I was a UCLA anesthesiology attending in the 1980s when Feynman came to our OR for an abdominal procedure after having been diagnosed with kidney cancer. I watched as he was wheeled down the hall toward OR 9, our largest, reserved for major complicated operations. As he was wheeled into the room, he clasped his two hands above his head like a prizefighter.
"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics. The YouTuber, an obsessed physicist who had spent months reading all Feynman books, provides a critical analysis and explains the cultural impact of "Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman!"
It's easy to dunk on someone unable to defend themselves.
Some basic sanity checks:
Personally recruited onto the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer in 1943.
Feynman Diagrams, fundamental to QM and became popular in the early 50s.
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture was given in 1959.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics were recorded at Caltech between 1961-1964 and became famous throughout the field shortly after.
Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics shared with Schwinger and Tomonaga in 1965
Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection came out in 1983
Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman released in 1985.
Any Physics Professor on earth would give both their legs to have the career Feynman did before he was supposedly only made relevant by his Biography.
It's not a critique of his work (although to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century). Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.
> you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein
Yes, you do--it's just that the mythbuilding builds on different aspects of their personalities.
Mythbuilding around Einstein made him out to be the physics outsider who came in and revolutionized physics--or, in the somewhat less outlandish (but still outlandish) version, the kid who flunked all his physics classes in school and then revolutionized physics. Neither is anywhere near the truth. Einstein was an expert in the physics he ended up overthrowing. The reason he did badly in school was that school was not teaching the actual cutting edge physics that Einstein was interested in--and was finding out about from other sources, pursued on his own. And even then, he didn't flunk out of school; when he published his landmark 1905 papers, he was about to be awarded his doctorate in physics, and it wasn't too long after that that he left the patent office and became a professional academic.
Mythbuilding around Hawking made him out to be the genius who, despite his severe physical disability, could see through all the complexities and find the simple answers to fundamental questions that will lead us to a theory of everything and the end of physics. (This mythmaking, btw, was not infrequently purveyed by Hawking himself.) That story conveniently forgets the fact that none of those simple answers he gave have any experimental confirmation, and aren't likely to get any any time soon. He did propose some groundbreaking ideas, but none of them are about things we actually observe, or have any hope of observing in the foreseeable future. And the biggest breakthrough idea he's associated with, black hole entropy and black hole thermodynamics, arguably wasn't his, it was Bekenstein's; Hawking initially rejected Bekenstein's arguments for black hole entropy.
The myth is not "Einstein did badly in school, but for that reason not this one". "Einstein did badly in school" is a myth, period. Einstein excelled in school.
> Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
He's the only one who left behind a model for how to go about emulating him.
Hawking and Einstein left behind their work but nothing I'm aware of teaching others how to do comparable work.
As the video points out, Feynman was telling tall tales to impress a much younger man, Ralph Leighton. Ralph Leighton decided to publish stories that told a specific narrative, that being an asshole was cool, and he omitted more wholesome stories about Feynman being supportive of women.
He developed quantum electrodynamics, the first fully fleshed-out quantum field theory. In the process, the invented the action formulation of quantum field theory, which is absolutely fundamental to the modern understanding of the subject, and he invented the method of solving path integrals perturbatively that everyone has used since (Feynman diagrams).
That easily puts him among the top 10 physicists of the 20th Century.
Beyond his research contributions, he was a highly innovative und unorthodox teacher, and an utterly captivating raconteur. He had a highly unusual combination of skills and personality traits. That's why he's so famous.
Sounds like you went to a pretty unusual school? It definitely wasn't on my reading list during a similar time period. But it seems like your doing a lot of selection bias here. People interested in become Physicists inevitably hear about him and the sample of people active on HN is wildly different from the general public.
Without the 20th century restriction, she rants against the list "Einstein. Newton. Feynman."
She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."
I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century.
What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.
I'd put Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Dirac ahead of Feynman. I'm not so sure about the others; not that they weren't world class physicists, but so was Feynman.
If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in the 20th century or the 19th. :-)
Einstein for sure. For the rest: I'm not sure that they're clearly ahead of Feynman. I'm not sure they're behind, either. To me, they seem to kind of be in a cluster.
Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.
To be clear that YouTube video is not really a critique of Richard Feynman, especially not his scientific career, it's a critique of people who knew him writing books and making content using his name and making money off it as if it came directly from him. It also critiques some of his behavior around interactions with students or telling what amounts to tall tales or standup comedy jokes and then other people taking it as gospel. Richard Feynman did not write the book "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". And some of the content in that book seems like it may greatly exaggerated or even be completely fabricated. And Feynman was not alive to see much of what was published in his name or using his name.
