Chapter 20 - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
Today's Chapter is based on the autobiography “Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character” by Richard Feynman.
Buy it on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041
Here's what I have learned from the book:
The Feynman Technique
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
— Benjamin Franklin
As we have learned previously through our deep dive on Sam Zell, Richard Feynman is notorious for his method of learning called the Feynman Technique. It consists of the following four key steps to master any knowledge:
Choose a concept you want to learn about
Explain it to a 12 years old
Reflect, Refine, and Simplify
Organize and Review
According to Feynman, the secret of learning lays in understanding the true essence of a concept rather than learning names through memorisation. As such, Feynman is keen on the principle of being able to explain something to a child with simple words rather than using complex words. As Mortimer Adler once said, “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way-by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
— Richard Feynman
“After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens-they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!”
— Richard Feynman
As such, Feynman believed that teaching should be done by providing examples and through experimentations rather than promoting students to learn through memorisation of complex terms and jargon. As a matter of fact, Feynman mentions that he couldn't personally understand anything in general unless he's carrying along in his mind a specific example and watching it go. This led to some people thinking he was kind of slow in the beginning because he asked a lot of “dumb” questions, but this allows him to deconstruct the problem through first principles thinking.
“I started to read: “Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed.. I said, “And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature-what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t. “But if, instead, you were to write, ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called “triboluminescence.”’ Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.””
— Richard Feynman
Similarly, from Feynman's work experience in the Los Alamos project, he found something similar in the way people work. Individuals tends to work better when they understand the situation rather than by merely following instructions and rules. This reminds of the concept of Leadership established by Lee Kwan Yew. It is a company's leader's responsibility to communicate the company's vision and values to their employees. Employees can only buy in on the company's culture if the leader is able to make them believe in it. As Lee Kwan Yew once said, “to be a leader, you must be able to communicate your feelings and move the other fellow. It's not just ideas, you know.”
“I said, “In my opinion it is impossible for them to obey a bunch of rules unless they understand how it works. It’s my opinion that it’s only going to work if I tell them, and Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless they are fully informed as to how it works!”” — Richard Feynman
“Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: “We’re fighting a war! We see what it is!” They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing. Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn’t need supervising in the night; they didn’t need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used. So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.”
— Richard Feynman
Circle of Competence
“I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.”
— Tom Watson Sr.
As mentioned previously, knowledge goes beyond memorising complex terms and jargon. However, this way of learning - through memorisation - has given a lot of individuals an illusion that they are more than knowledgeable on a subject than they actually are. This can be very dangerous as going beyond your circle of competence and not knowing it can cause serious issues in your decision making process.
“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.”
— Richard Feynman
Feynman realised that the fragility of knowledge isn't a common issue among students, but it is also susceptible among experts. For example, he mentions in his autobiography an incident where he was once approached by a painter at a restaurant who told him that he could get yellow paint with red and white. However, from his expertise with light, a combination of red and white could only get you pink.
“But that shows you how much I trusted these “real guys.” The painter had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn’t know. I was expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were, “The only way to get yellow will be something new and interesting, and I’ve got to see this.””
— Richard Feynman
“This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that’s the correct motion. It’s the fundamental principle of Einstein’s gravity-that is, what’s called the “proper time” is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn’t recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn’t dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.”
— Richard Feynman
As such, Feynman warns us to never trust experts and to always test things on your own. This is eerily similar to what we have learned from Edward Thorp who had the tendency to not accept anything he was told until he tested it out himself. As a matter of fact, Feynman was one of those “experts” who told Thorp on the impossibility of beating the game of roulette through prediction. This encouraged Thorp to find a solution to this “unsolvable” problem.
“If anyone knew whether physical prediction at roulette was possible, it should be Richard Feynman. I asked him, “Is there any way to beat the game of roulette?” When he said there wasn’t, I was relieved and encouraged. This suggested that no one had yet worked out what I believed was possible. With this incentive, I began a series of experiments.”
— Edward Thorp
“Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself.”
— Richard Feynman
“I’ll never make that mistake again, reading the experts’ opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.”
