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Richard Feynman - Names Don't Constitute Knowledge

Caitlin Spies · 110.5K views · 2014-09-17 · 2:06

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Overview

A short excerpt from a 1973 Yorkshire TV film in which Richard Feynman explains that knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing it.

On Hacker News

Shared to end arguments over definitions and terminology, and as a reminder that memorizing names is not understanding.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2017–2022

Topics

Scientific method & science communicationEducation & learningFundamental physics
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richard feynmanepistemologylearningterminologyphysics

What people said

P5fRxh5kUvp2th · 2022-12 · Reference

[VIDEO] I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B. Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.

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P5fRxh5kUvp2th · 2022-12 · Reference

Sorry, I'm not reading all of that. I stopped at the second paragraph. The answer to the question doesn't actually matter, not to you, and not to me. It's a ploy to try and confound the conversation. If you and the other poster really feel it needs to be defined, then define cancelled as "the thing that happened to Dorian Abbot". boom, you're done. It now has a definition, tautological, but valid nonetheless. The thing that should be getting discussed is whether or not what happened to him should have happened to him. And the answer is no, it shouldn't happen to anyone. And now I'm going to leave you with an observation by Richard Feynman. [VIDEO]

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P5fRxh5kUvp2th · 2022-12 · Reference

Sure, if you find the phrase "common sense" to be less offensive than "blind faith", but in this case they mean the same thing. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Caitlin Spies, played through YouTube.

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