Comment by mkstowegnv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkstowegnv | Hacker News Reader

Stories about Mims always attract comments that make it clear that his writing inspired many to learn electronics. But to give some balance to the starry eyed impression left by the article and many such comments I suggest looking into his Wikipedia page [1] or any other source that talks about his creationist and climate change denialist views and how they have lead to controversy in his life.

I would also strongly recommend against his books for beginners now because even simple projects should at least consider alternatives based on microcontrollers and there are now much better and more comprehensive books that cover the basics that Mims covered and more modern alternatives. I would recommend The Art of Electronics [2] (older editions can be bought affordably) which incorporates learn- from- real- world- bad- design wisdom, and which has a sense of humor utterly lacking in Mims' writing.

1 (with controversy section) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims

2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics

As someone who has spent a lot of time both on learning electronics and understanding how to teach it, I would argue against this as bad advice.

The Art of Electronics is like a recipe book — it's a (whimsical, yes) set of reference designs to be referred to like templates for a design engineer. The Art of Electronics is not a well-suited recommendation for a beginner or novice.

Furthermore: I have spoken to Forrest Mims (disclosure: the discussions I have had with him were in the process of creating circuitclassics.com. That said, I have not met him personally.) The conclusion I came to was that his personal beliefs do not affect and have no bearing on his technical work.

(Broadly, I do not understand why this man is so hounded for his particular personal beliefs.)

It is true that hundreds of thousands of engineers launched their careers after being exposed to his books, that they are quite good at this, still relevant — and probably the only book on electronics to sell over 1M genuine (and many more untrackably via unauthorized reproduction etc.) copies.

I have fond memories of his book and his writings. I was rather stunned that somebody so intelligent would be so willingly not so in other areas. No interest attacking him for it, but just, "Wow. really?"

We all have our quirks, don't we.

> I was rather stunned that somebody so intelligent would be so willingly not so in other areas.

Judging by the Wikipedia article, he's Christian. Which means creationism is a part of his belief systems. As for climate skepticism, hard to say, though I am curious about one thing. Wikipedia mentions him doing a lot of atmospheric research, hand has some pretty charts near the end - charts that, to my layman's opinion, should show a rising trend (due to correlation between water vapour and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), not a steady one. Could anyone comment on that and their relevance?

> Which means creationism is a part of his belief systems

This is only true for some doctrinal subsets of Christianity, and it's rare in European christian communities.

Far weirder to find someone who's innovated in atmospheric research - a great little paper on how to determine atmospheric water content with a $10 IR thermometer - who doesn't believe in climate change.

(https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2011BAMS3215.1 if you want the paper)

I don't have a dog in this fight, but nothing I've read by him shows any indication of being willfully unintelligent.

Believing in Creationism is being willfully unintelligent.

One can be a Christian and not be a creationist -- that's a choice.

You're saying "willfully unintelligent" as if he's explicitly trying not to be intelligent. But that's the opposite of what's going on. He's examined the science and he sees problems with it. He's heard the counter-arguments, and he isn't convinced, because of what he sees as a lack of evidence.

This is the same kind of fundamental misunderstanding that separates (for example) a white supremacist from one who is not. The general idea is that the former is refusing to reason, examine, or use logic. But if you talk to a white supremacist or neo-Nazi at length, you find that they have nuanced, complex, logical explanations for their beliefs. They may be wildly inaccurate, but that isn't to say they didn't put thought into it. Not only that, but their positions are bolstered by the fact that there's basically no way to completely disprove them, because it would require observing nature over millennia, or having records we just don't have.

Calling them willfully unintelligent not only misunderstands their reasoning, but it questions their motives. It's not just a false observation, it's an accusation. This moves the conversation from "I don't think you're right" to "you're a bad person". And I think that's at the core of how political and ideological discourse is so rotten today.

Sigh. You went to effort to make your case but I don't buy it (and resent your conclusion of effectively blaming me for the failure of discourse today).

> You're saying "willfully unintelligent" as if he's explicitly trying not to be intelligent

No, I did not. He has access to the science and he also has a religious tract. He chooses to treat that religious tract as an inerrant literal depiction of the creation of the world.

Those are competing thoughts and "willfully" means that he made a choice.

And "willfully" is kind of tricky here, because it would not surprise me if he was raised in a Christian household that effectively brainwashed him into these beliefs.

>And I think that's at the core of how political and ideological discourse is so rotten today.

And I disagree. I think a huge part of the problem is religious fundamentalism and a rejection of science.

Edit: oh, and neo-nazis and white supremacist are bad people m'kay?

> (and resent your conclusion of effectively blaming me for the failure of discourse today).

