misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.
From the about the authors in the OP's link "Feynman was a remarkably effective educator. Of all his numerous awards, he was especially proud of the Oersted Medal for Teaching, which he won in 1972.". He probably didn't do a lot of the stuff he popularised, but that was what he did, it is a skill taking abstract stuff and making it coherent. I know when I did physics (in the 90's) many swore by his books, particularly for quantum, it was a bit of a secret we'd have these incomprehensible books on quantum, and someone would say - have you seen "The Feynman lectures", they are good, I wish we had the videos available at the time.
> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture.
Moral relativism is a thing, but I think a more useful way to think of it rather than just saying "misogyny was a thing back then, should we care he was a misogynist then?" is to ask "if he were to have lived and worked in the 2000s, would he associate with Epstein?" And to be honest… Feynman does strike me as the kind of person to have the intellect to attract Epstein's attention and also the, for lack of a better term, party attitude to go to a couple of Epstein's parties that would result in him having awkward press releases trying to explain that he just had no possible idea that Epstein was doing anything sexual with children and conveniently forgetting all the times he was on the private island for some party or another...
That's the real strong vibe I get from Surely You're Joking. He's the kind of person who wants to be seen as someone who gets up to wacky hijinks, to be seen as "cool," and he specifically interprets "cool" in a way that's misogynistic even at a time (when he was dictating the stories that led to Surely You're Joking) when misogyny was starting to become a professional hindrance.
(And one of the things that really worries me about Surely You're Joking is that it's often recommended as a sort of "look at the wacky hijinks you can get up to as a physicist," so recommending the book is a valorization of his wacky hijinks and... well, that's ultimately what Angela's video is about, that's a thing we need to stop doing.)
> That's the real strong vibe I get from Surely You're Joking. He's the kind of person who wants to be seen as someone who gets up to wacky hijinks, to be seen as "cool," and he specifically interprets "cool" in a way that's misogynistic even at a time (when he was dictating the stories that led to Surely You're Joking) when misogyny was starting to become a professional hindrance.
In my experience, everyone who says this is talking about exactly one chapter in Surely You're Joking, but they don't appear to actually have paid close attention to the story. It's a story that Feynman recounts about trying to pick up girls when he was younger. He was advised by an older, "cooler" man to be mean. Feynman tries it and it works, but he feels bad about it and says that he never did it again. People calling Feynman a misogynist for this story seem to have just skipped the end of the chapter.
It's been decades since I read Surely You're Joking, and I've completely forgotten about that chapter. It plays no part in my conscious recollection of the book.
The episode that really stuck in my mind was the episode about his competition with the abacus-user, who was better at math, which essentially ends with him giving up trying to explain how he could mental math a cube root faster, because the abacus-user was just someone who couldn't understand a math explanation.
I remembered enjoying the book, so having not read it in a long time, I tried sharing Surely You're Joking with my kids at bedtime.
That chapter wasn’t the only thing I ended up skipping or heavily editing.
* Picking a room at Los Alamos with a window facing the women’s housing, but being disappointed that a tree or something blocked his view. (Wasn’t he also married at this point?)
* Starting a new Uni faculty position and hanging out at student dances, dismayed that girls would stop chatting & dancing with him when they learned he was a prof and not a fellow student.
* Hanging out at strip clubs to practice his drawing skills.
* Considering a textbook sales rep’s offer to help him find “trouble” in Vegas.
So maybe that one chapter turns around some at the end, but it’s not the only cringe-worthy moment in the book, and I can see why some people may have an overall negative opinion.
If I were going to do this with my kids now that they are teens, I wouldn’t filter as much and use the more questionable events as points of discussion.
This is from Lawrence Krauss[0]'s email to Epstein[1]:
> ps. I have decided that Feynman would have done what I did... and I am therefore content.. no matter what... :)
> On Apr 6, 2011, at 3:56 PM, Jeffrey Epstein wrote:
> what evidence? no real sex.. where is she getting her so called facts
Krauss's letter is obviously horrible in its implications. What's interesting to me is his interpretation of what Feynman would have done. Is it his delusional justification of what he'd done with Epstein, or is it based on a certain reputation of Feynman in the science community?
> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.
