https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
I think it is remarkable that a racist argument against a description of nature could even gain a foothold in the physics community. Fortunately, people like Planck and Heisenberg could see the insanity of it all.
And, Germany was a cornerstone in physics in the late XIX and early XX centuries.
This shows a bad aspect of humans in the quest for truth. If many scientists are involved in nationalism, antisemitism, etc what can we expect of less rational people? Not saying that we need to be completely rational though but it is interesting when bad emotions beat rationality in smart people as a topic itself.
Developed more thoroughly into a theory e.g. by Thomas Kuhn, see his book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Some broadly similar ideas in the philosophy or science were also explored by Feyerabend in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
The trolley problem adjacent research has shown (if inconclusively) that more rational people are more likely to be OK being a cause of harm to other people to achieve some goal. In those experiments such goal is usually “save more people”, but all you need is to define some terms and “kill some now” might seem imperative to “save more later” to a sufficiently rational, long-term-thinking, “smart” person.
So the Nazi did, and there is much less conjecture here since it’s mostly well-documented. They were specifically inspired by natural sciences, including the then-new Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If anything, their shtick might’ve been to overcome the “bad” (for the Nazi) emotions that one may experience when sending some disabled person or a Jew to death. Which, according to them, had to be done since they were detrimental to survival of humanity (as Nazis defined it, of course) by polluting its genetic pool—so they were taught to train themselves to treat Jews as non-human bedbugs, stripped Jews of citizenship, disciplined fellow Germans who dared to shake hands with a Jew, etc. To Nazis emotions were a hindrance, they included the “irrational” compassion, and we might be better off remembering that when we discuss rationality, which consequentialism tends to go hand in hand with.
Addendum: An obvious argument can be made that Nazis were “not rational enough”, i.e. the problem is not with rationality per se but only with rationality based on premises that we now know are wrong. That, however, shows nothing because if we’ve learned anything it should be not to assume that now we have finally got all of our premises in order and possess absolute truth and complete understanding of reality.
Have a look at Rosenbergs influental writings for instance. Or well, "Mein Kampf". It is not a rational, but very emotional work. All of their ideology starts with mysticism around nationalism. Finding greatness while giving yourself up to the higher rightful order. The Volk, connected by blood.*
All "rationality" was applied after that premise.
*The right blood of course. Investigated, determined and mandated by buerocrats with pseudoscientific methods.
However, to say it was all just emotion and post-rationalization is to oversimplify even more. The two were intermingled even since 19th century (e.g., Lamarck).
Sure. I remember from Mein Kampf, where Hitler talks about his Antisemitism. His Intuition always advised against it, but with his rational mind, step by step he came to the logical conclusion, that yes, the jews are basically to blame for everything. (Interesting that he remarks, that his intuition left him for some years, after he made that "rational" decision)
It was twisted all around.
Most of the book is about economics and rational behavior in terms of utility, but that part seems to apply here as well.
Logical coherence is always internal, it can only be complete within itself and will inevitably conflict with external reality and other internally coherent beliefs. It’s possible for a Nazi to be extremely rational in this way, whereas a reasonable person cannot be entirely rational by definition.
Well, scientists disagree with you [1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-think-...
And that agrees with what I said?
This framing is interesting considering how HN is such an IQ-worshipping forum: The context is the most pig-headed, blatant racism imaginable—doesn’t even try to rationalize it, just “Jewish Physics”—and then we pivot to how these exalted rational people (translation: physics-smart specifically) must clearly be more rational than “less rational people” (average people?) and in turn how racist they (less rational people) must be. So we went from blatant racism exhibited by physicists to inferring how these scientists must be leagues better than “less rational people” in terms of racial tolerance or rationality with regards to race (if race is even a thing).
Except the only thing we have in front of us is racism expressed by physicists. Not commoner racism.
So what grounds do we have to expect “less rational people” to be more or less racist than these exalted scientists? Absolutely nothing.
Imagine if a gaggle of biologists in Antarctica committed mass murder of another group of scientists and smeared their blood in some Satanic ritual. I bet the conclusion would be to speculate about how less rational people would be even more inhumane and cruel if they had to live through an Antarctic winter or two? Absolutely bonkers.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-t...
The Germnans were suspicious of Enigma security given Polish cryptanalysts had an attack in the late(?) 1920s and further attacks in the 1930s.
The German High Command used Lorenz for significant traffic .. this was cracked by the Britsh, by Bill Tutte and others, in house at Bletchley during WWII.
Instead if would have delayed D-day and other operations by a year or more but the benefit is arguably on the side of Germany because both the Soviet Union (making Germany "pay") and the US (first use of the atomic bomb there?) had more sinister intentions.
https://www.historynet.com/what-if-the-allies-had-not-broken...
The failure of Enigma also caused Rommel to lose the Afrika campaign. The Allies knew when and where his supply ships were coming, and sank them one after the other. Rommel knew that these losses were only explainable by espionage, but believed the Allied disinformation and misdirection as to the cause.
Still, in my understanding this doesn't seem to make a German victory more likely in retrospect because it wouldn't have sufficiently impacted the campaign in the East.
At best I see more fuel, stronger Italy, and weaker GB in it.
I can easily see certain theories being denounced today because they are "too white". Maybe not in physics - not yet - but I imagine this is already a debate in the social sciences.
Of course, it is true that science is a part of culture and society, and that the world is interpreted though the lens of both. Yes, culture can distort, but it is also a medium of truth. And reason is able to make these determinations in principle.
it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR)
the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle
pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent
In any case they didn't remove it because of the murder.
Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.
However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?
It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.
It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.
It was like WinFS in Microsoft land. The filesystem would be the database etc.
(By the way never put an image of a reiser filesystem on a mounted reiser disk and then run fsck. Goodbye, all files.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11sv7gc/linux_kernel...