Well, I apologize. I'm not intending to blame you for anything.

> He chooses to treat that religious tract as an inerrant literal depiction of the creation of the world.

According to an article I read about him, that doesn't appear to be the case. https://books.google.com/books?id=hSsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40#v=one... Third column, halfway down: "Mims did not become a Bible literalist." etc

> Those are competing thoughts and "willfully" means that he made a choice.

According to the article, Mims came to his conclusions after scientific study, not from growing up with a bible and deciding to just go with what he learned first. He looked at fossil records (among other things) and decided they weren't good enough to explain things without some extra force, and "chose" an intelligent designer as that force.

> it would not surprise me if he was raised in a Christian household that effectively brainwashed him into these beliefs.

He's a Texan, so I'm sure he was raised around Christianity, but he was actually an evolutionist before he became a science writer.

> I think a huge part of the problem is religious fundamentalism and a rejection of science.

In this case, science brought him to God. It would be funny if the public response and effect on his career wasn't so sad.

Thank you for the civil dialog in what could be a very contention discussion.

If Mims was being truly scientific about the Bible then that would include looking for finding falsifiability in the literal truths of the Bible. (Clearly I'm not religious and my take on that book is that it is, at best, a collection of inspirational stories -- not documented fact).

I respect each individual's right to have their own relationship with "God", including believing in things that I think are, dare I say it, stupid.

Scientific American did the wrong thing to fire him, but instead should have had a very clear firewall to ensure that they respected his personal beliefs and would not be associated with them.

Different people learn in different ways. Unlike most people apparently I credit Mims with delaying my taking up electronics. I found his books a complete turn off when I was young - painfully unimaginative and boring. Mims books were the only books available at Radio Shack and in the US, Radio Shack for decades before hacker spaces was in most places the only place to begin to tinker with electronics. The high number of Mims books sold has a lot to do with those decades of "monopoly". The Art of Electronics is what worked for me and many others and I have three hard bound copies that are falling apart from overuse. There may be simpler, fewer- topics-covered alternatives that would be better for very young readers, but AoE is what most teachers in particular that I know swear by.

(Broadly, I do not understand why this man is so hounded for his particular personal beliefs.)

Mims's beliefs came to the forefront several years ago (probably more like 20 at this point) when he was under consideration to take over editorship of the 'Amateur Scientist' column in Scientific American. This column isn't too well-known today, but it was hugely influential from the WWII years through at least the 1970s. It regularly featured experiments in all sorts of areas, from physics and chemistry to meteorology to natural history and archaeology.

I don't remember how the editors at SciAm found out that Mims was a creationist, but when they did, they rescinded the offer. There was a great deal of controversy among the magazine's readership at the time. The decision seemed prejudicial at best. Even without being religious, it felt like Mims was getting a raw deal.

I originally fell into that camp myself, but the events and trends that have taken place since then make me inclined to support the magazine's decision. If it was true that Mims's faith required him to deny basic elements of geological history and biological evolution -- and apparently it was -- then it's hard to see how he could do that particular job effectively.

It's a real shame, because it was otherwise the perfect job for him. Mental illness sucks, especially when it's voluntary.

Does that have anything to do with his ability to inspire people to do something with their lives? We're headed down this dangerous path where it seems we need to be able to vouch for every aspect of a person's life before we're allowed to celebrate anything they've done. People can do amazing things. And they can be assholes. And most of the time they're both.

I say this every time this is mentioned but Mimms actually did some brain damage to the budding electronics engineers. The books were cute but left people with a head full of things to be unlearned. This screwed up a number of my fellow students when they hit university. In fact our lecturer of the day, while drinking in the student union with us, described the Mimms books using language I can’t repeat here.

I actually started with 1st edition Art of Electronics Laboratory Manual back in the 1980s before I even went to university. That was in all incarnations total gold. It’s a tutorial guide rather than the textbook format of the main book.

In this day and age, Make Electronics (this will teach you which end of the soldering iron is hot) followed by TAOE is the way to go. Harry Kybett / Earl Boysen also produce an excellent book.

Electronics is vastly more complicated (and interesting) than cutting and pasting knowledge which is what you end up with from Mimms.

I found the Mimms 555/556 book to be a perfect source of copy/paste material to do the blinking lights “hello world” hardware equivalent.

Most programmers start off copy/pasting hello world; they don’t generally start off with accumulators and indirect addressing modes.

> creationist and climate change denialist

Unfortunately, it's not exactly an uncommon problem.

https://theness.com/index.php/creationists-mechanical-engine...

https://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis...

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/thermo_patterson...

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