That isn't necessarily Eugenics. If they think that "burger flippers" will produce inferior offspring, it's eugenics. But I suspect that if there is a low incidence of Stanford grads and "burger flippers" coupling it's due to other factors, for one thing the fact that they are two relatively small populations that likely have minimal interaction in a dating environment.
But, maybe things like this should be, you know, patched in an update to the system. It could always be better.
In my comment, it is to be understood that an exceptional individual like Einstein is worth more to the species than an average person. It is not to imply average people are worthless, but rather that exceptional people are rare and the species values them.
Evoking Einstein to defend eugenics is an... interesting choice.
We also ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're for or against, because that destroys the curious conversation this place is supposed to exist for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I suppose maybe we have a different set of definitions we are using. I do not view my stances as compatible with those of the time.
When I think of eugenics, I think of Gattaca, CRISPR, cloning, saving lives, and gene therapy.
You're entitled to your own mental states, but you're clearly not thinking the same thing that most people do when they think of "eugenics".
Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. It is only online that I encounter a sort of political extremism in opposition to the idea of leveraging what we know (of DNA) to make the world better.
I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that most experts would happily claim, even among friends, that what they're doing relates to "eugenics", which isn't just a sequence of letters that you can find in a dictionary. It's inextricably bound up with a very dark history. Consider why the Wikipedia article for eugenics isn't just a short one-sentence statement that eugenics is about increasing the occurrence of positive hereditable traits.
In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc.
On a separate note but still in response -- Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political and is outright banned in classrooms (and some countries due to the politicized nature of the content).
And that's fine for China. This may even become the norm in North America and Europe at some point in the future. But that doesn't change facts: most people speaking in English will not talk positively about the term "eugenics", which has a crap ton of baggage that you're just ignoring.
> Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political
That would be a fine point to make if I were citing Wikipedia as a source for a paper I'm writing. However, what I meant was that eugenics has a history that can't be sharply extricated from what you might believe is the literal meaning of the term. Words are more complicated than that.
Similarly, if I went on TV and proudly claimed that we should be doing eugenics, many would assume that I want to forcibly sterilize an underclass using unscientific ideas about heritability, and that I'm probably racist, too. I would have to do a lot of work to convince people that, no, all I really mean is that we should be able to do genetic testing to see if babies-to-be have the correct number of chromosomes (and so on), and decide to bring them to term based on that information.
Maybe you want to rehabilitate the term, which, OK, fine. But it's a mistake to assume that you can take the original definition of something and assume that's all the word "means" to people.
I suspect he would be disgusted at the idea of being used as an exemplar for eugenics.
well Einstein was against this idea of, you know, German pseudoscience, where they had these men going through mountains in the Middle East and measuring skulls and what have you, I do think applied genetics is a very different science.
This thread just keeps getting better. Do you... I mean... you do know why this is funny, right?
You keep evoking Einstein in contexts that would have him rolling in his grave. Imagine raising Einstein from the dead to tell him that he's the standard bearer of eugenics and a version of quantum mechanics that was not in his image. It's humorous.
You seem to know very little about science or its history but are quick to evoke scientism in defense of ideas that in actuality have very little to do with science.
Fun read and all.
Thanks for that link.
Very cool.
>>You seem to know very little about science
Einstein the person, the history of his life, etc are fully separate from contributions to science. Science is, generally, not about cults of personality, history, or any of that.
I have a great appreciation, respect, gratefulness, passion, and enthusiasm for science, progress, and advancement of the species.
One does not have to study the trivialities of how Einstein took his coffee or tea in 1938 in order to appreciate the genius and scientific contributions.
>>You
This side thread with you seems fallacious in a way, but that is okay. I respect you and think there is definitely a place in the world for people who do well in their careers and also worship their idols from history.
You know, all of that said, don't you think it would be cool and maybe beneficial to the species if cloning technologies were perfected and experiments were done where genes like those responsible for the entity you know as Einstein were cloned, given new names, new lives, and such? I wonder what would happen. It would seem such experiments are indeed coming in the future, and I do not think the historical trivialities of one's life have much to do with this scientific curiousity that many a biologist wants to explore.
This entire thread is an aside about an anecdote about how one guy's wife decided not to have kids and therefore there's a Great Replacement of the Mensa Members By The Non-Mensa Members.
Anyways.
What exactly were we talking about again?
Oh. Right. A really stupid paper.
Want to stay on topic? Reply to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
>>In 1918 he was asked by the mother of a brilliant German biology student to dissuade her son from joining the front in the First World War. Einstein complied and wrote: “Can this post of yours out there not be filled by an unimaginative average person of the type that come 12 to the dozen? Is it not more important than all that big scuffle out there that valuable people stay alive?”
>>And in 1922, Einstein told his close friend, the physicist Paul Ehrenfest, whose 4-year-old son had recently been diagnosed with Down syndrome, that he agreed with his decision to institutionalize his son rather than care for him himself, because “valuable people should not be sacrificed for causes without any prospects, not even in this case.”
Source: https://time.com/5314704/einstein-diaries-racism/
Einstein can be seen above quoted as saying things that are very similar to my own writings. Regardless, I just found this interesting today and thought you'd enjoy it.
As an aside, those quotes come from earlier in his life. It's uncertain if he held the same opinions as he grew older and matured. People's views do change over time, as we can see with Einstein's rueful feelings over the a-bomb.