If you listen to Feynman's lectures, you can see hints of what would later be discovered to be a pattern or abusive and pathological behavior. I haven't read the FBI investigation files that were recently released about him, but I am sure they are a very weird read. This was a person whose role in society was incredibly important to its future, or its certain demise, but seemed to want to ignore all that and embody sociopathic levels of Peter Pan Syndrome and impulsive morbid curiosity while not only having the nuclear codes, but knowing how to tell anyone how to make some themselves.

I have lately read more of Feynman's ideas about the attitude one should have about science, and I like them, and I've quoted them. He took very literally the idea that if you cannot explain something to a person in the 5th grade, you don't really understand it, and that playing with ideas is more important than being "data-driven". It's a view seemingly very consistent with Daoism.

The discussion of Feynman's personal life and the abusive behavior in it has involved science professionals being banned from various professional institutions because of their ideas about how he behaved, his autobiography, and whether we should still take his advice or show others his lectures.

On that matter I'm very conflicted. It seems obvious to me he was a very bad or unfortunate person, and you can see that right up until the things he said nearing the end of his life, and in photographs of him. However there are several separate issues at play here that I am concerned about:

The more people read Feynman, or listen to him, the more they will think his sociopathy is actually merely a cultural misunderstanding, and he is just a product of his time, and it is okay for them to have beliefs or behaviors which can result in the same things he did.

Feynman was part of "thought collectives", groups that determine what the future structures of knowledge will be, and future members of these thought collectives, e.g. California, Macau and Tennessee graduate students etc. Some of these people still like him a lot, and this can cause them to have their work undermined or become less influential merely because of that, rather than its quality, or merely because they disagree with some journal editor about appropriate language when discussing these matters.

A bunch of people of the era, as well as today, are undermined by the "Great Man" narrative of history. Whenever we hear about women in history, it's assumed they're there just to balance out the distribution of men, rather than because they can be true iconoclasts and innovators like Feynman or Euler or Plato. I didn't know who Wú Jiànxióng was until writing this, which is embarrassing, considering she was vastly more influential and impactful than Feynman in her field, as well as in the world. I think a major aspect of this is related to the first 2 problems. Men systematize their abuse, which results in (only sometimes, but enough) in a reactionary response to it which, as a consequence, can further perpetuate it and reinforce the idea of women in history as interchangeable with any other competent woman.

A side note related to 3: it is interesting to consider whether, under a non-patriarchal science, there would simply be no "great scientists", e.g. women would not have the same motivation to establish rigid pantheons of intellectuals, elevating their fame and influence as men do. I think this idea is undermined by non-european or non-heavily-US-influenced academic cultures, wherein it is generally understood and frequently comes about that students can produce just as impactful work as award winning life-long researchers (India, Singapore, Korea, China, Japan), which are nevertheless quite patriarchal.

In light of this I have some questions on my mind, feel free to not consider any of them:

Do you like Feynman? Why?

If you like him, do you think his ideas should still be popular?

Do you think that that we should talk about people who have done very bad things, or are bad people?

If so, should scientific and other formal communities regulate how they are talked about in a way that has little to do with their subject matter?

Why is this level of compartmentalization possible? Can it only exist in certain brains? How can a person be seemingly empathetic in one context, and apparently sociopathic in another?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5707163&forum_id=2Elisa#48826134)