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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.

The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.

Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?

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Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong.

Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.

>an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery

I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.

Arguably it is worse.

Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.

Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.

Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.

>Einstein

>diminished contributions in later part of his life

Whew, that's a wild one.

What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen?

I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.

In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.

It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?

> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life

There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.

What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F

I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing.

I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]

I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.

[1] still got downvoted smh

How do you define socialism? I see ppl throw around this term without ever defining it. They probably mean a soviet style central government , which of course is terrible.

Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.

Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.

Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.

The article explains what Einstein meant by socialism:

"Einstein concludes that these problems can only be corrected with a planned economy where the means of production are owned by society itself"

It seems clear he understood it was a tricky problem, and writing at the time many of the potential problems were not apparent:

"Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"

Yeah, I wasn't aware of that writing but I read the Wikipedia article and what it describes seems spot on to me.

I have decades of experience as an unaccomplished nobody and I concur.

Sounds pretty similar to the program of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim with respect to generic diseases common in Jewish populations like Tay-Sachs.

Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.

Is not being allowed to have children with close relatives also eugenics?

They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will.

Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive.

> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits

I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.

This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem.

Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.

I don't think it's a chicken or egg problem. We still have the non-functional form of the gene for synthesizing vitamin C in our genomes. It's been identified, and the mutation which knocked out it's functionality is known. This was a single event. If the primate who had this variant didn't already have a diet high in vitamin C, it wouldn't have survived. And since their diet was high in vitamin C, they obviously had the sensory apparatus necessary for detecting the food sources

> racist things about Irish people

It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share.

See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.

It didn't come off as self-deprecating at all, although I see that he had a grandmother from Ireland (unclear if she was ethnically Irish or English)

How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?

It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.

I'm surprised he identified as such. Dude is from Chicago but talks like someone from England.

>> Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people

Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?

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