The Feynman Manifesto
An opinionated guide for learning and teaching.
Purpose
What is the most important thing you could be learning right now? In this new age of information dominated by buzzwords like neural networks, blockchain, and quantum computing, what exactly should you focus on?
Perhaps more importantly, how should you go about learning whatever it is that you’re trying to learn?
When you read an article, watch a video, or attend a lecture, it’s tempting to think that you have fully internalized all of the concepts discussed. But unfortunately, the human brain simply doesn’t work that way. You lose most of what you learn passively.
In order to gain a deeper understanding of an idea, you must wrestle with it. You must take it apart and understand all the moving pieces, then put it back together to see how they combine into a meaningful whole.
The most effective way to do this? Teach others about what you have learned.
The act of teaching forces you to meditate on what you actually understand and what you still haven’t grokked. It forces you to reckon with gaps in your knowledge, especially the foundational concepts you should already know. It forces you to crystallize your understanding, because you want other people to comprehend what you’re saying so that they may gain value.
In that sense, teaching is learning. If done right, it’s a process that’s beneficial to both the student and the teacher.
This is the reason why we’re starting a new project: The Feynman Journal.
The purpose of The Feynman Journal is twofold:
- Create value for our readers by explaining complex but useful ideas in a way that’s easily understandable.
- Create value for our writers by providing them with opportunities to teach others about what they have learned.
Manifesto
In The Feynman Journal, we intend to write a series of educational articles with a focus on ideas that are both sufficiently complex and industry-changing. Sufficiently complex, because otherwise, our readers could easily learn from another resource, meaning we wouldn’t be providing much value. Industry-changing, because at the end of the day, we care about ideas that are practically useful.
We first want to clarify the definition of education. For most people, the word “education” (and probably “teaching” for that matter) probably implies a vertical relationship, with a superior party being in charge of the process. We reject this idea. To us, education is about the horizontal sharing of knowledge.
With that, here is The Feynman Manifesto:
- Get to the heart of what’s important. What is the driving force behind the idea? What is its core essence?
- Humans are visual creatures and abstract concepts are much easier to understand with accompanying visuals.
- Explain simply, but don’t be hand-wavy. Build explanations from the ground up using first principles. The reader should be able to arrive at the same conclusions by following your steps. The better you understand your idea, the clearer your thoughts, and more value is provided to the readers.
- Avoid jargon. If you must use jargon, break it down into layman’s terms and introduce them one at a time.
- Focus on practical ideas with real-world implications. Have a bias towards ideas that have stood the test of time, since they likely have many great insights to offer. Science for the sake of science is cool, but that’s not what we’re here for.
- Quality over quantity. Don’t write on a subject unless you’ve thought deeply about it (think weeks to months). Try to draw connections between seemingly disparate ideas and offer a unique perspective on the subject.
- Make it free and pay it forward. Our goal is to provide educational value to as many people as possible. You gained knowledge because other people shared theirs with you. It’s your turn to pass on the knowledge. We don’t believe that there is such a thing as “teaching yourself” — you always learn from someone.
- Education can be transformative, but only if it’s accessible.
- Learn diversely. We believe in the T-shaped approach to learning. Our goal is to highlight and connect exceptional ideas across various fields to achieve unique insights.
- Be creative. Teaching, in its peak form, can be an incredibly creative process. Use all the tools at your disposal to communicate your ideas as effectively as possible.
The Feynman Manifesto will serve as a set of guiding principles as we write new articles for The Feynman Journal.
Why Feynman?
At this point, you might be wondering why the publication is called “The Feynman Journal” and not “The Einstein Journal” or “The Newton Journal”. After all, Einstein and Newton had also made wonderful contributions to science.
So why Feynman?
- Because of his stance against intellectual pretense. It can be tempting to hide behind jargon to try to seem intelligent when you don’t fully grasp an idea. As Feynman himself said, words are just tools for science, not science itself.
- Because of his passion for teaching complex things in a simple way. The whole world can benefit from high-quality education.
- Because of his focus on practicality.
- Because of the Feynman Technique, which views teaching as a method for learning.
- Because of his love for visualizations and their universality.
- Because of his belief in the multi-disciplinary approach to learning. He learned the bongo drums for musical inspiration and sketching to enhance his visual communication.
Feynman also left us with some great quotes:
“Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” — Richard Feynman
Closing Thoughts
Over the course of The Feynman Journal, we’ll be touching on various topics across many disciplines. Our plan is to start with the following subjects:
- Deep Learning
- Cryptography
- Game Theory
As our reader, you’ll develop a diverse portfolio of ideas from various disciplines.
Being in a state of ignorance can be anxiety-inducing. The antidote to ignorance is learning. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. If these principles resonate with you, we welcome you to join us and contribute to The Feynman Journal.
