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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

That said, one should be interested in the weights and convolutions of Einstein's brain, instead of ignoring them for the sake of virtue-signalling about the people in the cotton fields and sweatshops, to the extent that said convolutions may well be in fact the very thing that could have lifted people of equal talent from the very cotton fields and sweatshops they lived and died in instead.

In other words, that quote has a very real "think of the children" vibe to it, and we all know how often that is used in earnest.

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I think that if we lifted billions of people out of childhood poverty and they had access to quality food, healthcare, and education starting at a young age, we would have 100x more people producing top-tier scientific output.

So no, I don't think it's absurd to really care much more about the people in cotton fields and sweatshops, even if all you really care about is scientific output.

They didn't lift Einstein out of cotton fields and sweatshops. If one is interested in the contribution of weights and convolutions of brains to being lifted out of cotton fields and sweatshops, one should measure the brains of people who lifted themselves out of cotton fields and sweatshops, not someone who didn't.

Too many people have been told "you're extremely talented and will go far", who didn't, for sociological reasons, such as lack of support, because they were assumed to not need it by the "adults" in the room. Where other people, lacking support, went far because of other talents that were adaptive to their sociological situation.

The point isn't to 'think of the children' but that the only way to address these injustices is to do literally that, there is no way around ethics by way of intellect or dwelling on abstract issues. Some of the worst camps humans have been shoved in have been during modernity, using modern tools conceived of by people with very big brains.

People who have no interest in the ordinary suffering around them are much more likely to add to it. Or going with Rousseau:

"Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”

I love that the narrative surrounding neuroscience has been so poisoned by AI bullshit that we're talking about weights and convolutions like those are things that actually exist in brains.

I think the "weight" here is weight as in mass and "convolutions" here is as in folds. The size/weight and folds of Einstein's brain have been the subject of studies, and the quote was from 1980.

Maybe I'm the one who is poisoned

It was not Einstein like brain that ended slavery. And it was not kind of people that complain about 'virtue signaling' either. The latter were just obstacle anyway.

Einstein was smart, did awful lot for physics, even did some active virtue signing moves toward racial equality.

But, his kind of brain had presidly zero with solving issues in question, no matter how much distasteful you find people who talk about those issues.

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