Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

onbeing.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 308 posts

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#61

Post by audioburn »

itjustdontwork wrote: post #57
nobrains wrote: post #53

All men are created equal. Except Blacks. And Muslims. And non-Americans. And Native Americans.

Tell us something we don't all already know? It's a fact that rich black students on average have a lower IQ and do worse on tests than the poorest of white students. Just as men are different from women, in many ways, blacks are different from whites in many ways. There's no point in trying to hide from it.

>It's a fact that rich black students on average have a lower IQ and do worse on tests than the poorest of white students.

Citation needed

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#62

Post by semi-extrinsic »

shaded2 wrote: post #20
itg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help" I'm not so sure. I went to a very diverse and large high school in NJ and what ends up happening is self segregation. All the ethnic groups would mostly end up hanging out with their own types.

That definately happens but is an underlying cause. I'm not sure what it is. I've lived in other countries where this natural segregation does not happen.

There's a fascinating example in computational studies that partly explains this: if you have people of different groups moving around randomly on a lattice, even a very slight preference (51%/49%) for being next to people in the same group as oneself ends up leading to a self-segregated pattern.

EDIT: see e.g http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#63

Post by myownbusiness »

Here's the truth that you young programmers aren't going to like. Einstein was a closet socialist/communist who was hugely overrated as a physicist by the media precisely for his left-leaning politics. "Civil rights" is a nation-splitting tactic that was deeply funded and driven by COMINTERN from the beginning from NAACP to the Scottsboro trials and all the way up to the "protests" in 2014. You folks have been taught your entire lives by a school system similarly deliberately subverted by leftists (see GAMAY for a well-written example) with teachers and professors with viewpoints that average more leftwing than 90% of the country.

The sentiment I'm expressing has been dismissed by your "authorities" as propaganda, lies, redbaiting, etc for decades. But, when _hard_ evidence proving these things has come to light, whether the Pumpkin Papers or Venona or redacted files on Michael King Jr, folks just shrug and pretend that's in the past, doesn't matter, or was laudable. Which is it? Is it a LIE that folks like Einstein were crypto-Reds or is it a TRUTH that doesn't matter because you want the revolution?

More importantly, when, exactly, are you "millennials" going to think for yourselves, rather than turning "hacker news" into the bastard love child of Pravda and Slashdot?

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#65

Post by yummyfajitas »

moron4hire wrote: post #11
skylan_q wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help Maybe instead of forcing segregation, or forcing integration, freedom of association could be tried?

Unfortunately, once communities start out segregated, they stay segregated.

Not really true, at least if physics/chemistry intuition can be trusted. Absent a segregating force (e.g. dipole attraction, what causes oil to separate from water), one expects two fluids to eventually become well mixed.

Conversely, if you mix two fluids which have a segregating force, you don't expect them to stay mixed. Intrinsic properties of the fluids drive the level of segregation - anything else is just temporary.

But maybe I'm just a physicist overreaching beyond my field. Why do you believe initial condition is important?

[edit: simulations posted elsewhere in the thread agree with this: http://ncase.me/polygons/ ]

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#66

Post by zimbu668 »

itg wrote: post #12
lpsz wrote: post #3

What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help -- the transition from "us" and "them" to a unified "us." And yet, it's disappointing how segregated America still is today. One fairly in-depth study [1] offers an example of how "today" came to be. (This report is not about any current events, but rathe…

"More diversity (in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in schools) would certainly help" I'm not so sure. I went to a very diverse and large high school in NJ and what ends up happening is self segregation. All the ethnic groups would mostly end up hanging out with their own types.

When filming Planet of the Apes, the apes and humans didn't mingle over lunch, and the apes, orangutans, and chimpanzees all self segregated as well.

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/12/13/skin-deep-2/

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#67

Post by huxley »

mariodiana wrote: post #4

The thing I like is the reference to Aristotle. Today, there are some people who are too quick to brand anyone who disagrees with their enlightened views as a "moron" or worse. There's no winning hearts and minds that way. It's better to gently point out the mistakes of those who are otherwise worthy of respect, in the hopes that this will spur others towards self-reflection, than to castigate and put people on the d…

I don't think Einstein was being that nice, he was essentially saying that intelligence and education were not guarantees against bigotry and bias.

Aristotle proposed in Book 1 of Politics that certain human beings were natural slaves, as different from the free citizens of Athens as human beings were from beasts. He argued that barbarians deserved enslavement because they lacked souls.

Back in 1550, Aristotle was marshalled in an important debate on race: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valladolid_debate

While much of the debate was around the notion that Spain had the right to conquer the Americas, a major part of Bartolomé de las Casas' debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda centred on the rights of Native Americans. Both men were humanist theologians and well versed in classical works, so Aristotle's idea of Natural Slavery was central to their cases.

De las Casas argued that native Americans were worthy of the same rights as European Christians because they were rational human beings with souls, not natural slaves. Years later, De las Casas expanded this idea to a universal statement that no human being regardless of race deserved slavery.

Sepúlveda took Aristotle on face value and argued that Native Americans were natural slaves and as such didn't deserve to be treated as rational human beings, he made the odious argument that enslaving them was a paternal response which improved their lives.

It's important to note that the debate on the shared humanity of the races and their human rights is an argument that is at least half a millennium old.

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#68

Post by eivarv »

itjustdontwork wrote: post #55
moron4hire wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, once communities start out segregated, they stay segregated.

Unfortunately Why is it unfortunate? No white person in their right mind would honestly prefer to live in a half-black community over an all-white community. Sure, they may say they would to save political face, or to look benevolent or "tolerant" and progressive, but deep down? No. The difference in crime rates and quality of life is just astounding. To prefer to live amongst more blacks is to prefer to be more at r…

I don't know about you, but I'm inclined to think that there are some pretty big socio-economic issues at play here.

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#69

Post by swatow »

moron4hire wrote: post #56
swatow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I didn't. My point was that when you expand or change the model, you open up a whole new range of possibilities. I'm not particularly interested in how the model is parametrized or what parameters lead to what result.

Again, the point was not the model, but the story.

If the point is the story, what purpose does the model/simulation serve? In this case, the best that the model does is prove that the story is internally consistent. It doesn't prove that the story has any relationship to reality, because there are hundreds of other stories about segregation that you could tell, each with their own model.

Re: Einstein: The Negro Question (1946)

#70

Post by myownbusiness »

myownbusiness wrote: post #63

Here's the truth that you young programmers aren't going to like. Einstein was a closet socialist/communist who was hugely overrated as a physicist by the media precisely for his left-leaning politics. "Civil rights" is a nation-splitting tactic that was deeply funded and driven by COMINTERN from the beginning from NAACP to the Scottsboro trials and all the way up to the "protests" in 2014. You folks have been taught…

Show that I'm wrong, downvoting coward.
Post reply on HN