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Comment by trey-jones | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'm reading this wrong, but I'm definitely reading it differently than most commenters here:

> the intelligence & character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few...

I don't think Einstein is comparing the most intelligent individuals to the least (or average) here. Certainly there are individuals who are more intelligent than the average, but I would argue not incomparably so.

I believe he's speaking about the tendency of large groups of people to act more like cattle than people. The intelligence of the mob (and the character, represented by the actions of the mob) are what I see as incomparably lower than that of an individual.

And I think this is indicated by the other shortcomings of 20th century humanity that he passes along. War isn't waged by individuals (or even groups of exclusively idiots and villains). There are a bunch of physiological and sociological variables introduced that make the output of the group stupider and less caring than the output of the individual.

View on HN

> … who produce some thing valuable for the community.

I think you are cleaning up his values. He clearly seems to be pointing to a few people who produce novel ideas and creations as opposed to the mass of people who never create much of value globally out of their lives.

And actually, this statement used to be uncontroversial. Social media and the death of journalism means that our best thinkers no longer have much of a platform. It may be easy to forget and unpopular to remember, but there are some exceptional and brilliant people out there.

> And actually, this statement used to be uncontroversial.

Indeed. The social value and inherent virtue of kings, high-priests, and robber-barons used to be beyond reproach.

True but in the context of the quote I don’t think Einstein would have viewed them as people that made valuable contributions to society. Probably would have placed them in the former category, honestly.

Einstein was a socialist, so this is likely not to whom he was referring. While undoubtedly an elitist, I’m sure he counted the leaders of industry among the dullards and buffoons. You’d honestly have to be pretty dumb yourself to put them on the same level of his peers in science, like, say, Von Neumann, even though that’s very much the order of the day in modern America.

Reading about Von Neuman is pretty crazy and shows how wide the gap is between people who are only highly intelligent and geniuses like he that made contributions to so many fields.

And which of those types would you categorize as a person who “contributes something of value to the community”?

We still have our stars.

Surely there is a list of them?

We should also consider that when our perception of things has changed, perhaps it is because the things we are seeing that changed. The average person in Einstein's day received a much inferior education to what schools offer today, and scientific progress was much more rapid. 1939 is only a few years after the end of the era of radioactive quackery, and in the thick of eugenics and "scientific" racism and sexism, while some leading scholars had begun to question this dogma. Fascists and their sympathizers controlled more than a dozen countries, many with significant popular support.

Today, the gap between scholars and the public is probably much narrower. This is certainly the case in physics, and I would think in biology and chemistry as well. I believe the only fields where the gap has significantly grown are computer science and pure mathematics, simply due to rapid progress in those fields.

> Today, the gap between scholars and the public is probably much narrower.

I would argue the opposite. Each field of study has so much more depth now that on any given topic there is more that a layperson has to learn to be on par.

Lay people do tend to be much broader generalists (at least in terms of scientific understanding) than they were in 1939 but they are further behind the specialists.

Doesn't this sub-thread conflate intelligence with knowledge?

I think I'll grant that there are more educated and competent people than there used to be.

But broadly the gap between scholars and "the public" is as massive at it's ever been. Meet a few members of "the public" socially, outside of tech or academic circles or however you usually meet people. Go to some random bar or club or whatever and make some friends. I think you'll find, like I do, that most people basically don't know anything. They can sort of do 3rd grade arithmetic, but struggle to apply it, and don't know anything else about mathematics - most people don't understand how to use negative numbers or what they're for, for instance. They don't know anything about history - they don't really know what the Renaissance was, or when the Roman Empire was, or when and where human civilization began, or anything else. They absolutely know nothing about physics - they are completely unaware of the idea that acceleration due to gravity is not dependent on mass, which I see as the starting point of teaching physics.

I think your characterization of "the public" outside of tech / academia (and I'd add medicine, finance, a few other professions) is pretty accurate in terms of academic knowledge.

Swap the places though and send someone who's held various mechanic, repair, manufacturing roles to a high end cocktail bar full of academics and let them ask questions on topics they know, and they'll be shocked (or maybe not) at how most of these academics basically don't know anything about how the nuts and bolts machinery that keeps the world running actually functions in real life, and certainly couldn't do most of the work themselves. They'd probably also come away thinking they'd rather have a random person from their dive bar in Nebraska help them for a day at work on a hard project than one of the people in the fancy bar.

Without being able to rely on these masses of the un-academic "public" to run the world they live in, the academics would largely be helpless and their knowledge useless as they starved to death as the world crumbled around them.