Without having watched the videos, to say that people made content using his name and made money off of it without Feynman knowing is disingenuous. Ralph Leighton recorded the conversations as Feynman was struggling with cancer. There are even portions of those recordings out in the web [1]. Feynman was fully aware of the books because there was apparently a scandal where Murray Gell-mann threatened to sue Feynamn and Leighton because of some mischaracterization. Feynman was apparently hurt and issued a correction in the subsequent version of the book [2]. So it seems that he was FULLY AWARE and actively endorsed the book.
"Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" was not written my Feynman and contained obviously fabricated stories. The fact that he was aware of this is more a point against his character than for it, no?(And says nothing of his scientific prowess)
It was dictated by Feynman. Parts of his original interview are still available as stated in my comment above. And as far as embllishment goes, I'm pretty sure all autobiographies suffer this fate.
You should watch the video. People who are not Ralph Leighton published books about Feynman posthumously without his knowledge and made money off of it.
Many people write books on interesting subjects posthumously (biographies come to mind). I believe it would be up to the descendants of Feynman to sue if due legal etiquettes were not maintained. Having said that, all famous Feynman books like the Feynman lectures, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Please of finding things out, etc are edited pieces of Feynman's recorded audio, no doubt about that.
Honestly, my problem with the video in question is that its tone unjustly attempts to denigrate Feynman (starting with the clickbaity title itself, a sham legacy? really?) by trying to frame the narrative that his supposed works were not his to begin with. The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all? If this is the central takeaway of the video then I'm honestly glad that I didn't waste precisious few hours of my life on such misleading content. Feel free to correct me though.
To me, Feynman is iconic because of the way he communicates. Of course, there is a disjunction between the man and his ideas and I'm not unwilling to believe that he had some flaws.
> Honestly, my problem with the video in question is that its tone unjustly attempts to denigrate Feynman (starting with the clickbaity title itself, a sham legacy? really?) by trying to frame the narrative that his supposed works were not his to begin with.
The video is not about denigrating Feynman. The "sham" legacy refers not to Feynman's legacy as a physicist, which is undisputed. The "sham" legacy refers to Feynman's false legacy written by other people for personal motivations.
> The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all?
Yes, that's the joke, but you're misunderstanding it. The joke is not punching at Feynman, but about how we know so little about him because we have no written primary sources about his views, only secondary sources.
I'm sorry but didn't we already establish that most of his famous books are the edited contents of his recordings with some of those audios available to download as well? Does a person have to actually sit down and write it out and dictations don't count?
Might not reply to this anymore, because a lot of these comments are people criticizing the video content they imagine in their heads based on the title only, not having watched the video.
It's also easy to dunk on someone without watching their content. You should probably watch the video if you want to dunk on it. It does not dunk on his physics. It's extremely thoroughly researched and it's about "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" which is specifically about the legacy of anecdotes about his personality, and is different from the actual physics legacy of Richard Feynman, and it is extremely clear on this point.
Was it accurate or not? Who cares if the presentstion was to your liking? The question is whether or not its claims are accurate. You sound like the Feynman Bros she talks about.
You can add to the list, "Putnam Fellow." And, not only was he a fellow, he apparently trounced the scores of the other 4 fellows:
"Anyway, I was among the first five. I have since found out from
somebody from Canada, where it was scored, who was in the scoring
division—he came to me much later and he told me that it was
astonishing. He said that at this examination, 'Not only were you
one of the five, but the gap between you and the other four was
sensational.' He told me that. I didn’t know that. That may not
be correct, but that’s what I heard."
The video is not about Feynman's actual career. That's actually the point -- the idea of Feynman people have in their minds is totally divorced from the actual person and his work.
A lot of the comments on this post are references to the book "surely you're joking Mr Feynman", which was a collection of stories(with a lot of embellishment) told by Feynman.
That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work
People still do very much know of him. My mother is the person who introduced me to his book. I was showing some interest in science in school when it was presented to me though. Though he's probably waning from "household name" status he's likely still widely known
He is known for being a bad ass scientists and super slick with the ladies.
Many decades later we say more accurately, he was a bad ass scientist who either sexually harassed or straight up raped most of his female mentees and was generally kinda racist (I mean, so was everyone back then. Still tho) and a general asshole.
