171–180 of 303 posts
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Who cares? Lots of assholes have done lots of great things. Some of the most important people in history have been assholes.
Because there are lots of people who do great things who aren't assholes. We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.
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Because there are lots of people who do great things who aren't assholes. We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.
Is that really true thought? I can't quantify this but qualitatively it seems like most of the people who accomplished great things really were assholes. I mean even here in the tech industry think of the people we commonly consider great. If you look deeply into their lives and talk to people who knew them personally you'll usually find they were kind of jerks. Is that just a coincidence or could there be a causal r…
I wonder if conflating assholery with talent or accomplishment is particularly common in bay-area start up culture.
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There wasn't ever a "moment" when they "discovered" the structure of DNA. The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom. Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograp…
It's important to realize that "Photograph 51" wasn't "Franklin's" -- it was taken by Raymond Gosling, a grad student mentored by Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. What happened was that Wilkins chose to share the data with Watson and Crick. Yes, he maybe should have consulted with Franklin first (and certainly with Gosling, whose opinion nobody seems to care about). In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along…
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Who cares? Lots of assholes have done lots of great things. Some of the most important people in history have been assholes.
A lot of people care. Love his work, hate the person, feel obligated to rightfully demonize him, not his work.
I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement. [1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...
Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gene:_An_Intimate_History
Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
You mean plagiarized it?
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Taboos are very culture-specific. I suspect that the above statement would cause approximately zero uproar in China, or the Arabic world.
And that means that black people are inherently less intelligent?
The point of my comment was that the current Western Civilization is so afraid of this hypothesis and its possible ramifications if it turned out to be even semi-correct, that it will try to destroy anyone who even dares to say it aloud, instead of approaching it without prejudice and studying it.
That is a political taboo, on the same level as saying "Allah probably does not exist" in Iran, "Ukraine is a separate nation which deserves sovereignty and our war against them is unjust" in Russia, or "Our government is neither very benevolent nor very capable and makes stupid mistakes" in China. And this taboo is mostly caused by US history of slavery and Western European history of colonialism and/or eugenics, but also by the current structure of politics. Much like the abovementioned taboos from Iran, Russia and China, its breach would undermine some political foundations.
It also has some consequences. We invest crazy amounts of money into artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence (and stupidity) is relatively underinvested, with the most interesting results coming from studies of corvids or octopuses. IMHO this is low-hanging fruit that we choose not to pluck, thus probably shooting ourselves in the foot when developing our own human potential.
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What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen? I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with…
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out. What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.
Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.
Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.
And by today's standards, I mean those applied to everyday scientists, not the "important" ones that should not be disturbed.
A terrible person indeed.