Specialized knowledge and training is amazing, and it allows us to advance as a civilization, but I don't think the average "academic" is much more intelligent or capable in the raw sense than the average person in "the public". Both are needed for society to function and progress. Without the academics there will be no progress, and without the public it will all break down.

Of course, there are also people who have little useful knowledge / skills / motivation either practical or academic. These people can however just as easily exist in the social / family circles of the elite, as in those of the public, so I don't think it's fair to throw them in either group for judgment.

The idea that blue collar and white collar workers are equally intelligent on average might feel good, but is easily disproven as intelligence has been shown to be highly correlated with educational attainment.

Huh I always thought acceleration due to gravity is a combination of both mass and distance. That is why gravity is so much stronger on earth than on the moon.

The force on the object is proportional to its mass. Acceleration, being (force/mass), is therefore not dependent on mass. (Ah least, for a small object being attracted to a much larger body)

Indeed it is, but the second body's mass may be neglected if it is orders of magnitude smaller than the larger body. Or at least that's how I understand it (I'm not a physicist).

I think this is a threat on its own. Education isn't everything, and may even backfire with dumb people. You know, there are people who are somewhat dumb, they figure a lot of things out, but they do know that they need a lot of help, and that they are not exactly geniuses.

But once a person's intelligence gets too low, they can't figure out anything. But, they can still learn. They don't see anything wrong with them, they think it's how the world works, people know and can do things that somebody taught them. When they see somebody figure something out, they think it's something they learned in the past, but are dumb and evil people who laugh at them for not knowing. Stupid and evil peoppe who refuse to pass on what they were taught. And they never figure out that they aren't normal, or even think that they're brilliant, because they remember more than others.

> He clearly seems to be pointing to a few people who produce novel ideas and creations as opposed to the mass of people who never create much of value globally out of their lives.

The reason why it is clear that this is not what he is doing is the rest of the text. He starts by saying that his time is rich in inventive minds. It doesn't really make sense to assert that a couple of sentences later he is arguing that the reason we have war and poverty is a lack of more inventive minds.

For context, remember this statement comes from a time when his homeland is in the grip of the Nazis and WW2 was just beginning. Why would he tell the future that there a smart people and stupid people and the problems are the fault of stupid people?

Especially given the ending I read this note with a tone of hopeful despair about our ability to overcome the emergent failings of large groups. So far I'd say he'd probably be disappointed, but we still have 4916 years to figure it out.

Yeah. At first blush, it seems like an unnecessary condemnation, but the comparison here is between those who contribute and those who do not.

I believe I fall into the latter of the two, but also know folks who fall into the former. I would say pretty bluntly that they are definitely more intelligent and have better character than I do. Probably by an order of magnitude, were it something quantifiable.

Your humility makes me question your supposedly ill character!

Wait why should social media mean less of a platform for our best thinkers? Sure social media provides not only additional platforming, but access to a far broader audience than Einstein could have possibly imagined?

Social media doesn't allow for well-reasoned discourse. 140 characters generally aren't enough to change the world. And the masses are on social media.

Twitter isn’t the breadth of social media.

Even here on HN, there's a strong bias towards shorter messages. Phones, perhaps due to on-screen keyboards, seem to encourage shorter messages than laptops and desktops.

not true

The signal is 4 orders of magnitude below the noise floor.

The dynamic range is very wide.

I think it can be both. The few who stand out do so mostly or entirely because they are separated from mass mentality. Maybe a Chicken and egg sort of thing. And then the quote about the difference between genius and insanity comes to mind.

This is the Jungian concept individuation.

Can you recommend any brilliant exceptions that come to mind? Especially in journalism.

Ed Witten is uncharacteristically brilliant and yet he (in my opinion) fell prey to the “masses” of physicists who clung to String theory despite its inability to yield results. Imo, that’s a counter example to your point. Thinking differently than other people and outside the masses doesn’t make one smart, take any non Ted Kasinski serial killer

I've read several bios on Einstein. There's nothing in any of his correspondence or opinions even remotely close to Ayn Rand's monstrosity called objectivism.

Could you also possibly be projecting your values on to Einstein?

There is a tendency to modernize or whitewash the views of heroes of the past so they pass muster today.

A generation ago we had far less reticence to categorize and rank people, for better and for worse.

I don’t know enough about Einstein to have a strong opinion here so this is a question more than rebuttal.

Does he normally write in loose metaphor or is he generally straight to the point?

Keep in mind that Einstein was a German Jew, and 1939 was after Hitler had come to power, passed all sorts of extreme anti-Jewish laws, and then started World War II. So it's a fair bet this is really about "how could so many people vote for and support Nazis?"

