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Richard Feynman on True Knowledge
The difference between “knowing something and knowing the name of something.”
Sunny Balwani did not know much about engineering. This normally would not be a problem — most of us don’t know much about engineering. But Sunny was the president of Theranos, a medical startup in the early 2010s promising to make cutting-edge blood tests, devices which would need engineering breakthroughs just to work properly.
Sunny had a big ego. He had too much pride to admit he didn’t understand what his engineers talked about. So instead, he hid behind jargon, repeating technical terms he overheard from other people, regardless of whether the word made sense or not in context. Sunny once misheard “end effector” (a term for a robotic claw) as “endofactor” (not a real word), and repeated “endofactor” throughout an entire meeting, probably trying to convince himself the whole time that he was smart. His employees caught on, and saw a chance to mock their egotistical boss. As told in Bad Blood, a book about the collapse of Theranos (Sunny was eventually arrested for 9 counts of wire fraud), Sunny’s employees would repeat the obscure engineering term “crazing” around him, completely out of context, just to see if Sunny would repeat it. He did.
There is a stark difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something.
Big words are often a crutch, a way to hide. It feels easier to pretend we know something than admit we don’t. It protects our egos.
What Richard Feynman Learned From Bird-Watching
One man who refused to hide behind jargon was the renowned physicist Richard Feynman.
Feynman was a voracious learner. He won a Nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, and helped investigate the Challenger disaster. He was also a remarkably good teacher. Feynman’s lectures on physics are beloved, and he was nicknamed “The Great Explainer.”
It was Feynman who wrote in So What Do You Care What Other People Think? that he learned “very early the…
