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Rob Shearer
Personal blog · v.cxprogrammingwriting
Rob Shearer writes Rob’s Posts, a personal blog at v.cx about programming and writing. Since 2009, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “Richard Feynman on education in Brazil”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-11, and you can follow it by feed.
55mentions?
43HN people?
2009–2025first – last linked?
Rob Shearer’s personal site.
Most-linked posts?
- Richard Feynman on education in Brazil27 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2011-04-26
- Richard Feynman on Education in Brazil14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2019-10-28
What Hacker News says?
There's an interesting bit in "surely you're joking, mr Feynmann" where he is amazed how primary school kids are learning physics. Only, as it turns out, nearly noone in the entire country has any actual understanding of physics, because from elementary school upwards all they do is memorize the material. https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “Panic at the Job Market”Submitted Richard Feynman on education in Brazil as a story · 152 points
HN discussionGreat story :) https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers”Submitted Mastodon Exit Interview as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI've done so many physics questions that explicitly instruct me to disregard air resistance... Reminds me of Feynman's speech: https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education > There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. > The n…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “The Lesson to Unlearn”Submitted Richard Feynman on education in Brazil as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe idea that science education is profoundly and pervasively dysfunctional. It was a slowly accumulating realization. There was Feynman's critique of rote memorization in Brazil[1], but ok, Brasil isn't CaTech. And Mexico high-school graduates having TIMSS scores similar to US high-school dropouts, but oh well, that's Mexico. And news media have a trope, like "Harvard MBA students don't know what causes Earth seaso…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life”Submitted Richard Feynman on education in Brazil as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education > Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. > There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. > The numbers have ‘errors’ in them – that is, if you look at them,…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)”Submitted One or two spaces between sentences? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy this Feynman story: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters”Submitted Richard Feynman on Education in Brazil as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe ability to implement the sorting algorithm in the C++ standard lib is completely orthogonal to people who have this insight. Weak example! Exactly when would you want to use a shared_ptr, and when you you absolutely not want to use a shared_ptr? Why? And what pieces of 1st principles knowledge would let you simply know that in about a minute? People who have an understanding of complexity analysis is really all…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters”Submitted On the (in)significance of P ≠ NP as a story · 1 points
HN discussionReminds me of an anecdote in Richard Feynman's book in which the Brazilian education system revolved around memorizing definitions without understanding the underlying concepts: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think”There's a nice discussion of this in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! > I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question – the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell – they couldn’t answer it at all! > Then I say, “The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis”Reminds me of the Feynman story where he goes to Brazil. May be a southern/latin Europe thing? https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993”Re: knowing vs understanding, have you read "Richard Feynman on education in Brazil"? http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Why does e to pi i equal -1? (2015) [video]”Writing is thinking. So is drawing. To think clearly, come up with new ideas, make and truly understand things, we need to put marks on the blank page ourselves, and not just repeat what teachers or textbooks tell us like the majority of students Richard Feynman had during his time in Brazil — https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education LLMs/AIs are useful to help us get farther, faster, like witty, skilled, intel…
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on “It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI”Feels for you, bro. I don't know if Brazilian education has improved since Feynman wrote this: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education I suspect not by much.
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on “Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School”http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass ”I am reminded of Feynman's story about teaching physics in one Brazil university, one semester, a few decades ago: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education The students learned to repeat the text of the books, without "understanding" what the books were describing. I'm sure this says something about one side or the other of this conundrum, but I'm not sure which. :-)
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models”Reminds me of an anecdote Richard Feynman had in his book on the Brazilian education system [1]. Basically, the students could memorize crap from books but didn't really comprehend what they were learning, such that when Feynman would ask a question such as "if I hold a glass of water in front of this picture, what will it look like?" they couldn't answer. But if he asked "What is the refractive index of water?" the…
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on “In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis”While I did take my example to an extreme to illustrate my point I think we can agree that trivia will be learned along the way, it just not what should be the meat of the teaching or testing. Your example of #StopAdani made me smile (not because it will fail) But because it sort of proved my point. I did not know who Adani is or what they were doing. But I knew how to search and what sites to go to to get some cont…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “How to Learn New Things as an Adult”Is this what you're talking about? http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “A Zero-Math Introduction to Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods”1. People are self-censoring dissenting views in regular conversation outside of people they trust 2. People are self-censoring dissenting views in written communication 3. People are self-censoring their own minds as a result of #1 and #2 4. Dissenting communications and dissenting thoughts are reduced in frequency, leading to a snowball effect as ideas are more and more suppressed It's not just the government that…
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on “Writers Say They Feel Censored by Surveillance”"Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything."[1] Sounds a lot like Feynman decrying the Brazilian education system in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. [1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Apple plans to spend $1B to support advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S”As a brazilian who has had some education abroad, the most interesting thing Feynman wrote about Brazil was his critique of the education system [1]. I studied chemistry in high school without ever going into a lab. This holds for all classes, even maths: everything was abstract with no real-world applications. Even Portuguese Language classes had this disease: about a dozen rules for diacritics could be simplified…
Comment linking /2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
on “In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party”But because the risk is so low (it doesn't happen that frequently) many people are completely unaware of the phenomenon. Also, people can't apply what they were supposed to learn in high school physics. It's not only Brazil that has this problem: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire”I'm afraid that this is because academic math is often taught and tested in a way that rewards memorization rather than understanding. Here's Richard Feynman's take on the problem: https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
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on “Children's arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math”
