> The biggest problem the Young dead-end poses is that having failed to find any trace in it, one must begin to assume that Feynman got the year, surname, or both wrong.
Alternative hypothesis: Feynman knew who the individual was but, having not asked them if they objected to being used to illustrate his anecdote, chose to hide their identity with a pseudonym. In that case the reference wasn't to "Mr Q. Young", it was to "Mr Young Researcher".
I thought so too at first, but that would only make sense if "Cargo Cult Science" were an unedited third-party transcript of the commencement address, and I don't think that it is, given its inclusion in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!." The address refers to "a man named Young", not "a man, let's call him Young".
I wonder if it's possible that there was a transcription error, or perhaps something introduced by the editor of the journal where the speech was first published [1]. If there was, then it's perhaps also plausible that the error could have been carried forward by copying and pasting the journal article into Surely you're joking.
All wild speculation on my part, of course. I wonder if any further evidence will ever turn up!
You're suggesting that _no one_ ever used a pseudonym for another without explicitly mentioning it in advance/shortly thereafter?
Besides, "Young" as a false-name doesn't have to be a direct clever "reference" to "a young person". It could just be a name he thought of at the time.
In any case, I think Gwern is far too conspiratorial in the reasoning for this article. There are some interesting connections found but the evidence, while reasonable, is not nearly as conclusive as he suggests.
> You're suggesting that _no one_ ever used a pseudonym for another without explicitly mentioning it in advance/shortly thereafter?
In academic writing like this, where he is being quite precise about the names and explicitly stating 'a man named Young', where the speech is in fact about being precise & scientific, and the anecdote makes up a good chunk of the speech, which was written in advance, and published at least twice by him afterwards over a decade? Yes. Feynman would have highlighted or signaled a pseudonym, he would not have used a plausible surname (I will remind the reader again, quite a common one back then, and still is).
> the evidence, while reasonable, is not nearly as conclusive as he suggests.
You are suggesting that all this is a red herring and we will find another, completely independent, multi-year investigation into rats using floor cues in mazes done by American grad students in the late 1930s (when American academia was far smaller than it is now), published in a way Feynman could find out, at institutions with links to Feynman via Cornell & Michigan, which also chose to use sand for the same task and rationale, which is not cited by Shepard or Curtis or indeed by any researchers in any of the scores of papers I have jailbroken & read on the topic of sensory leakage in mazes, which has simultaneously eluded all discovery by at least a decade and a half of people taking cracks at it (the 2009 Quora, and then several blogs going back to 2004, not counting the '90s Usenet discussions), and which happens to by sheer coincidence, be the actual source for the anecdote?
Alternative hypothesis: Feynman knew who the individual was but, having not asked them if they objected to being used to illustrate his anecdote, chose to hide their identity with a pseudonym. In that case the reference wasn't to "Mr Q. Young", it was to "Mr Young Researcher".