Hard Work at Patriarchy

I'd like to think I've become a better person over the last ten years. Although I fully expect Alphabet = Google = Blogspot to pull the plug at short notice and cast The Blob into dustbin of history, today it is still a searchable 2 million word archive of my evolving self.  In 2013, I wrote a fanboi piece about Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman a book of anecdotes related by Richard Feynman to his bongo-pal Ralph Leighton.  Five years later, I was forced to see that I, Patriarch had been blind to the running sore theme of misogyny that pervades SYJMF. Five years after that (last week) I was compelled to watch a three hour take down of Richard Feynman showing that he'd been a bad influence on young scientists. 

Angela "Physicist" Collier is a critical thunk science blogger in a similar space to Rebecca Watson [whom BloboPrev] who devoted the last 12 months to rage-reading everything on Amazon about Richard Feynman. Her reason for doing the work being that there was A Lot of SYJMF circulating among the physics bros (skewed bl♂ke even more in the 90s than now) when she was making sense of the world in college. Collier's position is that some = far-too-many young men reading about Feynman's clever clogisms and iconoclasm had not ignored the sexism but rather leaned into it . . . and blanked or insulted or disrespected her. Particularly galling examples included young chaps who assumed that, because they'd been top of the Calculus class in Bohunk High, they could continue to get As in college without doing the work. These chaps were baffled when Collier did get the As because she was serious about Project EduCollier and put in the hours.

Collier's 3 hour piece-to-camera came up on MetaFilter and that generated a little light and a lot of heat. I R retire, I am invested a bit [clearly too much with all the sexism] in the Feynman myth, so I watched it through (with a 24 hour intermission) despite it being a bit woolly in the edit and so far too long. In the last part of the YT, having cut the misogyny down to size, Collier looks at a might-have-been Feynmyth [he's 40 years dead now] which drew attention [summarized / clipped in black-and-red above] to his many good qualities.  

There are lessons in SYJMF even if they are fables: don't be (a) Dick; pay attention; do the work; polish your crap-detector; be kind. Collier adds [point 5 above] condemn least publishable units LPUs to the flames of hell even if, as now, no trees were harmed in the process. MeFite ngaiotonga put in the work to make an executive summary of Collier's YT: part1 + part2 + part3.