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There's the famous Feynman method i.e. Study hard, Teach it to others, Identify the gaps in your own knowledge, and Simplify/Synthesize.

But people often also forget that there is another method associated with Feynman aka The Feynman Algorithm (which was outlined by his colleague Murray Gell-Mann, a noble prize winning physicist himself). This method goes as follows:

1. Write down the problem. 2. Think real hard. 3. Write the solution.

Not to discount or discredit anything (or anyone) here but we must understand that Feynman was no average person and that his advice on anything related to learning or problem-solving must be viewed through an optics that adequately adjusts for his intellect as well.

11 comments

The second "algorithm" is good in that you _can_ overlook those three things in solving a problem.

Defining the problem can be a task in itself. So write it down.

Think hard. If you aren't willing to sweat and endure mental pain, then it isn't a problem. It's an exercise.

Write it down. Here is where the biggest gap lies in the algorithm. Usually a solution in your head isn't a solution and writing will reveal that. So there is a feedback loop between thinking and writing.

All of these are good, but obviously they don't help much beyond the obvious. It probably advantaged Feynman to create a mystique around his problem solving tactics. Which is why it is probably so obvious.

My variation on that method:

1. load my brain with all the context of the problem

2. go out for a run, which bounces it all around in my brain until things fall into place

3. write the solution when I get back

A lazier step 2 that works for me is to sleep for a full night.

This is also well known in the Clojure community as Hammock-Driven Development [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc

This diffuse mode learning (vs focused). Barbara Oakley’s book and course go into detail about leveraging the science of how we learn.

Gell-Mann probably had his tongue at least a little bit in his cheek when he said that: the two had a competitive relationship.

I always took it as a dig at the way Feynman liked to make out that ideas just came naturally to him, when in fact (as Murray would have known) Feynman had to put the work in the same as everyone else, even if he was a genius.

I met some really hard working people that literally had no good ideas - only poor clones of the most obvious solutions. So for me, event if it took him some work, he was far above most of others. And I like to read the quote about Feynman method as a remainder of the obvious: we do not control our creativity - there is no structure to it that can be thought or sold (contrary to what some self help book writers would like us to believe). There is only chaotic exploration and time, and for some it bears fruit and for others it only makes them go round in circles.

To be fair, I think Feynman applies this in sequence.

I.e Study hard, Teach it to others, Identify the gaps in your own knowledge, and Simplify/Synthesize.

THEN 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think real hard. 3. Write the solution.

If a problem seems intractable, return to the first process.

Also, remember that Feynman also spent weeks at play with problems that interested him. Do that too. Be kind to yourself.

Nothing of importance that Feynman had to "think real hard" about in his adult life could have been studied because the methods did not exist yet.

I meant study the domain hard. Know how to solve all the solvable problems related to the question at hand.

> Teach it to others

If there's no one around, try explaining it to yourself. An easy method to determine whether you superficially understood a topic or not. After reading some material, it's remarkable how little of it you've truly understood sometimes.

Many years ago I worked in the same small department as another engineer who was using the same development gear as I was. We had a fairly formal schedule with well defined times for tea breaks.

We generally sat opposite each other at a table drinking tea and eating biscuits while describing our problems to each other. Neither of us ever really said much about the other person's problems, we certainly didn't attempt to offer any real solutions, but it was striking how many problems that had seemed intractable before the tea break were trivially soluble afterward.

We were designing and programming embedded controllers in the early '80s.

Record it and play it back too! That way you get both the explaining and the being explained, now you can notice new things while past you is talking too :)

Teachers, Professors, and TAs may have prepared a quiz for us: to test the knowledge of others in order to help them feel learned in application.

A lot of his intellectual capacity seems to come from his ability to visualize a problem and make something difficult and complicated easier to conceptualize. He credits his dad with showing him how to visialize a problem, but he definitely refined the ability and trained his intuition for non-intuitive problems.

His dad asked Richard to teach him calculus, but just couldn't get it. Still, the idea of an adult wanting to learn something like calculus shows me he was a smart guy.

I was thinking of his dad describing a giraffe to him from a book when he was really young, and then describing the length of its neck and how it would allow it to poke its head into his upstairs bedroom window. He said things like this put him on the path to visualize things. Maybe when you're a kid, certain things set you off on certain paths that you take, and some of those paths are profitable (I don't mean this in a strictly monetary sense). Feynman latched onto that and rode it (with some natural ability) for his whole life. Other people might have been able to do the same thing, but they never would have latched onto it as a kid and refined it.

I think we'd have better thinkers in the future if we put more focus on refining abilities in kids like visualization of problems, or giving them different tactics to approach things they don't understand.

