (e.g. one or another traveling singer) who then near the end of the night make some excuse why they can’t spend more time with him and leave.
He notices one of the women who made some excuse about a party that night has been talking with the MC frequently, and surmises correctly that they are married – turns out the woman wasn’t actually looking for romance and was just leading Feynman on to get free drinks out of him. The permanent singer at the club had been introducing women to him after first telling the women he was a big spender.
Feynman befriends the couple (singer and MC), and they talk about how plenty of rich men at the bar keep spending money on the girls there without getting anywhere romantically. The MC tries to teach Feynman about the social roles people take on at a bar. The key lesson is that a man who buys a woman a drink up front is unlikely to end up getting the one night stand he wants, but if he refuses to buy her anything, his chances will be better. Feynman tried it out by getting a girl to pay him back for a sandwich, and a few hours later she came by at the end of the night and invited him to her room, so the lesson apparently worked.
The “bitches” part is some kind of temporary psychological reprogramming he’s doing on himself for a day or two so that he can bring himself to objectify people against his usual inclination, so that he can try the experiment. It’s clear in context that he doesn’t think all women are “bitches”.
Feynman tried it one more time some while later on someone who wasn’t a traveling singer, flirting a bit with a girl but then asking if she would sleep with him before he would buy her a drink. She agreed.
His conclusion at the end is: “So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”
Note: I’m not making any value judgments here, just recounting the story.
Again, he spent one day amping himself up so that he could spend one evening play-acting as a misogynist jackass, including throwing this single (offensive but also somewhat jokey sounding) line at a woman after she suggested that he buy her a sandwich so they could eat together at her place, but then took the sandwiches he bought and was about to leave without him. She can’t have been that offended by the line, considering she came back a few hours later and invited him to her room.
The point of the story is that misogynist jackasses can be successful at finding one-night stands a bar but he didn’t enjoy it, so he only ever tried it twice.
Maybe you think that is damning evidence of some inherently irredeemable character flaw, but let he/she who hasn’t ever once spent an evening being an asshole (intentionally for an amateur sociology experiment or otherwise) cast the first stone.
Feynman initially assumed that if a man bought drinks for a woman, she owed him sex. After these experiences, he assumed that if a man “disrespected” a woman by not buying her anything, she provided him with sex because she was stupid or masochistic.
Sadly, in both these cases, he never considered the possibility that a woman’s sexual consent and worth should not be monetized in the first place.
(a) Feynman never claims anyone owed him sex. All he said was that the men buying women drinks out of an unrealistic hope of getting a one-night stand out the other end were fools.
(b) Feynman never said that not buying her something was “disrespectful” (though the MC did say that the man should (1) be disrespectful and also (2) not buy a woman anything up front). The “disrespectful” part was insulting someone or directly propositioning a stranger for sex in return for a drink.
You are reading a whole lot more into the story about Feynman’s “assumptions” and “considerations” than is supportable by the text. Overall I would say your comment is considerably more condescending and offensive than the story.
If you want to give Feynman crap about his other treatment of women throughout his life, so be it, but this story is pretty thin evidence for whatever case you’re trying to make.
That comment is from the post, which again, I'd suggest people read instead of a paraphrase.
This is the advice offered to him:
“Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
The master of ceremonies was right, as in: acting disagreeable, pushy, socially superior, insulting, etc., and then directly propositioning someone for sex before paying for anything was effective in practice (at least twice) at getting women at a bar to agree to a one-night stand.
Edit: I read “the post”. Either the author has poor reading comprehension and largely failed to understand the content of the story (maybe Feynman can be blamed for not having written it in a clearer way), or she is being disingenuous.
I think the right phrase here might have passed out of our vocabulary during a long recent period of extreme permissiveness. It's ungentlemanlike to speak of such things.
It sounds like whoever told him the buying drinks doesn't work theory was the original PUA, and then he tried it thought there was something to it but didn't care to continue?
He creates many many good movies. Yes, his bad behavior doesn't nullify his achievements. Many famous/talented people are jerks in history, and 99% won't survive under today's moral microscope. The achievements wouldn't cover what they did personally to other people, however, the reverse is also true.
