Astral Codex Ten

Feynman

3 min read

Feynman

Article

Feynman is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 21, 2021 and June 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""But as Feynman put it, ‘what I cannot create I cannot understand’.""; “The idea is due to Feynman”. It most often appears alongside 7500 people signed a petition, A.I.M., Aerocar.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 21, 2021
  • Last seen: June 04, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here. With that in place, I felt like I could also take a chance on starting my dream business. You guys have had to listen to me write ad nauseum about cost disease - why does health care cost 4x times more per capita than it did just a generation ago? I have a lot of theories about why that happened and how to fix it. But as Feynman put it, "what I cannot create I cannot understand". So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. If it works, I plan to be insufferable about it. If it doesn't, I can at least have a fun conversation with Alex Tabarrok about where our theories went wrong. Since I'm no longer protecting my anonymity, I can advertise it here - Lorien Psychiatry - though I'm not currently accepting blog readers as patients, sorry.
Inline links: cost disease, Lorien Psychiatry
Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
June 04, 2021 · Original source
Besides flying cars and nuclear energy, the last main thread of the book is nanotechnology. The idea is due to Feynman, although it was popularized by Eric Drexler. Basically: we would benefit a lot from being able to do atomic-scale manufacturing. But our factories are human scale; the tools are way too big to deal with atoms. What if you used our human scale factories to make a one-quarter-human-scale factory? Then you could use the quarter-scale-factory to make a one-sixteenth-scale factory. Repeat a few times, and you’re down to atom-scale. Nanotech, Hall says, is to nuclear energy as the steam engine was to coal - the technology that will unlock the potential of a new energy source. But like nuclear energy, nanotech has languished.
Inline links: Feynman, Eric Drexler