Richard Hamming: You and Your Research is a 1986 talk about how to do "great" research in the sense of getting fame, promotions and prizes. This corresponds some with doing great research but also has differences. The talk isn't about the differences, but it does say that you have to sell your discovery in order to get credit. Just having great discovery isn't enough.
I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. "Selling" to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, "Yes, that was good." I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't stop and read it, you won't get credit.
And:
Hamming: I believed, in my early days, that you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number.
I thought that was interesting and important. My mentor, David Deutsch, contradicted it. He said "build it and they will come". He told me the world was waiting and if you do something great then people will find you and reward you. I don't think he acted on that advice in his own career, but that's the advice he gave to me and others. I think Deutsch is wrong and Hamming (and many others who've said the same thing) is right.
The talk in general is interesting. I had two main comments I wanted to share about the talk. I'll share two quotes that are spread far apart in the talk. My first comment is about the first quote, and my second comment is about both together. You can think it over and see if you notice anything before reading my comments.
Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!
What Bode was saying was this: Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity — it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
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... It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.
Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. And I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, "creativity comes out of your subconscious." Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention — you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.
And the second quote:
... good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer....
Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, "Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them." Answer: I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that — I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision — was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.
You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going to give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo and an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to be able to do this, that, or the other thing, and they pay a steady price.
John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said "The appearance of conforming gets you a long way." If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, "I am going to do it my way," you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.
By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help. For instance, one time for some idiot reason all the reproducing services at Murray Hill were tied up. Don't ask me how, but they were. I wanted something done. My secretary called up somebody at Holmdel, hopped the company car, made the hour-long trip down and got it reproduced, and then came back. It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort to cheer her up, tell her jokes and be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me. By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.
And I think John Tukey paid a terrible price needlessly. He was a genius anyhow, but I think it would have been far better, and far simpler, had he been willing to conform a little bit instead of ego asserting. He is going to dress the way he wants all of the time. It applies not only to dress but to a thousand other things; people will continue to fight the system. Not that you shouldn't occasionally!
OK, think it over. There are many good points that you could make about the passages, so it's fine if you come up with different comments than I did.
First Comment
Neglecting his wife is interesting and related to patriarchy and misogyny. And Hamming implies that mothers doing domestic labor are at a huge disadvantage as researchers since even if parenting only took them an extra hour a day (compared to fathers), he thinks that'd be a big handicap. I'm not sure he's right about that, though, since in general I think people can't do eight hours of productive intellectual work per day, so an extra hour for work shouldn't help intellectually. Maybe the extra hour helps with socializing and social climbing. And maybe some people do nine hours of productive intellectual work per day for a few years in their youth and that might be important to their career even if they can't sustain it long term.
I don't know what Hamming's work schedule was like. Maybe he meant a 5th hour of intellectual work per day, not a 9th. But, if so, I don't see the need to neglect your wife to get that time.
Here's a hint about my second comment. I think Hamming made a mistake. I think he missed something important. I think there's a contradiction between the two quotes which he didn't recognize. Think it over more if you want.
Second Comment
Hamming says that being really focused is important. You shouldn't give your subconscious extra things to think about. You should work long hours and never goof off. I'm not convinced this is true. Feynman goofed off. But let's just suppose it's true. My point is about how it contradicts what Hamming says later.
Later, Hamming says Tukey (who worked harder than him intellectually and knew more than him) should have dressed differently and done a better job socializing with the secretaries (like telling them jokes that they like, as Hamming did).
Learning how to dress to conform, and how to tell jokes that secretaries like, is goofing off. It's giving your subconscious something to think about besides science, math or computers.
Hamming seems to assume these things are easy and Tukey wasn't doing them due to ego. Actually, they're skills, and my guess is Tukey didn't have the skills and learning them would have been a big distraction for him. I don't really know anything about Tukey personally but I'm confident that some of the smart, hard-working people didn't have these clothing-and-socializing-related skills that Hamming had. And if it's true that you need to really focus on your work, as Hamming claims, then learning those skills would be bad — a major distraction that takes some of your attention away from your research and stops starving your subconscious of anything but your research to work on.
Some people try to tell jokes to secretaries, do it wrong, and make things worse. Some people try to dress to impress but do it wrong. They can end up looking bad and tryhard. They can be treated even worse than if they dressed casually and didn't try.
Hamming knew how to be friendly to secretaries successfully and cheer them up. He knew how to dress effectively. He thinks people who don't do these things are just refusing on principle. He doesn't recognize that these are skills. Some people are more likely to annoy a secretary than cheer her up. They don't socialize right. Maybe they could hire a tailor or stylist to help them dress right, but they couldn't just pay someone to change how they socialize. And I'm not sure if dressing right really helps unless demeanor and socializing fit your clothes. If people see your behavior as contradicting your clothing, that might be worse even if a skilled stylist picked out your clothes.
I thought it was interesting how first Hamming said to be super focused, work long hours, no distractions, no goofing off, don't give your subconscious any topics to think about besides your research. But then later he said how he has skills related to clothes and socializing and he doesn't see why all the other researchers don't do that. He doesn't recognize those things as skills that have to be learned. Learning a skill is a distraction. He probably learned them before he was out of school, so they weren't a big distraction for him while he worked at Bell Labs, but if someone else hadn't already learned them, then learning them would be a big distraction.
The underlying issue here is that Hamming thinks conformity is cheaper and easier than it is. He underestimates the costs involved. He fails to recognize how unfair it is. He thinks all the other researchers, who are mistreated for not conforming, just have big egos and are getting themselves mistreated on purpose when they could easily change their behavior and be treated well. Most of them have no easy access to fitting in better, which is important when considering how harmful our society's conformity rules are to research. A lot of good researchers have a hard time fitting in and it makes a big difference to their careers. Hamming victim-blames them and presents it as their own choice due to inflated egos, but he's wrong and he's unaware that they lack some substantial skills he had.