"You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods."

It sounds like Feynman remembered that his student thought highly of the problems he was working on late into his career. Feynman's encouraging his former student, as a recent graduate, to start out with low-hanging fruit.

He goes on to describe some of the easier problems that he worked on in the beginning of his career. That gave his former student some examples of worthwhile problems to start out with.

Personally, I think Feynman was very humble. Especially for a Nobel Prize winner.

I got the opposite impression regarding the list. To me it seemed to be trying to illustrate that he was not always working on grand ideas (one of them was a theory of how to fold paper to make a children's toy, after all).

Ego is necessary to protect a rather fragile flame of intelligence. When the flame becomes stable, the ego can be discarded. Some do, and in case of Feynman, if he did that, he would be called St. Richard; while some choose to turn their ego into a blast furnace, so the fire would turn inwards.

Ego is important because it allows you to seriously attempt problems that many people would consider beyond them.

If you genuinely believe that you can achieve something, you might be willing to sink many months of nonstop work into it despite zero tangible progress. Someone without that ego may not have the tolerance to last that long without progress while still believing it's a good use of time.

I think you misread this because he certainly did not say or imply "I was working on problems close to the gods", in fact the phrase he used was "when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods", meaning that others considered the things he worked on as being "close to the gods" only because they did not understand them at the same level he did - his list of experiments/problems was about how mundane the problems he was solving actually were. It did not read as him having much of an ego. Most of the problems he worked on have little to no impact on society or people's daily lives, most people still have never even heard of Feynman, and he knew most people wouldn't. That's not ego. If Feynman did have any ego it came from the pleasure he got from living an interesting life, not by how smart he was compared to the rest of humanity.

True, it's inflated ego which is a problem. From what I've read about Feynman, I doubt his ego was inflated.

> Too many engineers eschew ego

I'd like to work wherever you do. ;x

He had a gargantuan ego... and gargantuan accomplishments to back it up. The Michael Jordan of late 20th century physics, in more ways than one.

Too few engineers eschew ego - this is Feynman's point.

Most people are not Feynman. Most engineers today think they have the capability of being Feynman one day - of course, statistics dictates that most will not be.

This is why Feynman's advice is powerful -

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.

Feynman here is instructing someone with too much ego, not too little. Koichi Mano thinks the problems he's working on are beneath him - that he should already be working on Feynman level problems! This is why he writes with shame to Feynman about his "humble" problem. Feynman demonstrates to him that no, no problem is too small, and backs it up with how he chipped away at "lesser" problems for a long time to build up confidence and competence. Finally, he closes with advice that could be ported to a middle manager at the smallest bureaucratic company who thinks they don't do anything important -

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office.

If you do not have too lofty of an opinion of yourself (less ego, not more), then you will not be ashamed of the problems you succeed in, and only then might you have the chance to do something important.

I think you do him a disservice when you quote it out of context. “You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.“ doesn’t read like hubris to me, in fact it kind of reads like to opposite. A professor does seem impressive to his students, and Feynman points out its even at the hight of his career which is where he would have appeared the most impressive.

I think that goes well with the encouraging message of finding your place in the world, because you need it to progress.

You filleted the quote. He said.

> You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.

This is not ego

Quoting Ernest Becker from his The Denial of Death:

"In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of words, sounds and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper."

"It is natural for a man to strive to be a hero, it goes deeply in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, and yet the society gets chills when someone admits the honesty of it."

"I was working on problems close to the gods"

He’s saying that he’s working on the important stuff, figuring out how the universe works.

I imagine he was simply trying to be poetic.

>> One has to look out at the world and, taking in the successful and unsuccessful, conclude that some ego about oneself might be more or less required for success.

Well, if you don't think you pack a punch or can take a beating, you don't throw your hat into the ring.

The problem is always to know how to strike a balance- believe in yourself, know what you can achieve, but don't become an overblown bag of farts. Why? Because obviously nobody can stand knowing they're an overblown bag of farts, so if someone is, they don't know the first thing: who they are.

