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The Smartest People Never Do This, According to Richard Feynman
The biggest mistake people make when trying to be intelligent.
Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s father used to take him for walks in the woods when he was a boy. They’d see a bird, and his father would say, see that bird, it’s a brown-throated thrush in English. But in Spanish it’s a tordo. It’s also tordo in Italian. In Chinese, it’s called chung ling. And so on. Then his father would go on and say something important. “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts.” In What Do You Care What Other People Think? Feynman continues, “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” He took that lesson from his father his whole life.
He won a nobel prize in physics. He helped figure out why the “Challenger” space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight with a glass of ice water and a piece of rubber. Feynman was one of the greatest scientists of his generation. And he never stopped teaching that the most dangerous thing a smart person can do is mistake knowing the name for understanding the thing. He warned us about this in a 1974…