This is a good video for answering that question https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830fVdBYJzc

I don't know whether Einstein meant "the intelligent few are more intelligent than the masses, collectively" or "individually," but it's not fair for you to say that one reading is "loose metaphor" while the other is completely straightforward; either interpretation is sensible.

One is completely straightforward whereas the other is ambiguous. Only one interpretation is sensible without making a big assumption about the author's views.

Your “straightforward interpretation” hinges of what he means by “produce some thing valuable for the community.”

Did he mean valuable things like bread, or only extreme value like electrodynamics? Well he didn’t say “extreme value” and it’s easy to argue the character of productive members of society is above that of pickpockets so that fits.

So IMO a straightforward interpretation would be calling the great masses of humanity dumb rather than extolling the virtues of bakers.

In the lines before he mentioned flying and electric waves, so I think he means that. Bread would fall under commodities.

There is really only one way to read his message. Which is a good thing, given that it is intended to be transmitted across 5000 years.

He calls out the lack of commodities as a problem to be addressed, unlike flying and radio which are suggested to be solved problems.

“everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle” not fear of failing to create the next wonder.

Thus emphasizing the critical nature of workers. It’s easy to read as pro social safety net or event collectivist terms. But stating a problem alone doesn’t suggest a solution.

> There is really only one way to read his message.

This thread is a clear indicator that ther are multiple ways to read it. One may seem more valid than others but it's not at all unambiguous.

I'd love to know what the people in 5000 years, if there are any, project onto this. Maybe they'll refer back to this thread and fall into two major camps.

No, what this thread shows is that however clear you express something, there will always be people refusing to understand it.

Irony levels of this thread are approaching 9000.

I don’t understand why the distinction matters?

The intelligent few will produce more novel ideas, combined or individually, than the masses.

Whom by definition produce nothing (at least nothing novel).

I think the distinction is that one interpretation is arguing that "truth by committee" is usually wrong, while the other is arguing for an elitist view where some people just carry all the weight.

Technically, defining something as being true only sometimes makes it true in fact ("All bachelors are unmarried", for example), in other cases (like this one) it only causes it to appear true...but then, if one considers the theory that reality is equal to people's perception of it, it is usually a moot distinction ...but not always.

To answer your question - "yes" I definitely could be projecting my own values. Just as everyone else reading it another way could be projecting their own. We all have our biases. I do recognize that. I'm also not beholden to the language used (incomparably). To me that reinforces my interpretation, but of course often the interpreters can assign more meaning to a word than the author intended.

I'm not saying mine is the right answer, but I definitely think it is an answer.

Einsteins time period was the golden era of libertarianism and individualism were more mainstream especially during WW1, so it doesn't come to me as surprising that Einstein would write something like that. The famous books of that era have many central themes and elements of individualism from authors such as Orwell, Tolkien, Huxley.

Sure but Einstein was a socialist.

I love how to vote or rail against socialism is, in some sense, to say "Nah, Einstein don't know shit, surely I'm smarter than that man." Also don't call me "Surely"

Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist? Can a society/political movement be socialist and fascist simultaneously?

Yes it was a racial socialism as opposed to class socialism.

Einstein didn't have the 20th century as reference.

> Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist? Can a society/political movement be socialist and fascist simultaneously?

They're both high authoritarian societies. Nazis were just for murder along geographic and racial boundaries rather than class boundaries.

How would you characterize that basis of reference?

No, that is wrong. Read a history book and learn the correct answer. Your random guesses are just stupid.

You could let us know what you think is the correct answer? That's always an option, right...?

yes they can be. most of this is just who 'owns' the capital. Does the individual own it? Does the state own it? Does the state allow an individual to own it and they dictate what happens? When the argument should be about how monopiles (either state controlled or people controlled) are typically bad for everyone except the monopoly (and whoever owns it). One thing the socialists did very well was to hide the fact that fascism is a form of socialism like communism is too. If you read the nazi manifesto there are many aspects that are spot on socialist. Even the word 'nazi' is short for national socialist. The word is bandied around lot when people want to end an argument or make their opponent look bad. Without any thought what those people stood for.

I agree with your assesment 100%, People are just really simple minded and don't want to be grouped in or compared to nazis in any way share or form. Just look at all the emotional arguments presented in this thread alone by people who presumably identify presumably with more left leaning socialist values.

> Can a society/political movement be socialist and fascist simultaneously?

Sure, nothing really excludes one from the other I think. You can take all of Europe now, give them a superiority complex, and you’d have a fantastic facist socialist republic.

Not that I don't think they are in fact superior in terms of like "Yeah I'd take Euro cit over whatever I have now", but doesn't Europe already low-key believe that anyway or is that simply the American hegemony talking?