The video actually addresses this very point in the first few minutes:
> the second component of the Feynman lifestyle that the Feynman bro has to follow, you know as told in this book, is that women are inherently inferior to you and if you want to be the smartest big boy physicist in the room you need to make sure they know that I think people are sometimes shocked to hear this like that that exists in this book especially because as I said if you were a precocious teenager interested in physics people shoved this book at you they just put it into your hands like oh you want to be a physicist here's the coolest physicist ever
> I feel like it's at this point in the video when like Mr. Cultural Relativism is going to show up in the comments and be like how dare you judge people from the past on their actions that's not fair things were different back then women liked when men lied to them and pretended to be an undergrad so that-- it was fine back then it was fine and I just, no, actually this book was published 40 years ago which is just not that long ago Richard Feynman should have known that women were people 40 years ago like absolutely not it's not "how things were back then" what's wrong with you people, no, it's inappropriate then it's inappropriate now
Later the actual author, Ralph Leighton, of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is mentioned so perhaps the responsibility for what was included is his more than Feynman's. I think the criticism stands that the degree of sexism effectively celebrated by inclusion was certainly less culturally accepted in 1985 when the book was published than when the events occurred, and that's the point of raising the issue of why was it judged as good and proper to include this marginalizing anecdotes when his actual contributions to physics and teaching were worthy of celebration.
I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book. From memory, he learnt the behaviour from other bar flies at the bars he hung out. And he expressed his surprise at how some women reacted. This was far from his upbringing and his experience with his fiancee.
The behaviour is hardly laudable, but "celebrated" it is not.
> I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book.
The argument presented in the video about this is that these are the stories Feynman edited and reworked over time, and shared with his friend Ralph Leighton, who then recorded them in the "Surely You're Joking" book.
The video also describes a change in his behavior later in life. In 1974, responding to a letter asking to reprint "What is Science?"[1] from 1966, he comments that "some of the remarks about the female mind might not be taken in the light spirit they were meant"[2]. This is cited in the video as Feynman becoming more progressive between 1966 and 1974. The "Surely" book is published in 1985, and yet still includes the misogynistic stories. The video's complaint is that there should be some contextualization about views changing, like was given in Feynman's reply in 1974, but there being none it comes across as an implicit endorsement. I don't recall from the video if Feynman reviewed or edited the "Surely" book, which leaves it as Ralph Leighton's perspective more than Feynman's.
It seems a legitimate criticism that this book held up as an example of a good role model in physics doesn't try to avoid perpetuating bad stereotypes. It's probably egregious to say the mere inclusion of the stories celebrates their actions. But it's equally egregious to fail to even try to address the bad behavior, especially when it's held out as a positive example.
Certainly. But you're missing the point. Feynman chose to tell the stories to Ralph Leighton who then recorded them in the "Surely" book which was published in 1985, well after Feynman's own perspective seems to have changed about the more offensive things he'd said.
By many other accounts he was a kind, caring, thoughtful person, but some of the selected stories in "Surely" paint a significantly different picture. To me it's unclear, not having studied the life of Richard Feynman, what parts are exaggerated. But it does seem clear that these stories were refined and selected for inclusion, and were therefore considered endearing or representative for the intention of the book. And in the time and culture in which it was published that seems like a bit of a miss at the very least.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".
yeah its pretty amazing it can do this. The problem is the gaslighting by the companies making this - "see we can create compilers, we won't need programmers", programmers - "this is crap, are you insane?", classic gas lighting.
It’s giving you an idea of what Claude is capable of - creating a project at the complexity of a small compiler. I don’t know if it can replace programmers but can definitely handle tasks of smaller complexity autonomously.
I regularly has it produce 10k+ lines of code that is working and passing extensive test suites. If you give it a prompt and no agent loop and test harness, then sure, you'll need to waste your time babysitting it.
TDD does not require you to know everything you're building up-front. Tests can come out of experimentation, to validate the final build. Tests can be driven by autonomous directed planning.
I'm currently, in fact, working on a system where the LLM semi-independently build up an understanding of a project and its goals from exploration, and then creates small targeted improvement plans, including the acceptance criteria that then feeds into building test suites which the build will finally be measured against.
