I followed a link at Steve Hsu’s blog and came to this discussion of Feyman’s cognitive style. Hsu writes that “it was often easier for [Feynman] to invent his own solution than to read through someone else’s lengthy paper” and he follows up with a story in which “Feynman did not understand the conventional formulation of QED even after Dyson’s paper proving the equivalence of the Feynman and Schwinger methods.” Apparently Feynman was eventually able to find an error in this article but only after an immense effort. In Hsu’s telling (which I have no reason to doubt), Feynman avoided reading papers by others in part out of a desire to derive everything from first principles, but also because of his own strengths and limitations, his “cognitive profile.”

This is all fine and it makes sense to me. Indeed, I recognize Feynman’s attitude myself: it can often be a take a lot of work to follow someone else’s paper if has lots of technical material, and I typically prefer to read a paper shallowly, get the gist, and then focus on a mix of specific details (trying to understand one example) and big picture, without necessarily following all the arguments. This seems to be Feynman’s attitude too.

The place where I part from Hsu is in this judgment of his:

Feynman’s cognitive profile was probably a bit lopsided — he was stronger mathematically than verbally. . . . it was often easier for him to invent his own solution than to read through someone else’s lengthy paper.

I have a couple of problems with this. First, Feynman was obviously very strong verbally, given that he wrote a couple of classic books. Sure, he dictated these books, he didn’t actually write them (at least that’s my understanding of how the books were put together), but still, you need good verbal skills to put things the way he did. By comparison, consider Murray Gell-mann, who prided himself on his cultured literacy but couldn’t write well for general audiences.

Anyway, sure, Feynman’s math skills were much better developed than his verbal skills. But compared to other top physicists (which is the relevant measure here)? That’s not so clear.

I’ll go with Hsu’s position that Feynman was better than others at coming up with original ideas while not being so willing to put in the effort to understand what others had written. But I’m guessing that this latter disinclination doesn’t have much to do with “verbal skills.”

Here’s where I think Hsu has fallen victim to the tyranny of measurement—that is, to the fallacy of treating concepts as more important if they are more accessible to measurement.

“Much stronger mathematically than verbally”—where does that come from?

College admissions tests are divided into math and verbal sections, so there’s that. But it’s a fallacy to divide cognitive abilities into these two parts, especially in a particular domain such as theoretical physics which requires very particular skills.

Let me put it another way. My math skills are much lower than Feynman’s and my verbal skills are comparable. I think we can all agree that my “imbalance”—the difference (however measured) between my math and verbal skills—is much lower than Feynman’s. Nonetheless, I too do my best to avoid reading highly technical work by others. Like Feynman (but of course at a much lower level), I prefer to come up with my own ideas rather than work to figure out what others are doing. And I typically evaluate others’ work using my personal basket of examples. Which can irritate the Judea Pearls of the world, as I just don’t always have the patience to figure out exactly why something that doesn’t work, doesn’t work. Like Feynman in that story, I can do it, but it takes work. Sometimes that work is worth it; for example, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand exactly what assumptions implicitly support regression discontinuity analysis, so that I could get a better sense of what happened in the notorious regression discontinuity FAIL pollution in China analysis, where the researchers in question seemingly followed all the rules but still went wrong.

Anyway, that’s a tangent. My real point is that we should be able to talk about different cognitive styles and abilities without the tyranny of measurement straitjacketing us into simple categories that happen to line up with college admissions tests. In many settings I imagine these dimensions are psychometrically relevant but I’m skeptical about applying them to theoretical physics.