> Fascism rejects assertions that violence is inherently negative or pointless, instead viewing imperialism, political violence, and war as means to national rejuvenation.

Even though they have a long history of it, Europe still has a ways to go to get back there :P

I was referring more to the European (although maybe its more French aha) exceptionalism or superiority complex.

Cool take tho

Socialists want to pool resources to support the wider group. Fascists want uniform cultural norms throughout society. There's nothing contradictory about the two beliefs, but in our time people who subscribe to one rarely subscribe to the other.

I think my fair counterpoin to that is I never hear anything socialist sounding from modern-day Fascists (except maybe for the rich), as much as they are generally nationalists, they don't seem to have much care for their fellow countrymen...

You describe nationalism. Communism is the extreme left of socialism.

China is a communist state but wants and enforces uniform ciltural norms. The most oppressive regimes of today are communist regimes.

> Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist?

Because a fundamental principle underlying fascism is that words don’t have any inherent or collective meaning, beyond how they’re used in the moment by “the strong” to dominate “the weak.” It’s an irrational ideology.

>> Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist?

Why did East Germany call itself the "German Democratic Republic"?

To set an example for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

What is the deal with this schtick, legit? Why does NK of all hellholes call itself democratic for any other reason than the presumption that everyone is cool with their Great Leaders in perpetutity?

Because democracy is a key part of Marx/socialist thought. The whole idea is that collective ownership of capital would mean it would be democratically managed by the working class, for the interests of the working class, rather than for the interests of someone else. You can quibble about that if you want but it's a big part of socialist thought anyways. It's only in the modern period that democracy has become synonymous with the western capitalist system.

So to what extent is democracy MORE a socialist thought with regard to its respect and enforcement of socialism than is the Western Capitalism system to which its become more Modernly and Popularly associated?

Likewise why did it build a "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall" ("Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart").

Maybe they were being faschetious

The Nazi party was one of many on-the-fringe parties formed in Germany's post-WWI chaos, and it initially combined socialist and nationalist ideas. The opportunity of funding from big business lured it rightwards, and the nationalism, as it often does, turned towards racialism and antisemitism. From late 1919, Hitler was a significant player in driving that move.

It was because Hitler hated the Communist movement and wanted to set his party apart from the Communists.

The best way to capture that opposition was to get the Socialists on his side so that's what he went for by calling his party Socialist and setting them in direct opposition to the Communists.

Thanks! This makes the most sense to me

Actually Hitler objected to the socialist moniker. It was inserted into the name (to intentionally appeal to uninformed leftist workers) by the executive committee (the proposal was put forth by Rudolf Jung).

(Why Hitler?: The Genesis of the Nazi Reich, Mitcham, 1996)

> Also, why do the Nazis have "Socialist" in their moniker if they were fascist

I can't tell if you're being serious

They should have been, like, Nazifah or sumfing

What.

wat

Maybe socialist during his time meant something different than today's socialist. Imagine that.

Liberal used to mean libertarian prior to the 60s.

Einstein's time period was also one critical of fascism with one of the points of discussion from then on that was talking about how large masses of people can turn into horrible unintelligible creatures that lead to the likes of the holocaust.

> Could you also possibly be projecting your values on to Einstein?

I think this misses the forest for the trees. IMO, even if the GPs interpretation is wrong, it's still a far more interesting and insightful observation (that groups so often behave so much worse than individuals) than the alternative (some people are a lot smarter than others).

It’s ok to be wrong and insightful. It’s not ok to attribute it incorrectly.

The collective "intelligence and character of the masses" was a topic of the highest relevance back in 1939, particularly to a Jew like Einstein, while the average of its individuals less so (and of more interest to the racist ideologies he opposed). And this is not a metaphor: it is literally what is said in the note. On the contrary, it's a stretch to interpret it as a reference to the individuals in the masses instead of the masses themselves.

Let's finish the quote.

> the intelligence & character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community.

It doesn't strike me as crazy that a guy who was hanging out with Gödel and von Neumann all day [0] might think this way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Resident_schol...

People are overly charitable with Einstein because they view him as more grandfatherly and less of an asshole than most of the classic super genius types of history. That's based almost entirely on his image, which has been well sheltered, and his literal image (how he comes across in old black & white photos; oh look, golly, that's soooo cute, he has his tongue sticking out! look at that hair!).

Back in reality, Einstein likely had an ego the size of a large galaxy, like all the rest. I don't know that I've ever read about someone being similarly famous and them not having an unhealthy outsized ego. The fame always wins.

