I don't why people get so excited about quaternions, like they are some mystical concept.
Personally, I think one is better off learning some Differential Geometry and Abstract Algebra to really appreciate the broader context in which these exist.
This story is a bit of a misnomer when you look deeper. His dad is a statistics professor and he was mentored by well known mathematician in undergraduate so it's not like he didn't have a lot of schooling.
We can't really know for sure. We have the anecdote about the workbook but what about earlier and did he absorb any of his dad's teachings or aptitude by osmosis.
Even if we accept he didn't he still went to college and had an unusual experience as an undergrad in being mentored by an excellent mathematician.
That he took a gap year in h.s. doesn't seem that noteworthy to me.
The world is an interdependent eco- system these days. The idea that a country can isolate itself an reproduce expertise that has flourished elsewhere is a bit silly and tilting at windmills.
Globalization is a fact of the world today and the best path to better lives for everyone is through mutual cooperation and policies that lift all boats.
Trump's goals and attempts to change this are foolhardy.
Did you read the book? Some of those are distortions.
Regarding the negging incident, she left out important context in her summary of this part of the book.
Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the women at that bar were intending to use men to get free drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner and then says she has to run to go meet up with a lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging, was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically, not being a pushover.
Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
I also think the incident about lying about whether he was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and two girls go with him back to his place. But later he confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor".
Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize how different people's attitudes were to things like nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a thing.
I hadn't read the book fully, but I did coincidentally read that chapter a long time ago. Given the context you provide, I agree that he does not seem to be worse than anyone else given the time period. The problem is when people read about him and try to adopt mid-1900s values in the 2000s - and that's really what the video above about his legacy is about.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
It's misogynistic, because the ghost writer of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feyman!, Ralph Leighton, ultimately put into print narratives that encouraged men to see "ordinary" women as "worthless bitches". In the character of "Feynman":
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
...
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl!
The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation bias. It matters, because training your mind to be misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into other aspects of your life, like how you treat female coworkers.
When I hear someone's brake's squealing, I try and avoid them at all cost. I've been behind an old car that when it braked, I was coughing for hours afterwards.
Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul.
The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society.
A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.
The left needs to stop accusing other members of the left of being "far-right" everytime they dare to have a different opinion on a topic.
That tendency of the left to ostracise its own rather than engage in debate, is exactly what pushed people like Elon and Rogan away, along with much of the centre, and is exactly why Trump won.
Whether he endorsed Harris or not is irrelevant to my point.
It was a poorly written article. I am actually very sympathetic with some of the pushback against some things associated with wokeness, like poorly implemented DEI policies that don't address root causes for representation disparities.
And you have no evidence that any of this is why Trump won. From the people I know who supported Trump, they did it for much different reasons.
I think the framing is dead on.