I’ve been reading Dr. Richard Feynman’s book "Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character". SYJMF!ACC for short, if you prefer.
So far (I’m about halfway through), it’s been a charming and entertaining introduction to one of the world’s most interesting educators and physicists by the man himself. It manages to be readable and lighthearted too. I like to imagine his writing tone is how he’d converse with his colleagues as well, or at least mirrors some inner monologue playing while he engaged in his shenanigans.
One SYJMF!ACC chapter stood out to me in particular. There was an entire chapter dedicated to a story about Feynman spending the evening observing ants in his office while he was a graduate student at Princeton. He recalls that he wanted to investigate how ants bring food back to their den, and whether they had a “sense of geometry”. He devises an experiment where he ferries them to and fro a sugar piece on using scraps of paper.
The biggest takeaway I’m getting from this book is a demonstration of the power of curiosity. Clearly it’s gotten Feynman through MIT, Princeton, Los Alamos, and Cornell. Most of his success can be attributed to his words: “I always do that; get into something and see how far I can go”. The first part of that (getting into something) is what I want to discuss.
Why have I never caught myself doing something like making paper ferries for ants? Is it because I don’t think the topic is “worth my time”? I spent sometime reflecting on whether this mindset is some subtle form of arrogance; to confine oneself to working on important problems, and not wasting my {precious, superior, illustrious} time. But who’s to say what’s important?
This question’s been hotly debated for ages. The study of ants is surely worth nonzero utility. Ant colony dynamics could hold some insight for swarm robotics, or ant communication patterns could reveal something about information theory and compressible signals. People also clowned Dr. Ally Louks for her thesis until the Twitter algorithm’sinvisible hand scooped many instances of practical use cases to the top of the feed.
What bothers me is that I have explored rabbit holes before. I’ve spent afternoons learning the Rubik’s Cube, learning about wavefront aberration patterns (post coming soon!), making this site, etc. Indeed, I’ve committed myself to something that isn’t immediately useful but merely curiosity-satisfying. The frequency of this has decreased over time, perhaps because I view whatever my pressing responsibilities are as more important. Yet, I still find time to doomscroll. This is where the arrogance theory shines. It’s not that I don’t have the time, it must be that I think whatever I’m doing is more important. This is also no excuse. Feynman’s work was of utmost importance, yet he found the time to play with ants and attend tea time with the Dean.
I am conflicted because this behavior, at first, seems to contradict Dr. Richard Hamming’s advice in his essay, You and Your Research. It’s such a fantastic essay, and I’d recommend that anyone interested in doing meaningful work should print a copy just to have. He says that great scientists focus on great problems, and should “drop everything” when they see the potential to solve one of the many such problems they have on standby. Which is it?
Obviously there’s some nuance to the situation. Feynman didn’t spend ALL of his time running experience on ants, and rather spent most of his time doing intelligent physics. But, I guess the better question is: what benefit does Feynman see to this curiosity? Is it just for the purpose of cultivating a mindset? And what prevents me from “wasting time” in pursuit of rabbit holes?
The answer I’ve arrived at is that it’s an issue of results not process. We tend to commit to obligations because of the perceived net gain of the results over the cost of committing. We never commit to things if the gain doesn’t at least offset the opportunity cost of completing the activity. Rabbit holes are touchy because it’s difficult to calculate the gain, and the cost is almost always large in terms of productivity. You never know what you may learn, if you find anything useful at all. The cost is almost always a few hours of time that could be used for other activities. Arrogance comes in because we think we’re more important than we are. That our effort is needed so direly by society that we can’t afford to play with ants.
And so a defense of rabbit holes has become a critique of training your policy under the objective function of maximal productivity. This is perhaps an additional reason why it’s important to volunteer. Because committing yourself to something with zero personal gain and nonzero cost forces you to rethink whether the heuristic was right in the first place.
Back to research and rabbit holes. Would you willingly undertake a research project if you were told that it would inevitably fail? Is there still benefit to such a project? Who benefits from that negative result? Negative results are indeed useful, but who wants to be the sucker to invest years for it? Of course, you can never know what will end up a positive result. Maybe that’s what drives every researcher. That their hypothesis will bring more meaning to the world.
Cultivating a curious mindset is important. Not because importance is measured by task completions, but because it could be better measured by how elevated your base experience of life could become. Being curious is so much more exciting.
Some items I’d like to share with you