Feynman’s ideal candidate
April 28th, 2008“I would like to discuss some of the little tricks of the trade in trying to judge an idea.” Such a skill is very important when politicians are trying to woo us with their ideas.
About a year ago, I was reading a 1963 lecture that Physicist Richard Feynman gave at the University of Washington. The below passage hit me in the gut. Feynman was a physicist, but as he so often demonstrated, he had brilliant thoughts on all aspects of life:
“I would like to discuss some of the little tricks of the trade in trying to judge an idea. We have the advantage that we can ultimately refer the idea to experiment in the sciences, which may not be possible in other fields. But nevertheless, some of the ways of judging things, some of the experiences undoubtedly are useful in other ways…
“The first one has to to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck…If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn’t know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific…
“Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, ‘What are you going to do about the farm question?’ And he knows right away – bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through:
—’What are you going to do about the farm problem?’
—’Well, I don’t know. I used to be a general, and I don’t know anything about farming. But it seems to me to be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can’t tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I’ll try to use…’
“Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It’s never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept…The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises, (resulting in) a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It’s all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.”
This November, pick the people who know how to get at the answer.