The masses are very commonly wrong about their adored historical figures though. Gandhi was exceptionally vile in his beliefs. Mother Teresa was a sadist that clearly enjoyed torturing people that had AIDS. FDR was a racist that put Japanese Americans in camps. Che was a sociopathic extreme homophobe and mass murderer. Napoleon was one of the great genocidal maniacs of history, almost on par with Hitler in the death and destruction he caused in attempted conquering. Bill Cosby, well, you know. And on it goes forever.

Perhaps you’re being a bit too uncharitable to overcompensate?

I’ve never heard of this, and the only sources I can find for the claim you made about mother Teresa make claims that the organization that mother Teresa started would refuse patients pain medication out of misguided notions. I’m curious what specifically you’re referring to here.

And as for:

> FDR was a racist that put Japanese Americans in camps

I wouldn’t go so far to say that FDR was racist for doing this. America was literally bombed and dragged into a war, and other countries were also placing civilians in internment camps. From Wikipedia:

>> Japan interned 130,000 Dutch, British, and American civilians in Asia during World War II.

Does this mean the Japanese were racist? No. This was world war, and countries were doing this as a source of leverage.

I don’t know about the rest of your examples, but I feel like you may be being a bit uncharitable in your characterization of these circumstances.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_internee

FDR was very much a racist who was going along with a plot concocted by a wealthy group of agricultural interests to dispossess Japanese-American citizens and immigrants of their farmlands, under the pretense of national security:

> Only hours after the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7. 1941, Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of California's powerful Salinas Valley Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, was dispatched to Washington to urge federal authorities to remove all individuals of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. In an interview for the May 1942 Saturday Evening Post, Anson told how he drew a frightful scenario for the War and Navy departments, the attorney general and every congressman he could get to listen to him: an invading army coming ashore in Monterey Bay and advancing into the Salinas Valley while Japanese residents blew up bridges, disrupting traffic and sabotaging local defenses.

> By the end of the war, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "farm ownership by Japanese amounted to about 30 percent of their total pre-war farm operations {and} ownership transfers to non-evacuees during and after evacuation has probably reduced these farm ownerships to less than a fourth of the total pre-war Japanese land holdings, including leaseholds . . . ." Few of the internees ever received full payment for their land.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/02/02/b...

This was further exposed in Korematsu vs. the US, where it was revealed that the Office of Naval Intelligence had prepared reports showing there was no actual threat, which they then hid from the courts when Japanese-American citizens sought redress through the justice system. Likewise, the FBI had already locked up or was monitoring anyone they thought was dangerous and had discredited all of the key justifications for internment:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/confession-error-s... https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...

Thank you for this description and links. I had no idea the agricultural powers of California so explicitly advocated for removing the Japanese Americans.

Yes, Japanese society was (and I believe remains) incredibly racist, at a level I think Americans would have some difficulty really comprehending.

The immigrants and US citizens of Japanese descent were not the ones doing the imprisoning of US soldiers, so this is entirely irrelevant? Japanese Americans were also much hated by white farmers in California for their efforts to engage in labor organizing across race lines. They created the first interracial farm-workers union with Mexican laborers:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-Mexican_Labor_Assoc...

I don't understand your question. It was suggested upthread that Japanese internment of Europeans during the war implied that racism didn't animate the policy, based on a premise that the Japanese aren't racist. But the Japanese were, at the time, luridly, profoundly racist; they were during the war racist in the mold of Nazi Germany.

> I’ve never heard of this, and the only sources I can find for the claim you made about mother Teresa make claims that the organization that mother Teresa started would refuse patients pain medication out of misguided notions. I’m curious what specifically you’re referring to here.

There's a fair bit of evidence that Mother Theresa had a religious appreciation for suffering that is presumably the basis for the 'sadist' assertion. That does seem like hyperbole but explaining the complicated ways that she or any of the referenced individuals far fall short of their reputations in an accurate and susinct way is hard.

Einstein has been hugely whitewashed, like for example they claim he wasn't racist because of a black college visit he did where did PR speak, while ignoring the nazi like statements he did in China while talking better but also somewhat subtle racism about Japan.

The claims against Mother Theresa spread particularly by Christopher Hitchens among others are false:

https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gcxpr5/saint_mo...

Thank you for the link.

Bill Cosby in the same breath as Einstein, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, FDR? Wow.

> Gandhi was exceptionally vile in his beliefs.

A man who brought independence to 400 million people with non-violent means was a vile man? A man who’s the “father of the nation” to 1.3 billion people was a vile man?

Are you making up your own history here?

Gandhi also routinely slept in bed with naked young girls to prove he was celibate.

Also: "In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." He also said black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.""

So maybe read up a little?

