Hopefully over time we all learn to temper the bad while growing the good.

Some do a better job than others, but also we can never know the totality, bad or good, of any person.

In my opinion that’s important to bear in mind when people disappoint us, or we disappoint ourselves.

Exactly! Is there a single person who doesn't have good and bad aspects? Nope. The balance isn't the same between everyone, sure, but 'no one is perfect'.

Also some are psychologically disturbed due to various reasons and those people need therapy and mere reactionary punishment will not improve matters in the long run (for society).

> Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Further excerpts and discussion here: https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman-...

Then he moved on to directly state his intentions, which actually worked, because those women were actually open to having one night stands. But that move was not possible for him unless he convinced himself that women in question is worth less then nothing.

But, if his nice guy play would work and they would really fall in love with his nice guysness and then had sex with him, they would be really hugely disappointed next morning cause he was in it for sex only. So I guess it is very good thing all players except him were experienced enough to recognize the situation and seen through his nice guy act.

This is never an excuse because millions of other men were products of the same time and didn't behave like this, FFHS.

He notices one of the women who made some excuse about a party that night has been talking with the MC frequently, and surmises correctly that they are married – turns out the woman wasn’t actually looking for romance and was just leading Feynman on to get free drinks out of him. The permanent singer at the club had been introducing women to him after first telling the women he was a big spender.

Feynman befriends the couple (singer and MC), and they talk about how plenty of rich men at the bar keep spending money on the girls there without getting anywhere romantically. The MC tries to teach Feynman about the social roles people take on at a bar. The key lesson is that a man who buys a woman a drink up front is unlikely to end up getting the one night stand he wants, but if he refuses to buy her anything, his chances will be better. Feynman tried it out by getting a girl to pay him back for a sandwich, and a few hours later she came by at the end of the night and invited him to her room, so the lesson apparently worked.

The “bitches” part is some kind of temporary psychological reprogramming he’s doing on himself for a day or two so that he can bring himself to objectify people against his usual inclination, so that he can try the experiment. It’s clear in context that he doesn’t think all women are “bitches”.

Feynman tried it one more time some while later on someone who wasn’t a traveling singer, flirting a bit with a girl but then asking if she would sleep with him before he would buy her a drink. She agreed.

His conclusion at the end is: “So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”

Note: I’m not making any value judgments here, just recounting the story.

I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE!”

It's probably better if people just read it.

The point of the story is that misogynist jackasses can be successful at finding one-night stands a bar but he didn’t enjoy it, so he only ever tried it twice.

Maybe you think that is damning evidence of some inherently irredeemable character flaw, but let he/she who hasn’t ever once spent an evening being an asshole (intentionally for an amateur sociology experiment or otherwise) cast the first stone.

Sadly, in both these cases, he never considered the possibility that a woman’s sexual consent and worth should not be monetized in the first place.

(b) Feynman never said that not buying her something was “disrespectful” (though the MC did say that the man should (1) be disrespectful and also (2) not buy a woman anything up front). The “disrespectful” part was insulting someone or directly propositioning a stranger for sex in return for a drink.

You are reading a whole lot more into the story about Feynman’s “assumptions” and “considerations” than is supportable by the text. Overall I would say your comment is considerably more condescending and offensive than the story.

If you want to give Feynman crap about his other treatment of women throughout his life, so be it, but this story is pretty thin evidence for whatever case you’re trying to make.

This is the advice offered to him:

“Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”

This is his conclusion to that advice:

The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!

You can take from it whatever you want.

Edit: I read “the post”. Either the author has poor reading comprehension and largely failed to understand the content of the story (maybe Feynman can be blamed for not having written it in a clearer way), or she is being disingenuous.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/17/richard-feynman-arl...

But the man did revolutionize our understanding of physics.

So take the good with the bad.

I specifically contrast that with the many recent reports of deliberate abuses of power or outright assault. There was still a knowledge, even back in the not too distant past, that those things were wrong, as evidenced by the fact that so many men tried to keep their behavior hidden.

It would be weird in any case to assume that, erm, career people are just as heroic in other spheres of their life.

Agree to disagree. If people would tell them to go to hell from the beginning, their achievements would go to someone else and we would all be better for it.

Billions of people over hundreds of years produces lots of opportunities.

There is no doubt in my mind that we would've made the same progress with any other company, albeit perhaps cosmetic differences.

I think this is translatable to most other advancements. It's nearly always iterational, and either someone's first, different people discover something independently or it's a mashup of separate discoveries.

History makes geniuses, smart people exist everywhere.

It doesn't work like that unfortunately.

Feynman similarly was responsible for actual important works in physics. He won't be stripped from history books.

That said, it’s not exactly uncommon knowledge that Feynman was terrible to women, especially all the ones who followed his first wife, including his second. People aren’t exactly building statues to him so much as his lectures and story telling ability.

So, not at all because he was a central figure in that piece of history? I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make here...