When Wiener met Einstein | Hacker News Reader

When Wiener met Einstein

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>He felt, however, that international rapprochement or another world war were the only things likely to happen. He did not agree with Russell that another world war would mean the end of civilization. He thought the leadership of civilization would pass to America and ultimately to Asia. He thinks that our general education level in the States is poor, but that there are great centers of learning with us and that much fine work is being done. He expects big things from the U.S.

Einstein's megatrend forecasting was pretty good.

> and ultimately to Asia

Or in full: "He thought the leadership of civilization would pass to America and ultimately to Asia."

Many today would think that was perspicacious on Einstein's part.

I highlighted the part, because it's still in the future.

Recorded almost a century ago as well.

Einstein did not have best opinion of Asia from his travels 5 years prior [1].

of Chinese: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

and Japanese: “intellectual needs of this nation seem to be weaker than their artistic ones – natural disposition?”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/12/einsteins-trav...

Jeez. What an article.

You can have the opinion that ever person or ethnicity should be treated equally and still dislike cultures and make negative comments about in a private journal.

The idea that non-racist humanitarian should censor their private likes and dislikes into neutral is insane. Being tolerant and cosmopolitan does not mean that you like everyone. It means you tolerate and treat others with respect despite your personal likes and dislikes.

Can you have a change in leadership without violence is the question.

> He does not expect relativity in its present form to last many decades, and hope that further work will soon go beyond it.

We have so much to learn from cybernetics, especially in the infancy of blockchain. How does one design a flourishing economy and maximize outcomes for its members?

I recommend checking out Stafford Beer's lectures on cybernetics: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-...

It’s fascinating how valuable simple diaries or letters are to history. Even something like documenting an encounter on a train (not that meeting Einstein is anything small).

They're a ton more valuable than what we think of as "historic documents". We get taught in schools that history comes in the form of direct, straightforward pronouncements -- the kind associated with big events like a revolution or major discovery.

To learn what things actually felt like, and how people actually saw the world, historians end up building up their pictures from a lot of ordinary artifacts. Writings are fantastic if you can get them, especially candid ones like letters and diary entries. They contain the tiny scraps of information about what people do every day.

Garbage dumps are similarly full of valuable information about what people ate, what they considered important, and what they owned. People think of the junk as gone so they don't filter it. It's truthful in a way that their carefully preserved valuables can never be.

The real work of historians is an enormous amount of drudgery, reading vast amounts of dull material and trying to put together a picture from that. It's not exciting, but to the people who do it, they love the vividness and connection they get.

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