Reddit reviews Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman

That is how children learn about the world, if I'm not mistaken. :)


> I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. --Richard Feynman

(From this lovely book)

> I think folks who think the listener needs a PhD to more or less correctly understand something just aren't that good at explaining. :)

It depends what you mean by "understand", and it depends what is being explained. I'm afraid I think your claim here is far too sweeping. I teach and pride myself on evidence-based pedagogy and do my best to empathetically and charitably frame my answers to questions to best meet my audience halfway with descriptions that are both non-misleading but also understandable to my audience. I pride myself on my ability to do this on some subjects, but am dismayed when I see others give understandable but misleading descriptions about subjects that are highly mathematical or abstract, or require many ladder-wrungs of insights before becoming fertile ground for the appropriate Wittgensteinien ladder-removal. I'm afraid there are a great many, perhaps the vast majority even, of subjects in my area of expertise that are simply not understandable to a lay audience, no matter how Feynman-esque the speaker, unless they are knowingly misleading. Let me put it this way: there are a great many lay people who would argue with Feynman about basic physics (some great correspondences are this book), and even he couldn't get through to them, because at the end of the day they did not have the appropriate tools to understand his arguments.

> Consider this famous clip of Feynman explaining magnets. [...] Obviously that's inexact and glosses over so many details, but the core of the idea is there and it falsifies the notion that you need a graduate degree to understand it.

Feynman is a great speaker who is very careful to try to explain things both accurately and with humility while also being understandable to a (fairly educated) lay audience. However this does not at all falsify the idea that you need a graduate degree to understand say QED (the subject he is ultimately discussing in the video). In fact it is a good example of exactly what I'm arguing: that people who don't have the background to appropriately judge (whether what they have grokked from a video and their intuition that they have understood it is in any real correspondence with the truth) will nonetheless feel that they are competent to make that judgement based on watching the video! The truth is that one can easily come up with a great many questions in response to Feynman's description that his own description cannot adequately answer, and which would force Feynman to back up a bit and say, "well, for that you need to learn quantum field theory."

> Consider mathematics. The way it's taught usually involves numbered lemmas. Each lemma is a sentence or two. Yes, maybe you need to study a bunch of other nodes in the graph to understand each new concept, but the network of meanings is eminently graphable, with short descriptions

Well, but it's quite the opposite when you try to ask the same sort of questions you might in philosophy, such as "why should I care about this lemma being true or false"? If you ask most mathematicians, they will tell you that it can take years of studying a single paper before they are able to fully understand just how powerful and useful and meaningful a given lemma is, how it clarifies and coherently connects with different fields of mathematics and explains previously misunderstood patterns or properties, a lemma which otherwise would be nothing more than an abstract and meaningless string of symbols.

> Philosophy - being a lot like mathematics - should have this. :) A nice graph of interconnected concepts where you can click on each one for more detail, links to examples, books, etc. If it cannot be systematized, broken down into atoms, then it truly isn't a science. :)

Something like this would be nice (and for all I know already exists), but I'm not aware of even something like this for physics, really, so I'm not sure it's fair to insist on it for philosophy! Again, I would counter that if we try to do that with physics, for example, it will quickly get in the weeds in a way that would demonstrate the difficulty to you in a way that might give you a new respect. Try to do something as simple as make a picture of the Standard Model particles and give a map of how they interact in a way that can be understood by a lay audience. Many have tried and failed, often when writing their PhD theses. You will find the bones of attempts scattered across physics subreddits. They all fail for various reasons, because stuff is complicated. I don't see any reason why we should hold philosophy to a higher standard.