Centennial of a curious fellow

A hundred years ago today, groundbreaking physicist Richard Feynman was born in Manhattan, New York.  I first bumped into Feynman when I was in high school, and I found out about "Feynman diagrams" -- a way of looking at particle interactions that was simple and elegant, but raised profound questions about the nature of time.  (Specifically, why there's an "arrow of time" -- that time always proceeds in the same direction -- when Feynman diagrams imply that either direction is equally likely.)

Then in the mid-80s, I read his autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!  I picked it up because I'm fascinated with physics, but when I read his book, I was blown away with how playful he was about it.  He was the opposite of the stereotypical science nerd -- he has whole chapters devoted to strategies for picking up women, his (successful) attempt to convince an Italian man he was speaking Italian (just a different dialect), performing on the bongos, and various practical jokes he'd played.

One of these -- the chapter entitled "Who Stole the Door?" -- is required reading in my Critical Thinking classes, when we're discussing ethics.  The central question is, has a person lied when he tells the truth so unconvincingly that no one believes him?  (For the details, you'll just need to read the book.)

Of course, Feynman had a serious side, and his contributions to subatomic particle physics and quantum electrodynamics won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 (along with Shin'ichiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger).  His Feynman Lectures on Physics, now a classic of science literature, started as his attempt to improve undergraduate pedagogy at CalTech, and is still considered groundbreaking -- a 2013 review in Nature said of them that they embody "simplicity, beauty, unity ... presented with enthusiasm and insight."  His enthusiasm for the topic never waned.  "Physics is like sex," he said.  "Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Copyright Tamiko Thiel 1984, RichardFeynman-PaineMansionWoods1984 copyrightTamikoThiel bw, CC BY-SA 3.0]

He was also quick to criticize his colleagues, and the scientific endeavor in general.  It was all very well to specialize, he said, but the disdain some scientists show for broad-based general knowledge was completely wrong-headed.  "In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another," he said, at a luncheon at CalTech where he was the keynote speaker.  "The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public.  When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument.  The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization."

However, Feynman was unequivocal about well-done science being the ultimate arbiter of truth.  In a lecture he did at the University of Auckland in 1979, he said:

There's a kind of saying that if you don't understand its meaning, "I don't believe it. It's too crazy. I'm not going to accept it."…  You'll have to accept it.  It's the way nature works.  If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully.  Looking at it, that's the way it looks.  You don't like it?  Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy.  I can't help it, okay?  If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.

His skepticism comes shining through in many of his writings and speeches.  He was unimpressed by claims of the paranormal, and showed up what he thought of synchronicity at the beginning of one of his talks:

You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight.  I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot.  And you won't believe what happened.  I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357.  Can you imagine?  Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight?  Amazing!

He was up front about being an atheist.  "Agnostic, for me," he said, "would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this."

He exited the world with his characteristic humor.  His last words before his death in 1988 from complications of liposarcoma are said to have been, "I'd hate to die twice.  It's so boring."

When people come up with scientists and other intellectual figures who represent the heights of brilliance, Einstein usually comes up as the apex, the pinnacle of what the human brain can accomplish.  Myself, I always think of Richard Feynman, who not only was smart enough to comprehend the innermost workings of the universe, but tempered it with self-deprecating humor.  And what stands out to me most is his driving, insatiable curiosity.  As he put it in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist:

It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places.  When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting.  It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders.  Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

The risks of paltering

In Richard Feynman's brilliant autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he tells the story of his experience as an undergraduate practical joker.  One day while his fraternity brothers were asleep, he took one of the frat house doors off its hinges and hid it behind the oil tank in the basement.  Of course, when the theft was discovered, everyone wanted to know which of them had pilfered the door.  Everyone denied it but Feynman:

I was coming down the stairs and they said, "Feynman!  Did you take the door?" 

"Oh, yeah," I said.  "I took the door.  You can see the scratches on my knuckles here, that I got when my hands scraped against the wall as I was carrying it down into the basement."

Knowing Feynman to be a wiseass, everyone rolled their eyes and assumed he was lying.

The door stayed missing, and still no one confessed.  (Well, actually, someone had, of course!)  Finally the president of the fraternity was so miffed that he called a general meeting at dinner time and asked each member to swear on his word of honor whether or not he'd taken the door:

So he goes around the table, and asks each guy, one by one: "Jack, did you take the door?" 

"No, sir, I did not take the door." 

"Tim: did you take the door?" 

"No, sir!  I did not take the door!" 

"Maurice, did you take the door?" 

"No, I did not take the door, sir." 

"Feynman, did you take the door?" 

"Yeah, I took the door." 

"Cut it out, Feynman, this is serious!  Sam: did you take the door..."  It went all the way around.  Everyone was shocked.  There must be some real rat in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor! 

That night I left a note with a little picture of the oil tank and the door next to it, and the next day they found the door and put it back. 

Some time later I finally admitted to taking the door, and I was accused by everybody of lying.  They couldn't remember what I had said.  All they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody admitted taking the door.  The idea they remembered, but not the words!

I always use this story in my Critical Thinking classes to spur a discussion into the nature of lying.  Was Feynman, by deliberately telling the truth so unconvincingly that no one believed him, actually guilty of lying?

I didn't know until yesterday that this practice actually has a name: misleading by telling the truth is called paltering, and was the subject of a study released just last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Called "Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others," the study (by Todd Rogers, Richard Zeckhauser, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton of Harvard, and Maurice E. Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania) shows that paltering works -- but it comes with a cost.

Professor Richard Feynman, palterer extraordinaire [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Their experiment presented volunteers with a variety of scenarios in which people are represented as lying outright, misleading by omission, and misleading by paltering -- telling the truth in such a way as to mislead.  The scenarios included negotiations for a car purchase, negotiations over the sale of a piece of property, and negotiations over the development of a piece of property for commercial use.  The results were strikingly uniform; lying outright was considered the most unethical, but paltering was close -- especially when the palter was made in response to a direct question (as it was in Feynman's case).  The authors write:

Taken together, our studies identify paltering as a distinct and frequently employed form of deception. Paltering is a common negotiation tactic.  Negotiators who palter claim value but also increase the likelihood of impasse and, if discovered, risk harm to their reputations.  This latter finding suggests that those who might view paltering as a (deceptive) strategy for claiming more value in a negotiation must be cautious.  It may be effective in the short-term but harmful to relationships if discovered.

Which is exactly what Feynman discovered.  People are much more likely to focus on the results and the intent -- they care less about the actual words spoken.  So a palterer who says after being found out, "But I told the literal truth!  It's not my fault you interpreted it wrong!" is not likely to gain much in the way of credibility.  In fact, they are generally looked upon as only a tiny notch above someone who told a bald-faced lie.

This does open up an interesting question, though; to what extent is it incumbent upon the recipient of information to be smart enough (or do enough research) to detect when lying or paltering is occurring?  I'm not trying to blame the victim, here; but the principle of caveat emptor has been around for millennia, and I have to admit that I tend to lose sympathy with someone who got hoodwinked when a bit of quick research could have uncovered the deception.  As with everything in the realm of ethics, there are no easy, hard-and-fast answers.  But it's nice to have a word to put on lying-by-telling-the-truth,  and it gives us one more thing to be on the lookout for in car negotiations, real estate purchases -- and political discussions.