If we require that every historical person adhere to present sensibilities to be considered "great" then no-one will be considered "great". Societies routinely vacillate between permitting and punishing incest, rape, beatings, bigotry and theocracy, to name but a few things. It makes sense to me that we'd factor such matters out of our consideration - we cannot and should not hold an individual responsible for the mores of their time. Socrates was a misogynist and a pederast - but so was everyone else. Ben Franklin was an anti-semite - but so was everyone else. Einstein beat his wife - but so did everyone else. Lincoln was racist against blacks, even as he worked hard to give them rights - but this was far more progressive than most people of his era. We ought to grade people on a curve, not by modern standards. To do otherwise is a very foolish thing that puts us in the position eliminating any and all human virtue of the past. I can't help but guess that presentism was invented by a particularly ambitious PR intern.

> If we require that every historical person adhere to present sensibilities to be considered "great" then no-one will be considered "great"

So what? You say that like it is some huge loss! I think the correct choice is to abscond from this culture of hero worship you're advocating for and see people for their good and bad qualities, and be ready to criticize them without hesitation. Is it so important to you to put someone on a pedestal? I find that activity morally nauseating.

> we cannot and should not hold an individual responsible for the mores of their time

That's the weakest argument. "Of their time"? Last week? Last month? 1,000 years ago? You can pick whatever date you want to justify your hero worship. Personally I don't see accepting the Neuremberg defense as an ethical (or sophisticated) position, but you do you.

I personally think life is better when we admire people for doing amazing things. Such people are inspiring and are the characters in a pleasant and arguably constructive narrative. I don't advocate hero worship or putting people on pedestals. Nor do I advocate lying about their weaknesses or failings, even from a modern perspective. Two things can be true at once; vice and virtue can be present in the same person, and often are. We should accept that both vice and virtue are functions of time and place - a very modern notion. But the underlying "vibe" of your argument is that of a religious zealot convinced of the purity of your position, which I find natively abhorrent. It's the kind of position that I wouldn't even bother debating, like flat earth. I'd just walk away, as will will now do here.

So courageous of you, sir, to be catty and then run!

An argument on a public forum is not won by whoever shouts the loudest or has the most "courage". If expressed clearly enough, it suffices (and is much wiser) to explain your ideas once and let the readers decide.

So I guess I won. The person I was arguing with called me a religious flat earther and then announced he was done with the conversation, rather than allowing me to reply. Age old forum behavior: Gotta get the last word and run. Sad really. If I was such a savage troll then just don’t reply!!!

As a reader, I felt javajosh had the more persuasive argument.

Pointing out the flaws of these "great" individuals, heroes of humanity's past simply accomplishes nothing. They're long dead. They have notable accomplishments, that will be taught as history. Saying, "but he was a piece of shit according to my moral standard" doesn't really do anything except start a big argument. And that is a waste of time and energy, and a distraction from more important issues.

If your argument is "your shirt with a picture of Lincoln on it offends me - he was a racist!", then I guess you can just kick rocks or whatever.

P.S. "racist" is lately feeling really close to "communist" of the 50s as far as how effectual it is in describing a person's character. A witch hunt, in other words.

> Che was a sociopathic extreme homophobe and mass murderer

The homophobic claim is patently false. He had no involvement in Cuba's treatment of gay people, and the only quote in which he even mentions gay people is about how he was bothered when a guy he liked was beat up. The homophobia accusation is mostly just peddled as a gotcha question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5eFPgvhS60

if you want to finish the quote it should also be taken in context. the quote is an answer to the question of why people go to war and kill each other

It was a very different educational reality back then.

High school education was not at all common until the 20th century.

That means most of Einstein’s contemporaries, the masses, would have had between a 50-80% chance of a haphazard middle school level education. [0]

Contrast this with his peers in the sciences who were extremely well educated and an early generation if not the first generation of globally-connected world-class minds and there is no ambiguity about what he is saying.

[0] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf

He had to leave his home and relocate to the US, because masses of stupid people suddenly decided that Jews are root of all evils. His words reflect exactly that sentiment. Unfortunately, 80 years on, there are still masses of people upholding the same belief.

A smart man once said “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

This would’ve been quite obvious to someone fleeing Germany in the 1930’s after seeing what happens when the people are panicked and afraid and a charismatic leader says “I know whose fault this is and I can fix it!”

It’s not clear to me that there’s a meaningful distinction. If “the masses” can be manipulated into supporting and even dying for a despicable but charismatic leader, that precisely means a bunch of individuals were so manipulated.

No, I don't think that's right.

A group of people functioning with a sense of group identity behaves very very differently from what each individual member of the group may say or do on their own. Peer pressure and groupthink are powerful phenomena that can override individual character and intelligence.