I think it's important to separate different types of harassment. Yes, Feynman was probably sexist and viewed women in terms of stereotypical gender roles, but so did probably 70% plus of people in the 60s.
I specifically contrast that with the many recent reports of deliberate abuses of power or outright assault. There was still a knowledge, even back in the not too distant past, that those things were wrong, as evidenced by the fact that so many men tried to keep their behavior hidden.
I think there is a difference between "grabbing, kissing, making comments about physical attributes" and "looking around for the nearest 'girl' and asking if she would fetch it to him".
Of course, but they're talking about the risks/results of holding the entirety of a person up as hero when you may not know everything about them. Then they used an example they felt was relevant to them and possibly relevant to many HN readers. There was no suggestion that the actions were as bad.
I mean even after you think you know somebody it’s useful to recognize they have good parts and bad, separately. Lasseter can still be a hero for his work as a director (writer? Creator? Honestly not sure about his title.) without looking up to his social behavior at all.
It would be weird in any case to assume that, erm, career people are just as heroic in other spheres of their life.
I absolutely think that way, that we can and should separate the person from the achievements (case in point: I love Roman Polanski's films). Nevertheless, it's a natural reaction to be sad when a person you hold in high esteem is revealed to have negative aspects in other areas.
> You can respect their achievements while separating the other half
Agree to disagree. If people would tell them to go to hell from the beginning, their achievements would go to someone else and we would all be better for it.
This would require a very strong assumption that geniuses are a commodity. That all it takes is to be in the right place and be given the right opportunity and anyone could have done what he did.
It's probably true. Given enough time and people, someone's going to do it. You just gotta look at ancient civs and how they often would independently come up with really complex stuff. Given the spread of knowledge since that time, some discoveries might be easier.
Billions of people over hundreds of years produces lots of opportunities.
This was not OP's argument. The argument is that we could have replaced Feynman with whoever was second-best-yet-not-a-chauvinist-pig, and we would get exactly the same outcome, sans sexism.
The iPhone wasn't invented by Apple, they just had a great combination of timing on manufacturing processes, great marketing and a decent UI to start with.
There is no doubt in my mind that we would've made the same progress with any other company, albeit perhaps cosmetic differences.
I think this is translatable to most other advancements. It's nearly always iterational, and either someone's first, different people discover something independently or it's a mashup of separate discoveries.
History makes geniuses, smart people exist everywhere.
You can tell people that their behavior in one area is wrong without failing to respect their achievements in another area, so your statement (as well as manifestly being false; disrespecting Feynman doesn't magically create another equally-talented physicist) is a non-sequitur.
Huh? General Lee was the Commander of the Confederate States Army. No one is stripping him from the history books; he had an important role in history. It's the monuments glorifying him that are being removed from public spaces.
Feynman similarly was responsible for actual important works in physics. He won't be stripped from history books.
Robert E. Lee is still in history books. He may have a few less monuments than he did a few years ago, but then those who read history books rather than just worshipping graven images of historical figures out of context might realize that Lee himself was opposed to such monuments to either side of the Civil War as barriers to national reconciliation and progress.
I mean frankly who gives a damn what Lee thought; the issue is the same with feynman in theat it is their fans who romanticize them.
That said, it’s not exactly uncommon knowledge that Feynman was terrible to women, especially all the ones who followed his first wife, including his second. People aren’t exactly building statues to him so much as his lectures and story telling ability.
Rewriting history is worse than these guys' behaviour. Future generations need to read about both the good and the ugly, if only to avoid repeating the latter.
It's rewriting history and the present to claim that Robert E Lee is being stripped from any history books. That's just bullshit. So's the idea that rewriting history is worse than fighting for slavery.
He's trying to say that he's the victim here, a white man suffering from reverse discrimination, sick and tired of having to tolerate people writing bad facts about Robert E Lee and tearing down his statues, which deeply effects him every day of his life, because tradition. We've heard it all before.
Relevant quote regarding Feynman:
…in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.
It's complex. You can respect their achievements while separating the other half. And until you really know someone, it's not good to lump the two halves together in your mind.