I’d also credit likely dyslexia for his ability to visualize.

Like an MLB player telling you if you want to get better at baseball to throw the ball faster . thanks.

This reminds me of this poem I read somewhere:

===

Are you willing to put in the time

to learn to throw the ball faster,

even if it takes hours and hours of

throwing that ball over and over again?

Or will you say that it's only for those who

are good at throwing the ball very fast

and submit voluntarily to being average?

This poem reminds me of Carol Dweck and the growth mindset.

> Feynman was no average person and that his advice on anything related to learning or problem-solving must be viewed through an optics that adequately adjusts for his intellect as well.

I wasn't planning to work on models of fundamental physics.

>Not to discount or discredit anything (or anyone) here but we must understand that Feynman was no average person and that his advice on anything related to learning or problem-solving must be viewed through an optics that adequately adjusts for his intellect as well.

I wonder about this a little. Let's assume the premise, Feynman was "no average person". To what extent is this explained by the hardware, as it were, between his ears and to what extent the software he was running? The way he approached puzzles, problems and so on throughout his life from a very early age influencing the functioning of that hardware? It seems to me he had some impressive sounding intellectual programming going on, much of which he was doing himself, when I listen to his stories of his childhood.

Michael Jordan was pretty good at a particular sport. He was "no ordinary person" and obviously so - he's 6 ft 7 or so which makes him an outlier in just that one dimension of his genetics, ie his hardware (and no doubt some others too, just that one is measurable in a clear and obvious way). If I wanted to play "like Mike" I can forget about it and there was nothing I could have done or that could have been done for me, or to me while I was growing up and after that would make any meaningful difference. Is that statement true of every single person reading this comment? I am in no way discounting Michael Jordan's work ethic, competitive drive & basketball decision making study and genius, I'm just noting if I had all those and had them to a greater extent that Jordan (if such a thing is possible - I have no clue) I still would not play like him, I had literally zero chance.

Is the same true of Feynman? I don't think it's a question that can be answered with anything much more than "belief" and prejudice. Psychology is probably the academic field that might address this and the question is too complex & sophisticated to get a good answer so much so that we have seen rather a lot of utterly discredited, appallingly bad answers that have gained traction over the years. Too many factors that cannot be controlled for. Too much that cannot be measured. Given that, if we believe Feynman had the genetics the way Jordan did as a necessary condition of whatever we're calling success, and it's reasonable to believe that, we still must have a doubt about it.

Beyond that, we don't know how many other humans have or had a "Jordan like" body who did not go on to his levels of achievement and if there are any or many, why they did not which would tell us something about the worth of potentially controllable factors - eg training & study. And yet when we try to achieve something with our physical strength, stamina and so on, listening to Jordan on his training regime is probably useful - unless you're getting something equally good, somewhere else (which is very readily available). Physical training regimes seem to have had a lot of work put into their analysis and we can probably all talk meaningfully about some aspects of achieving better physical fitness than we currently have. Is the same true for training our brains? Listening to anyone who has done impressive things with their brain on the topic of how they prepared seems quite worthwhile to me. Contextualizing their thoughts also seems worthwhile. We genuinely do not /know/ what makes a person into someone with Feynman's intellectual abilities. So as far as listening and trying what he recommends? What else do you have? Why do you think it's better? What is he recommending that would only work for someone with better hardware between their ears that we have? How could we get meaningful metrics on any of it if we can at all?

Wow, that's a very long way to say "Is it nature, or is it nurture ? I don't know.".

But putting jokes aside - we know for sure that there are conditions that limits brains capacity to learn. Be it genetical, environmental or acquired through some events (if I hit You hard enough with metal rod at right spot at head there will be some possibility for You to loose ability to retain memory). And its quite for me to believe that this conditions are discrete - I would expect some continuity.

>>We genuinely do not /know/ what makes a person into someone with Feynman's intellectual abilities.

We don't event know what makes people learn to think critically (a opposed to learn just to repeat facts ad verbum). If You look at debates of education specialists in my country all You can see is people that try to create some giant sieves that will pick up students that are worth investing in and throw out others.

Arguably, the human brain is both hardware and software - while neural networks are not representative of real neuron networks, but we can sort of use them as a basis - without sufficient connections/neurons, you simply mathematically can’t solve certain problems (as in the end, neural networks just subdivide an n-dimensional problem space).

So while brains can and do develop new connections, there is likely a non-linear effect of having “better” connections by default.

To be fair, that second algorithm works pretty well. I frequently solve problems by staring at them.

These accommodating adjustments are appropriate in many contexts.