I mean I don't really think there is any point in declaring anyone the best scientist ever. But he's firmly in whatever the top tier is when only considering scientific contributions.
The person talking in the video lost me, when she criticized pupils asking about air resistance. Basically that was me, literally, without having known anything about Feynman. I simply asked, because I was interested in how one would calculate that, rather than the boring "use formula from book, plug in values, get result". I wanted to know more. Not because I wanted to "seem smart because I know air exists". That's such very silly take. And in fact there were many people, who would not have even thought about air possibly having an effect on a falling object. Basically she is raving on against curious students. Maybe she is herself not so curious and cannot stand it. Who knows.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Autobiographies.
As Churchill said, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
I see. In a strict sense, yes, published books like Surely You're Joking and its sequel, The Feynman Lectures, QED, etc. weren't "written" by Feynman himself.
But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of context (which might be in the video or Gleick's biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to), suggests that Feynman didn't create the content that's in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took credit for them. That is emphatically not the case. All of the content of those books is Feynman's. Leighton took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task, and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody, certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
I don't think the problem people have is "Richard Feynman didn't produce content"
It's "the content that people interacted with that they formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually editorialized and published by other people"
They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written by these authors from the real historical person
To the extent that the character of "Feynman" as he appears in books like Surely You're Joking is different from the real historical person, I think the difference is due to Feynman himself--the way he told the stories orally to people like Leighton. I don't think it's due in any significant measure to people like Leighton "editoralizing" when they wrote up the stories for publication.
So again, I think "never wrote a book" is misleading if it gives the impression that the portrayal of Feynman in such books was not Feynman's own portrayal of himself. It was.
That's true, i guess I'm trying to say "the portrayal of Feynman versus the reality of him" which "he didn't write any books" doesn't represent well.
With some more thought, the fact that he wasn't the direct author of any books is interesting but not really that significant to his character, so i can't see much reason to point it out other than to discredit his achievements.
Though if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree.
> if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree.
Only if you take "written" literally, as in, he didn't do the actual writing, he just told the stories orally and someone else wrote them down.
I personally don't care much about that; the stories are his (including, as I've said, whatever misrepresentations of what actually happened they contain). Lots of people have books ghostwritten, and that's not considered unusual.
More than that, there are famous examples of books for which someone got the credit for the writing when they actually did little or none of it: John F. Kennedy being credited as the author of Profiles in Courage, for example. Even the content of Profiles in Courage was probably less Kennedy's than the content of the books Feynman gets credited for was Feynman's.
I watched this video and honestly did not find any of her points very compelling.
Her best point is basically her own subjective opinion that Feynman does not belong amongst the greatest physicists of all time like Newton and Einstein. And like yeah I guess that’s sort of true. But most of the video is just stating that Feynman’s fans are weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring. It’s the combination of both and she mostly ignores that.
Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
In any case I’ve found Feynman’s work and life to be inspiring since I was a teenager. He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
Frankly I'm having trouble believing you watched the video if you make the assertion:
> He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
There were multiple points in the presentation on her experience with Feynman fans and why they deserved the Bros title.
* Having an unearned superiority complex while having misogynistic beliefs (6:50->8:23) - followed by examples of personal experiences by the video creator
* Making up stories about him (1:42:XX->1:44:XX)
* Thinking that negging is cool? I realize I already said misogynistic beliefs, but feel like this should be re-iterated (24:20->25:50). The example given about the Feynman and the waitress was particularly rage-inducing to me. I'm picturing my mother or wife in that scenario and some jackass doing that to them.
> Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
This is a mischaracterization of this section of the video. 37:33-> 39:45 for anyone else who wants to make their own judgement. The point was that people watch the clip of Feynman and come out with the wrong/harmful conclusions.
Did you read the book? Some of those are distortions.
Regarding the negging incident, she left out important context in her summary of this part of the book.
Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the women at that bar were intending to use men to get free drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner and then says she has to run to go meet up with a lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging, was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically, not being a pushover.
Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
I also think the incident about lying about whether he was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and two girls go with him back to his place. But later he confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor".
Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize how different people's attitudes were to things like nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a thing.
I hadn't read the book fully, but I did coincidentally read that chapter a long time ago. Given the context you provide, I agree that he does not seem to be worse than anyone else given the time period. The problem is when people read about him and try to adopt mid-1900s values in the 2000s - and that's really what the video above about his legacy is about.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
It's misogynistic, because the ghost writer of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feyman!, Ralph Leighton, ultimately put into print narratives that encouraged men to see "ordinary" women as "worthless bitches". In the character of "Feynman":
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
...
