The Feynman Technique helps you learn stuff. We learn not only from the books we read but also the people we talk to and the various positions, ideas, and opinions we are exposed to. Richard Feynman also provided advice on how to sort through information so you can decide what is relevant and what you should bother learning. In a series of non-technical lectures in , memorialized in a short book called The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist , Feynman talks through basic reasoning and some of the problems of his day.
His method of evaluating information is another set of tools you can use along with the Feynman Learning Technique to refine what you learn.
Regardless of what you are trying to gather information on, these tricks help you dive deeper into topics and ideas and not get waylaid by inaccuracies or misunderstandings on your journey to truly know something. 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. It is like a child asking naive questions. It is important to appreciate that.
And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that 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.
If you learn something via the Feynman Technique, you will be able to answer questions on the subject. You can make educated analogies, extrapolate the principles to other situations, and easily admit what you do not know. The second trick has to do with dealing with uncertainty. Very few ideas in life are absolutely true. What you want is to get as close to the truth as you can with the information available:. How does something move from being almost certainly false to being almost certainly true?
How does experience change? How do you handle the changes of your certainty with experience? Theory A and Theory B. Before you make any observations, for some reason or other, that is, your past experiences and other observations and intuition and so on, suppose that you are very much more certain of Theory A than of Theory B—much more sure.
But suppose that the thing that you are going to observe is a test. According to Theory A, nothing should happen. According to Theory B, it should turn blue. Well, you make the observation, and it turns sort of a greenish. So the result of this observation, then, is that Theory A is getting weaker, and Theory B is getting stronger.
And if you continue to make more tests, then the odds on Theory B increase. But if you find a whole lot of other things that distinguish Theory A from Theory B that are different, then by accumulating a large number of these, the odds on Theory B increase.
An extremely useful tool. Knowledge is not static, and we need to be open to continually evaluating what we think we know. Here he uses an excellent example of analyzing mental telepathy:. And in the beginning of these researches, he found very remarkable effects. He found people who would guess ten to fifteen of the cards correctly, when it should be on the average only five.
More even than that. There were some who would come very close to a hundred percent in going through all the cards. Excellent mind readers.
A number of people pointed out a set of criticisms. And then there were a large number of apparent clues by which signals inadvertently, or advertently, were being transmitted from one to the other. Various criticisms of the techniques and the statistical methods were made by people.
The technique was therefore improved. The result was that, although five cards should be the average, it averaged about six and a half cards over a large number of tests. Never did he get anything like ten or fifteen or twenty-five cards. Therefore, the phenomenon is that the first experiments are wrong. The second experiments proved that the phenomenon observed in the first experiment was nonexistent. The fact that we have six and a half instead of five on the average now brings up a new possibility, that there is such a thing as mental telepathy, but at a much lower level.
It would still be fifteen cards. Why is it down to six and a half? Because the technique improved. Now it still is that the six and a half is a little bit higher than the average of statistics, and various people criticized it more subtly and noticed a couple of other slight effects which might account for the results.
It turned out that people would get tired during the tests, according to the professor. The evidence showed that they were getting a little bit lower on the average number of agreements. So if the man was tired, the last two or three were thrown away.
Things of this nature were improved still further. The results were that mental telepathy still exists, but this time at 5. Now what about the five? Well, we can go on forever, but the point is that there are always errors in experiments that are subtle and unknown. But the reason that I do not believe that the researchers in mental telepathy have led to a demonstration of its existence is that as the techniques were improved, the phenomenon got weaker.
In short, the later experiments in every case disproved all the results of the former experiments. If remembered that way, then you can appreciate the situation. He was never content with just knowing the name of something. He wanted to understand it at a deeper level. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Once you identify a topic, take out a blank sheet of paper. Write out everything you know about the subject you want to understand as if you were teaching it to a child.
As you learn more about the topic, add it to your sheet. Often people find it helpful to use a different color pen so you can see your learning grow. Use your sheet as a reference and try to remove any jargon or complexity. Only use simple words. Now scientists are bringing this ancient wisdom up to date, documenting exactly why teaching is such a fruitful way to learn — and designing innovative ways for young people to engage in instruction.
Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. But how can children, still learning themselves, teach others?
One answer: They can tutor younger kids.
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