— Richard Feynman
The concept of understanding one's circle of competence is primordial in increasing your odds of success in life and in business. As a matter of fact, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger often mentions that their success in investing comes from understanding their circle of competence and operating within it. Buffett also explains that you do not need a large circle of competence to be successful, but it is a must to know its boundaries.
“You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.
If you want to be the best tennis player in the world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it’s hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably doable by two-thirds of you. It takes a will. It takes the intelligence. But after a while, you’d gradually know all about the plumbing business in Bemidji and master the art. That is an attainable objective, given enough discipline. And people who could never win a chess tournament or stand in center court in a respectable tennis tournament can rise quite high in life by slowly developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop through work.”
— Charlie Munger
“What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”
— Warren Buffett
Multidisciplinary Thinking
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
— Mark Twain
Feynman is perhaps one of the most well known physicist, especially for his work in the Atomic Bomb Project. However, he was also curious in learning other fields of science such as chemistry and biology. As a matter of fact, he was once told by a teacher the importance of learning other disciplines:
“So MIT was good, but Slater was right to warn me to go to another school for my graduate work. And I often advise my students the same way. Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.”
— Richard Feynman
One of the reasons why this is useful is due to the fact that Feynman noticed that experts will always see and evaluate problems through their own point of view. This can be a bad thing as we can fall into the Man with a Hammer syndrome, meaning that we become biased towards the tools that we possess to solve a problem, regardless of whether such tools are appropriate to the problem at hand.
“Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge”; and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on.”
— Richard Feynman
As a matter of fact, Charlie Munger also believes that people who have a broad mind and who understand many different models from many different disciplines make better decisions. This is mainly because it allows one to have a different box of tools when facing a problem. Possessing a different box of tools is certainly an advantage and an edge that Feynman also experienced during his career:
“The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.”
— Richard Feynman
“When one of the guys was explaining a problem, I said, “Why don’t you do it by differentiating under the integral sign?” In half an hour he had it solved, and they’d been working on it for three months. So, I did something, using my “different box of tools.””
— Richard Feynman
“Munger has adopted an approach to business and life that he refers to as worldly wisdom. Munger believes that by using a range of different models from many different disciplines—psychology, history, mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, and so on—a person can use the combined output of the synthesis to produce something that has more value than the sum of its parts.”
— Tren Griffin
Peter Kaufman, one of Munger's most vivid followers of his multidisciplinary approach, mentions the reason why it is important to be a multidisciplinary thinker in his speech to the California Polytechnic State University Pomona Economics Club:
“The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, “To understand is to know what to do.” Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line—”to understand is to know what to do.” How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, “The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.” You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well,” but how are you going to make any good decisions in life—the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life—if all you know is one well?”
— Peter Kaufman
Kaufman continues by saying that he was able to learn the big ideas of science, biology and etc. through reading interviews with experts on the subject. He was able to understand because the interviews were done in a clear language and by using good examples. As we have learned previously with the Feynman Technique, learning can be easy if you keep things simple.
“So I tried to learn what Munger calls “the big ideas” from all the different disciplines. Right up front I want to tell you what my trick was, because if you try to do it the way he did it, you don’t have enough time in your life to do it. It’s impossible. Because the fields are too big, and the books are too thick. So my trick to learn the big ideas of science, biology, et cetera, was I found this science magazine called Discover magazine.Show of hands, anybody here ever heard of Discover magazine? A few people. Okay. And I found that this magazine every month had a really good interview with somebody from some aspect of science. Every month. And it was six or seven pages long. It was all in layperson’s terms. The person who was trying to get their ideas across would do so using good stories, clear language, and they would never fail to get all their big ideas into the interview. I mean, if you’re given the chance to be interviewed by Discover magazine and your field is nanoparticles or something, aren’t you going to try your very best to get all the good ideas into the interview with the best stories? Okay.”
— Peter Kaufman
Beyond the Book
Read "The Feynman Technique: Master the Art of Learning" by Farnam Street
Read "Understanding your Circle of Competence: How Warren Buffett Avoids Problems" by Farnam Street
Read "The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking" by Farnam Street