Pompous vs Ordinary Fool- R. Feynman


Mikee

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The full text of the passage comes in an online chapter, "Is Electricity FIre?" from Feynmann's book Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman (the host site seems Slavic, and seems also to fly over any copyright concerns):

Finally, when we were discussing the question of whether we had developed a way of having a dialogue among people of different disciplines—our second basic “problem”—I said that I noticed something interesting. 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. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!”

Of course I was attacked, from all around. “Don’t you think that order can come from chaos?”

“Uh, well, as a general principle, or … I didn’t understand what to do with a question like “Can order come from chaos?” Yes, no, what of it?

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more.

Edited by william.scherk
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Feynman's comments on cargo-cult science are also priceless.

Please see: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/08/richard-feynman-caltech-cargo-cult-science/

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