Review of '"Surely You\'re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A fun romp through life anecdotes of a scientist. Other people have mentioned this before, but Feynman's attitude towards women renders reading this a little less pleasant than it would otherwise be. When I was younger and more naive reading some of his encounters in his perspective I didn't take them with enough salt, because I idolized scientists too much for it to really occur to me they might be as sexist as often as the rest of the population: a good scientist, after all, tries to keep in mind both a hypothesis and a counter-hypothesis, the weight of evidence and ways to falsify their current paradigm, so if they apply that to life they would be cautious before making blunt statements about women and men.
Alas, I have come to learn that people are good at compartmentalization, and that scientists often only really successfully practice the scientific method in groups rather than as individuals because they tend to be biased toward their own pet theories too much. It's like bees: every worker bee wants to lay their own eggs, but the collective action of the hive ends up ensuring that this does not in practice happen because other worker bees won't agree to raise just any egg and will nip them in the bud unless it meets the standards of the entire collective.