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl!
The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation bias. It matters, because training your mind to be misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into other aspects of your life, like how you treat female coworkers.
Yeah, it's hard not to see some truth in what Murray Gell-Mann said, which is that he spent as much time trying to come up with stories about himself as he did working.
Also while breaking the rules might be fun, lockpicking desks & sending coded messages out of Los Alamos "for fun" is maybe not for the best.
It wasn't for the worst either. Frankly i think it's essential for people to have experience in some mischeviety. Hacker mindset, etc, etc. I've joined a PhD program recently and you can really tell who's never done anything but study.
I would agree. I think at least in some fields a certain cleverness is needed. Mathematics is all about being clever and testing assumptions as an example.
I LOVE the videos of how Feynman talks about physics and have read and loved many of the books she talked about. But really this whole video is, I think, spot on about them.
Overall seems good, but I find it interesting she says it teaches to always be the smartest person in the room when the book often reflected Feynman as being somewhat simple, going on about reliance on mental tricks in comparison to his colleagues who he felt were much more talented. Or instances where he found himself out of his depth & got lucky (pointing at some random thing on a diagram to figure out what it is without asking, happens to get people he's with to rubber duck debug an actual problem). Which may support her observation of Feynman bros who might find this relatable
This all comes back to the observation I've made working with competent people, which is that we're all stuck trying to solve problems with the computational power of a slab of meat
(she later goes on to address this modesty as being underhanded)
(continued watching, two hours in now, this is great work)
All I see is people trying to point out the differences between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard Feynman the real person"
"Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their native languages that he doesn't speak.
"Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning physicist
Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a good scientist?
That YouTuber seems quite bitter, making videos complaining about famous scientists and complaining about people lke Worlfram and Musk who studied physics in school and then became successful in business -- not for being bad businessman or bad people (which some of them may well be), but because she's offended that they say they love physics even though she thinks they don't deserve to.
Elon Musk has a bachelor in science and business, I feel like a PhD scientists is allowed to complain about the media going to Elon Musk for science views rather than scientists
How much of that book do you think is the literal truth and how much do you think was embellished? When I read it my impression is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let the boring real life details get in the way of a good story. Some of it is completely believable, like the general telling people to never have their safes open when he is around, but others came across as a bit fanciful to me, especially when he started talking about women. I'm guessing every story has at least a grain of truth in it, but I would like to hear perspectives from the other people in the stories.
> When I read it my impression is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let the boring real life details get in the way of a good story.
Is this not an undesirable trait in non fiction stories?
Recently started to read his book, and was shocked at how much my interpretation of Feynman seems to differ from the frequent praises. Smart and a gifted science communicator, but even these embellished stories told in the most flattering light, he comes across as an egotistical jerk and misogynist. How many female physics majors changed studies after enduring his extremely creepy behavior?
I hope that people who read this book in the future are able to recognize some of his truly toxic traits, and not think that being a jerk is part of his genius like the Steve Jobs mythos.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops
How many women or other discriminated-against people didn't have the chance to make a difference in the world because of attitudes of people like Feynman?
Most of these complaints about Feynman come down to one story he told. People who come away thinking Feynman is a misogynist generally miss the point of the story. Feynman talks about how when he was young, an older friend told him he could pick up women by being a jerk. He tried it, and it worked, but he felt bad about himself afterwards and decided not to do it any more.
Some people look at that story and say, "Look at what a jerk Feynman was to the lady in the story!" And then they completely ignore the part where Feynman says that even though the method was effective, he didn't feel right using it.
There's also the fact that he did "life drawing" of a number of his students, which is completely unacceptable today, and wasn't exactly approved of at the time.
I've certainly felt like I've taken a bit more of an effort to clarify that I'm impressed with Feynman's clarity of teaching, rather than any of his other hijinx, which are often amusing, but not outstanding like his academic work.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? is the most heavily edited.
Gell-Mann famously threatened to sue Feynman if he didn't alter his book which he did in later printings.
The parts of the Cargo Cult Science chapter that referenced specific scammers were removed out of fear of a defamation lawsuit.
The Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path chapter in which he discusses picking up women at bars was removed after the first edition.
All of Surely You're Joking received a pass to change the language of the book in order to "remove sexist and misogynistic language".
What Do You Care What Other People Think? was also altered to remove his descriptions of his first wife and broadly the language of the book was also updated.