It still needs direction - if you have a large spec or a judge/fitness function, such as you would for a compiler for an existing language, you can achieve a lot just from using that and may not need much additional direction. But even for far more exploratory projects, you can have the LLM surface perceived goals and plans to meet those goals, and "teach it" on the way by giving it points on how to revise a given goal or plan, and have e.g. implementation successes and failures feed into future plans.
My current system has "learned" [1] quite quickly on fairly complex test projects, and I'm in fact right now testing it on a hobby compiler project. The first cycles are frustrating (and an area I'm refining), because it's dumped into a project it doesn't know the real motivations for, and it will start making some code changes you know are bad, and letting go obsessing over that is hard. But ultimately using it as input to a feedback cycle where you add to its goals (e.g. make clear one of the goals is code that meets your specific standards) is more useful than managing it in detail yourself.
I'm very closet to putting this improvement agent in a cron job for a project I rely on for day to day use (yes, I'll make sure I can roll back), because it now very consistently implements improvements both entirely unilaterally, or based on minor hints (it has access to some files on my desktop, including a "journal" of sorts, and if I put a one-liner about an idea or frustration, I'll often come back to find a 300+ line implementation plan for a change to fix it, or lay the foundation for fixing it.
[1] "Learned" in this instance is in quotes for a reason. I'm not fine-tuning models - I have the agent do a retro of its own plan executions, and update documents with "lessons learned" that gets fed into the next planning stage.
> Someone got it working on Compiler Explorer and remarked that the assembly output “reminds me of the quality of an undergraduate’s compiler assignment”. Which, to be fair, is both harsh and not entirely wrong when you look at the register spilling patterns.
This is what I've noticed about most LLM generated code, its about the quality of an undergrad, and I think there's a good reason for this - most of the code its been trained on is of undergrad quality. Stack overflow questions, a lot of undergrad open source projects, there are some professional quality open source projects (eg SqlLite) but they are outweighed by the mass of other code. Also things like Sqllite don't compare to things like Oracle or Sql Server which are proprietary.
That is a very good analogy - sliced shop bread is tasteless and not that good for you compared to sourdough. Likewise awful store bought tomatoes taste like nothing compared to heirloom tomatoes and arguably have different nutritional content.
Shop bread and tomatoes though can be manufactured without any thought of who makes them, though they can be reliably manufactured without someone guiding an LLM which is perhaps where the analogy falls down, and we always want them to be the same, but software is different in every form.
I 100% agree. Though i would argue that, like trash sliced bread, 99% of software is just CRUD reinvented over and over. Which, like a deli sandwich, is probably fine not to have artisanal bread for.
not sure I agree, the transport layer sure - which can be automated without LLM's anyway, it's the business logic which differs every time, and is the hard part.
I have been through this before (wherever/whenever the money seems to flow) - databases are bad, you should use couchbase etc, I was a db expert, the people advocating weren't, but they were very loud. The many, many evangelistic web development alternatives that come and go, all very loud. Now the latest - LLM's, like couchbase et al they have their place but the evangelists are not having any of it.
I work a lot with doctors (writing software for them), I am very envious of their system of specialisation, eg this dude is such and such a specialist - he knows about it, listen to him. IT seems to be anyone who talks the loudest has a podium, separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. One day we will have a system of qualifications I hope, but it seems a long way off.
I'm using a MacBook Pro 2016 for dev still works great, and its still better than every windows laptop available now. The touchpad itself is still superior - its crazy when you think about it. I know people on their 3rd or 4th windows laptop since I've been using mine. I tried a M4 recently and its battery life is fantastic, and its faster so I'll probably upgrade when this one dies, but it still works well.
Edit: just did a google and it seems I can still sell it for about $600AUD, I don't know how anyone is buying a non apple lap top.
From the about the authors in the OP's link "Feynman was a remarkably effective educator. Of all his numerous awards, he was especially proud of the Oersted Medal for Teaching, which he won in 1972.". He probably didn't do a lot of the stuff he popularised, but that was what he did, it is a skill taking abstract stuff and making it coherent. I know when I did physics (in the 90's) many swore by his books, particularly for quantum, it was a bit of a secret we'd have these incomprehensible books on quantum, and someone would say - have you seen "The Feynman lectures", they are good, I wish we had the videos available at the time.
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