Richard Feynman - Abhishek Chakraborty

The Importance of Doubt in Scientific Thinking

Even though it’s safe to assume that the field of medicine is the epitome of scientific method, ironically, it wasn’t always so. It was a field marred with arrogance, hubris, and a sheer lack of scientific rigour. Most importantly, what medicine lacked was doubt, a necessity in scientific thinking.

Chasing Uncertainty

The future is uncertain. No matter what we think or believe, we have no control over it. Uncertainty will be a factor in everything we undertake. It makes no sense to try to guess it. The best we can do is to learn to control what we can, i.e., our thinking, our decision process, and our reactions.

The Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learn Anything

The Feynman Technique is a learning concept you can use to understand just about anything. This technique doesn’t let us fool ourselves into thinking we’re masters of a subject when we’re really amateurs.

Richard Feynman On The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something

Knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it. In order to talk to each other, we have to have words, but we often talk in fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities to cover up our lack of understanding.

Learning Through Thrills and Pleasure

The opposite of learning through pain is learning through thrill and pleasure. Doing experiments to find faults in the laws, doing mathematics to find errors in the theorems makes studying a whole new game.

Cargo Cult Science: When You Follow The Instructions But Don’t Understand The Process

Cargo Cult Science looks like science, and follows all the basic traits of a scientific experiment. But it blindly copies instructions without understanding them, confuses correlation and causation, and is overtly focussed on outcomes without having clear fundamentals.