"none of us is as dumb as all of us"

I was thinking "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals." (I think that's how it goes...) but this one is great too lol.

This has never made any sense to me. "People are dumb, panicky animals" because "people" is made up of "persons" who (in aggregate) dumb stuff down. The individuals in the "people" are also "dumb, panicky animals," generally speaking.

It's just speaking to the idea of pack mentality. It's ingrained in us to go with the flow because we're a social species. So, if someone else makes a mistake, it's not nearly as bad if we make a mistake as well. On the flip-side, if you're the only person around, you can't rely on anyone else and it forces you to think about things.

It's not always true of course; just a colloquialism.

imo, I think it's a bit of both.

> Further more, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.

It sounds like he's speaking to the common intervals of war during his lifetime. From 1879-1955 Einstein would have been alive for roughly 27 wars that involved the US and there's probably a multiplicative factor there for international conflicts and wars.

> This is due to the fact that the intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.

The way I read this is that people are inevitably who vote for war. It's similar to the attitude prevalent in the song "Forever Young" by Alphaville:

        Can you imagine how we won the war?
        Little fascist lady she loves you so
        Following her leader, she's getting in tune
        The music's played by the madmen

which became

        Can you imagine when this race is won
        Turn our golden faces into the sun
        Praising our leaders we're getting in tune
        The music's played by the madmen

I reason about that as juxtaposed to his comments on his contribution to the atomic bomb:

> “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger.” (1947)

From his Isaacson biography, it would appear that he does not have high regard for the mental faculties of the average person.

As far as absolute comparisons of intelligence goes, we don't yet have a way to measure it and may never have. The best we can do are relative comparisons like IQ. So he may well be spot-on in his assessment, and we should respect his point of view, because he was clearly very close to the top of the mountain in his (and every) time.

Obviously Einstein was a brilliant man but I've gotten the impression he was "2nd tier" when compared to some of his contemporaries like Poincaré and von Neumann. Confirm/deny?

I don't even understand how its possible to think this.

He revolutionized classical physics, made huge advancements in the brand new field of quantum mechanics (unwillingly at first) and made tons of very interesting philosophical works.

It could be I am way out of my depth here, but it seems to me someone like Von Neumann was certainly above Einstein. Von Neumann was an S-tier intellect, truly astonishing.

I don't know enough about Einstein to say whether or not he was also an S-tier, but I have often heard it said that someone would have figured out the stuff he is most famous for if he hadn't been there. Because others were working on similar math. And I've also read about Von Neumann just solving unsolvable things on whim, inventing new concepts whole cloth that weren't even the focus of his work, etc.

Nobody could say Einstein wasn't brilliant, but his being famous doesn't mean he was the most brilliant. For that matter, we should acknowledge that the smartest person to have ever lived might have died without ever touching a pencil, because we still use "being born in the right place" as a proxy for greatness. Should we ever meet the basics needs of everyone and to allow every mind to flourish, we might find our greats are less rare than we thought.

Thank you, this is precisely what sort of conversation I was trying to elicit. If anything, realizing that Einstein's intellect, while tremendous, is something we can wrap our heads around. He always seemed like a quality, if a bit unfocused, academic who managed to put himself in the right places at the right times and accomplished tremendous things as a result. A testament to the fact that one doesn't have to be a von Neumann level genius to affect science in earth shattering ways.

> I don't even understand how its possible to think this.

Are you intending to come across as so rude? Because I'd say this sounds like your problem. Perhaps English isn't your first language, so I'll forgive your tone.

Anyway, it seems apparent to me that an academic who struggles to land a job researching or teaching after graduation is not "top tier", but as a non-academic, perhaps I misunderstand.

Famously, the man didn't fully understand the mathematics (tensor calculus and differential geometry) required to flesh out his obviously profound ideas about general relativity, so he learned them, and then proceeded to change how we think about the universe. It's completely fascinating the drive and effort required for such a thing.

I realize the profundity of the photoelectric effect, but I've read that had Einstein not figured out relativity that Poincaré wasn't far behind. Also, Einstein commented that he felt von Neumann was the "cleverest man" that he had ever known so curious what these guys thought of Einstein? I like to imagine it rather like the tensions between impressionist musicians where Einstein is the scrappy Satie and the establishment try-hards like Ravel are smugly casting judgment on his lofty ambitions, but this may not be correct.

I maintain that I am asking a fair question about how he compared to his contemporaries.

I'm not a physicist, but this guy reinvented physics using thought experiments that were later proved to be extremely accurate.

That's just relativity, but he also did groundbreaking work on atoms and light, and he even designed an interesting new refrigeration cycle.