Socrates, the wisest of men, knew how to get out of this one. "I know one thing, and I know it well: I know nothing at all", he said [1]. And, he said, "know thyself" [2].

A scientist is driven by what she doesn't know, and wishes to know. But she must know the immensity of the task, lest she become an idiot who thinks she knows and knows nothing, John Snow.

________

[1] my liberal translation of his laconic "εν οίδα οτι ουδέν οίδα", "I know one thing, that I know no thing".

[2] "Γνώθι σαυτόν".

As I read it, this letter isn't about the problem of shyness. It's about feeling unsuccessful and unknown ("nameless") because of the small scope of what you're working on.

It took me a while to realise that following Dijkstra's dictum "do only, what only you can do" not only means tackling intellectual problems that one is uniquely suited to address, but also means being the husband and the father.

(the latter being unique up to isomorphism, but if we're not willing to accept a strict equality, it leads us into Ship of Theseus questions about personal identity...)

TIL Al was not only Feynman's student but also a possible inspiration for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons , upon reading the wonderful:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/10/24/dressing-up-science-richard-feynman-and-the-costume-parties-of-al-hibbs/

I think the error was that Mano referred to his coherence theory problem as "humble and down-to-earth". Feynman sought to correct the implicit assumption that there is some natural dividing line between "humble" and "great" problems. I think he would reject that such a thing as a humble problem does not exist.

The error mentioned is that Feynman (as PhD supervisor) supplied an important thesis topic to Mano. Mano didn't get the experience of how to evaluate a problem and find motivation within it:

"I accepted [someone else] as a student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on (namely those problems you see you may do something about)."

Yes, this! Saying that your work is “Humble and down to earth” doesn’t necessarily days that it’s beyond yourself.

Haven’t we all been told that it’s good to be humble? To me, the reply goes way beyond what this statement warrants.

Feynman was sad that Mano seemed to have a low view of himself. He had described his work as trying to solve a “humble and down-to-earth type of problem” — in contrast to the supposedly more majestic problems that he had seen Feynman solve.

I appreciate the example. Often times I find myself in this thought pattern as well: is this problem beneath me?

Concur, and happy for the company.

I too felt touched by this. It's sound advice for a sadness I feel sometimes.

I grew up in Japan as well as in the U.S., and I'm inclined to agree with your take. This brilliant letter is the result of a cross-cultural exchange of ideas, philosophy, ways of life.

There's a strong Buddhist influence in Japanese culture, and in that value system, it's emphasized that selflessness is a virtue. "The nameless" is one of the phrases in this tradition, for pointing at the "ineffable mystery" - similar to how other religions like Christianity have words to talk about God indirectly, in deference, as "the Lord" or "the Highest".

In American culture, there's a strong tradition of individualism, self-reliance, and self-respect. Also, generally speaking, there's a sense of society as a competition.

On both sides, there are unhealthy extremes. The self-effacing approach can lead to loss of confidence and purpose, and to suppress the fullest expression of one's unique nature. And being "full of oneself" can lead to arrogance, blindness to one's own limitations, lack of empathy, and so on.

Personally, I read Feynman's letter and feel his humanity, the care and consideration for fellow thinkers, to encourage and support each person to value who they are.

Maybe the Japanese colleague did not need that advice, with a whole another understanding of the value and pride of being nameless - but, I tend to believe that Feynman sensed something, and had empathy to feel that this person needed to hear positive words to be confident in who they are and what they do.

task: easy to difficult

ability: low to high

in any given moment

seeking the sweet spot across two dimensions

Csikszentmihalyi

Start small and work your way up and around.

No way to know the optimal path, so don't stress about finding it.

Albus Dumbledore?!

Perhaps blog posts?

> I’m wondering if my experience is an outlier or if this is pretty much what everyone experiences today?

I experience very much the same issues. While I do occasionally have great conversations over IM with select few people, most are similar to what you describe, write a long letter and only receive a few sentences or less. I myself though do still prefer in person conversation, too much inflection, tones and meaning is lost in text based conversation, it is even taken the wrong way a lot as a result.

