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Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#42And where is the relevancy of looking at someone's thoughts that he never communicated publicly or acted upon whatsoever? Are we doing a psychoanalysis or something?
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#43How is this relevant to HN?
In case you're confused: HN is not JUST about hacking and startups, and has never been just about those things. Read the HN guidelines.
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#44It’s hard to visit a different culture for the first time and not notice their differences as a group. It’s only with extended interaction with people from a different culture that their individuality stands out.
I’ve always thought that the cure for xenophobia is travel, but it’s more than just travel that’s required. You can’t just breeze through as a tourist, you have to spend an extended length of time and get to know people as people.
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#45I think people in those days had a very exaggerated idea of the scale of genetic differences between people of different ethic groups. Nowadays we know such differences are a rounding error and that looking at differences in genomes between individuals, those attributable to ethnicity are generally a minority. Back then, this wasn't known. EDIT - I had a bit of a laugh at the quote about the Chinese supplanting other…
Does knowledge of genome proximity help you to find women of other races more attractive?
I've always found Chinese girls attractive, long before I knew anything at all about population genetics. Not that I know a whole lot about it now, but still. I was lucky enough to go to a school in the UK, but with a large proportion of foreign students from all over Africa, the Middle East and Asia so maybe that had an influence.
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#46The quotes are translated from german into very specific english word that carries connotation. Going by the translation however, I find the interpretation made by Rosenkranz to be with odds of my own. I see a comment about too high population growth, while Rosenkranz claim it is about "how Chinese men can find their women sufficiently attractive to have offspring with them". A question about why there is a too high population growth is not the same as a question about why there is any population growth.
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#47This is more click-bait journalism; I'm not sure why Einstein should be singled out for sharing the same beliefs as others in the society in which he was raised. "Europeans in 1922 were Xenophobic" is not worthy of an editorial.
The writer claims that Xenophobia was not Universal, and therefore this is interesting. No view is universal; there are people alive today who believe the earth is flat, although they are a minority. In 1922 Europe, only a very small minority of people would not have been Xenophobic.
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#48Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#49Why is it so "shocking"? Discussing racial differences was more common in his time, and being a great scientist does not necessarily coincide with general wisdom. I hope this story will help people realize that we should not ban the work of people who have said problematic things.
This is also addressed in the original article: > Rosenkranz told the Guardian that although views like Einstein’s were prevalent at the time, they were not universal. “That’s usually the reaction I get – ‘we have to understand, he was of the zeitgeist, part of the time’ – but I think I tried here and there to give a broader context. There were other views out there, more tolerant views,” he said.
I don't think they have given a helpful broader context though. How common were those more tolerant views in that era? If just a few extreme outliers or a significant minority would be relevant.
This is citizen of the Weimar Republic writing 3 years after the end of WW1. China had joined the allies in 1917, the same year as the US. Education of the era tended to encourage belief in the Empire first, civilising mission. Not to forget years of wartime propaganda. Belief in eugenics was rising and becoming popular. Including in the US and UK. It was a little later in the century those ideas would die out.
Certainly tolerance was famously prevalent in the theatre district of Berlin in the pre-Nazi early 30s. Elsewhere not so much. No doubt the historians I've read have also been biased or incomplete - that of course is far harder to judge.
Re: Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia
#50When a white person in historic America encountered the negro slave trade for the first time, becoming aware of the harsh living conditions of millions of people, he have to either conclude that their values regarding justice and the human condition were either in obvious conflict with their own society and culture, or accept the narrative of white supremacy, i.e. blacks were less human and so suffering was OK because it was their natural state. Most chose the latter, as it had the least cognitive dissonance.
A Westerner observing a typical 1920's Chinese person's life for the first time would have experienced the same assault on their fundamental values, especially more humanist values. It was a feudal society, where quiet tolerance in the face of extreme hardship is a cultural value, as is producing as many (male) offspring as possible. Moreover, given harsh standard of living and the large population, human life (especially those of children) was cheap and easily discarded. Finally, post-Qing China would have seemed extremely unsanitary to Western eyes -- even today Chinese authorities struggle with promulgating basic 20th century standards of hygiene (since hygiene is a norm, not a trait).
The foreigner would have been aware that 100's of millions of people lived this way (no one knew China's population was a billion plus until the CCP did the first modern census).
It would have been all to easy to take a dim view on the Chinese as people.