It's not really possible to say how much raw intellectual power goes into solving a problem (yet), so it's hard to compare giants like Poincare, von Neumann, and Einstein.

Still, Einstein's mind was clearly first-rate.

Right, his mind was first rate but in a dog-eat-dog life, so much more goes into it. I find them all very interesting characters and I'd like other people's thoughts on the narrative I've crafted of their lives and interactions.

There's vision / creativity and then there's raw compute & storage power and the ability to cross-reference. Einstein seems first rate in category #1 but 2nd rate in #2. VNeumann is maybe a decent candidate for smartest human ever, in terms of category #2.. he was a prodigy staggering adults with math/linguistic feats of strength at a point in development when Einstein was probably still stuttering. But being intuitive has it's own advantages and it takes all kinds of people to build our vast wealth of knowledge.

The thing that fascinates me about Von Neumann is his apparently "normal" personality given his savant nature. Dude liked to do earth shattering work in front of the TV and was quite a friendly, if not a bit socially awkward, person.

That's also how I would read it, and I think it's perfectly understandable why someone who was considered a Jew by the Nazis and had to flee from Germany, despite holding a prestigious university chair position and being a scientist of the highest international acclaim, would feel that way about the instincts of the masses in 1939, in the days of mass hysteria leading up to or following right up to (depending on when exactly this was written) an unjustified war of aggression against a neighboring country (even without knowing what that war would later turn into).

Considering these circumstances, I think his assessment is spot on, and the fact that we look down on this idea nowadays (judging from the fact that this is the top-voted comment at the time of writing) may be evidence of the kind of progress he was hoping for in the last paragraph.

Well said.

Our 21st century version, at least to me, is even harder to phrase... at least currently.

I thought connecting everyone, all opinions, minds, ideas... I thought it would be good. It was, at first. There were ways for the better ideas to float. Ways for ideas to cross-pollinate.

The "society" seemed like a greater intelligence, one that I got a lot from.

Now... It's worse than I could have ever imagined. It's like every person makes the whole a little meaner, dumber, weaker of heart... The whole makes the individual a little worse.

Oh yeah I unfortunately agree with you here. The ability to aggregate power around fringe ideas and bully other people into submission has truly allowed for a much less enlightened world - prime example is look how bareknuckle politics is around the world now.

The strategy that you can isolate one person from the herd with your online gang is deeply concerning for the future of reasonable discourse.

That and many other dynamics. Bullying is one. A lot is just dumbing down. Reduction to meme. Thinking by affiliation. Picking sides. Factionalism. Populism. Statements have scores. Followers. Upvotes. Retweets. Everyone is gaming some sort of algorithm.

All the problems of politics, now permeating all of society.

We think, often, how and as we speak.. as we debate. Now that the conversation, the debate has become.. what it is, I think it really does affect how and what we think. That (garbage) mode of debating is now a major mode of thinking.

It's a mess.

100%

The multiple interpretations of that passage now has me actually wondering, in how many other ways it'll be interpreted by the 6900s!

In the immortal words of Agent K

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett's version of this: "the intelligence of a group of people is the intelligence of the stupidest member of the group, divided by the number of people in the group".

In this context I agree, - I read it as him lamenting the intelligence of those who participate in, and perpetuate the conditions of the Drepression (and global economic collapse) in addition to the tendency to descend into mass violence (as he witnessed in the WWI and beginning again in Europe).

Oh no. He was definitely saying this https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE?si=EwhkQ-gju2aw97z_

> War isn't waged by individuals (or even groups of exclusively idiots and villains).

Although it is usually individuals who decide whether to start a war or not.

I think 'intelligence and character' in this context, can be interpreted as the knowledge of and ability to control world events. All of the wars are started by the 'in the know' few that have their own goals, have power, influence, access to information, etc. But the people that actually fall for the war propaganda and sign up to fight and die (or cheer it on from the sidelines) are largely entirely excluded from having any influence over the decision to start a war, and unaware of the machinations that go on behind the scenes. If we didn't have 'stupid' people willing to die for the goals of a few psychopathic parasites, I'm sure we'd have a lot few wars/conflicts.

I think how you interpret that line is related to how you interpret

> However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle

It is possible to give both an Ayn Randian interpretation.

But then: Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

I doubt Einstein would accept an invitation to Galt's Gulch.

War is waged by individuals. We call it "fighting" or "assault".

"the masses" => "masses"

It’s interesting that 10 years later he would write a defense of socialism; maybe in his mind both things could exist together (socialism and independent thought) or maybe he changed his mind…?

http://www.exponentialimprovement.com/cms/uploads/Einstein%2...

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