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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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Irresponsibility

I think about this one story I read about Feynman a lot, especially during the times when I am going through burn out in my personal and professional life. I am unfortunately not blessed with a good memory, so I am fairly certain I get many facts wrong in it, but I can recall its essence very accurately.

After Feynman was done working on atomic bomb during the war, he was offered a hot shot professor job in some big school, Cornell, I think. And he kept getting better offers from all other places because everyone wanted a piece of him. But he was also depressed and burnt out. He worked in a very intense environment in Los Alamos for atomic bomb, and around the same period, love of his life and his first wife, Arlene died due to sickness. So later when he started working in Cornell, he was barely scraping by at work, and he spent time reading Arabian nights (early version of doom scrolling).

He felt guilty and he felt like a fraud, because all were saying wonderful things about him, and had high expectations on his work, whereas he lost all his curiosity and motivation. He spent a good amount of time in that state, with a deeply conflicted mind.

Then one day, he was shaving in front of the mirror, and a beautiful thought occurred to him. He asked himself what’s the worst that could happen if he doesn’t meet other people’s expectations. He never asked them to keep those expectations in the first place. So, he is not responsible for fulfilling them. This thought surprisingly freed him, and he went back into just playing with physics, the way he always did ever since he was a kid.

Later he was in cafeteria, and saw a kid throw Cornell medallion in air, and he noticed something interesting about the movement of medallion and the plate. He got excited, worked out the equations, and figured out that the medallion rotated roughly twice as fast as the plate wobbled. He told his colleague about this finding, and this colleague was like “okay, this is great, but what’s the point of this?” To which I believe Feynman replied with “there’s no point, I am just doing it for fun.”

But this discovery apparently laid foundation to the work that ultimately got Feynman his Nobel prize.

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