I kind of wonder if that Feynman story is real? Or at least, real the way he tells it. It seems more likely that the engineers realized he couldn't give them any useful feedback from just being blindsided with these massive blueprints for 30 seconds, but semi-famous and outranked them, so they let him seem smart to save face and end the conversation. Otherwise why would they stop with just that one bug, why not have him go through every bit of the blueprints in detail? What was even the point of showing them to him when he wasn't an engineer and it wasn't his job to work on things like that?
...But he was certainly very good at making himself seem impressive...
This is helpful. It helps explain something I've been puzzled by: Why are job talks so overwhelmingly important in academic hiring? By the time someone is selected for a job talk, the committee is already quite familiar with the candidate's research quality and impact. And if one is optimizing just for research quality, then you already have all the info you need. But the thing is, in academic hiring, they're not just hiring for research skill; they're also hiring for someone who can supervise grad students, entice undergraduates, raise the prestige of the university and department, etc, and for all that signaling skill is equally important as having skill.
I kind of wonder if that Feynman story is real? Or at least, real the way he tells it. It seems more likely that the engineers realized he couldn't give them any useful feedback from just being blindsided with these massive blueprints for 30 seconds, but semi-famous and outranked them, so they let him seem smart to save face and end the conversation. Otherwise why would they stop with just that one bug, why not have him go through every bit of the blueprints in detail? What was even the point of showing them to him when he wasn't an engineer and it wasn't his job to work on things like that?
...But he was certainly very good at making himself seem impressive...
Either way it seems to have worked eh?
This is helpful. It helps explain something I've been puzzled by: Why are job talks so overwhelmingly important in academic hiring? By the time someone is selected for a job talk, the committee is already quite familiar with the candidate's research quality and impact. And if one is optimizing just for research quality, then you already have all the info you need. But the thing is, in academic hiring, they're not just hiring for research skill; they're also hiring for someone who can supervise grad students, entice undergraduates, raise the prestige of the university and department, etc, and for all that signaling skill is equally important as having skill.
Yes! This is such a great example, thanks for sharing it.
See also this statement from Patrick Winston (from his legendary How to Speak lecture at MIT: https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=aLqztrdaiJiZMSrE&t=39):
"Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas—in that order."