Communication is shorter because it is more frequent.

If you can keep people constantly updated about whatever, there is no need to write a long letter essentially repeating yourself.

Long letters are not dead. I have a short list of old friends whom I communicate via the infrequent long email only. These are old acquaintances with whom I have no regular business with, and they have moved far away in life, so short texting conversations are irrelevant. Usually I initiate these "pen pals" by reaching out on Christmas or Eid, several years after we have lost contact, and I make it clear to them that I want to maintain infrequent long correspondence. Usually they are overjoyed and respond with great enthusiasm, as they may have never received or written a long personal letter before in their life. It often has a powerful effect on people. In terms of content, I try to avoid making the letter too personal, because we have been far separated in time and place, sharing only major milestones in life. The fact that I don't use Facebook or any social media at all helps, because people have NOT seen what I've been up to, nor have I seen what they have been doing. I believe the long letter works better than social media -- you can maintain deep, meaningful relationships, with people far away and long ago, with people of the same and opposite gender, without getting involved in the muck of social media.

It’s a result of how long it took to send messages (days to months, depending on where the recipient was), and that it didn’t usually cost more to send six sheets of paper than one. You wanted to make sure to write everything you had to say.

[edit] it should be added that most of the people whose long letters are interesting and well-written enough that we still care about them were educated a particular kind of way, or at least were immersed in a culture of those who were. Classics and rhetoric—as in, they most likely read and considered parts of Ars Rhetorica during their education—to a much greater degree than we treat those subjects now. We move farther every year, it seems, from considering those to have any value for most people.

When I hear people refer to this as a long letter, I weep.

Just 20-30 years ago this was merely a letter. Most of my hand written letters were longer.

I think this is mainly a problem of social norms- there are few contexts today where people assume you want to have long-form discussion without you going out on a limb and stating it explicitly. Asking someone to coffee is one that still exists; I do this with friends sometimes. But another alternative is to just take that step and explicitly state what you'd like to do. It might be a little awkward, but I bet many people would be receptive.

In my experience, such long personal letters still take place in the form of actual physical letters. That and phone calls.

Like a couple others in this thread, I have a hand-written correspondence with a small handful of people that I cherish.

I used to do the same like you did - email, with similar results - but I discovered there is something cathartic about sitting down and taking the time to let one's hand fly across the page, stroke after stroke. Because I write in ink, I can't take a stroke back - so I sometimes have to pause and think carefully about the next paragraph as a whole.

People respond to handwritten letters differently - it's not an email that gets sorted in their "to-do" folder only to be forgotten about. One can never be unconscious of the fact that this handwritten letter took time. Opening it, you are elated to find pages and pages of your friend's response that you can touch in your hands. The last time my correspondent even sent me an origami piece in the same envelope - he doesn't hand-write back, opting to type and print on nice paper - but my argument is that the surprise and genuine delight upon receiving a hand-written letter in the (regular!) mail compels people to respond in kind.

I recommend this quite un-modern substitute to you. If you're pressed for time, try writing a letter on a long flight.

Reddit is a modern equivalent.

I used to do long personal emails.

I've recently started engaging my Facebook friends, Instagram followers, and new Tinder matches with daily installments. Not really a long letter, but the content is somewhere between a long letter and a short memoir. Many people are weirded out and confused but there are a number that really love it so far. I explain the concept in this video: https://youtu.be/zUC2aFkBHiw

I write multiple emails of this length or longer every goddamned day. There's nothing particularly long about it, and if you think so, it's because you and your pals have the attention spans of gnats.

Put away your ipotato and use something with a keyboard. Get new friends if you have to. Also, stop texting: use the audio on your phone. That's what it is for.

Long letters have no value. You can find depth in long back and forth discussions because there is an actual exchange. Long letter were conveying / creating little value compared to the amount of words they are using.

As said president macron about a philosopher "he was light because he was profound" (ligth in the french sense of not being "heavy" / painfully laborious and annoying).

Learn the value of saying less.