Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

I don't like this article's groundless speculation about Albert Einstein, who is used as an unwilling poster child for dozens of causes without support in Einstein's actual biography. I have carefully read Einstein's longest autobiographical writing, and cite it on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

and while it is indisputable that Einstein blew off some of his school homework, it is not at all clear that he would meet any of the DSM-IV or new DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for any of the conditions claimed for him.

More generally, there is a better call for improvement of psychological diagnosis

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

already up on the website of the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States, the subject of much news reporting and commentary in the last week. So I won't take this opinion piece by lone blogger as the last word on what needs to be done to improve psychological diagnosis.

Yeah, the Einstein reference triggered my bullshit filter too. If the best evidence you can cite for Einstein being pathologically anti-authoritarian is a dislike of Prussian discipline, failing exams he was pushed into taking early and a patchy graduate employment record, you've haven't distinguished his behaviour from millions of present-day Americans who manage to be stroppy teenagers and underemployed young adults without attracting the attention of mental health professionals.

I'd much rather hear anonymised examples of alleged misdiagnosis (I'm sure they do exist) but the author is surprisingly reticent on that front. He even observes that his patients previously diagnosed with various psychoses had "fully recovered" whilst retaining their anti-authoritarian streak: implicitly acknowledging they probably did have a problem and that losing an anti-authoritarian streak wasn't a prerequisite to recovery.

I'm pretty receptive to arguments that certain disorders are overdiagnosed but the article has surprisingly little to say about that.

I read two Einstein's biographies and I have come to the conclusion that if he was born today he would probably be a college drop out. Some people say that geniuses always survives life hardships, but the fact that there are no new Einsteins (or Maxwells, Plancks...) seems to show this isn't true.

> Some people say that geniuses always survives life hardships, but the fact that there are no new Einsteins (or Maxwells, Plancks...) seems to show this isn't true.

No new Einsteins, Maxwells, and Plancks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys...

A Nobel doth not a genius make.

But a Nobel is granted to a genius already made.

Not necessarily. Robert Lucas, for instance.

Every year someone will win the Nobel prize and that doesn't mean they are great like most of the early winners. And I'm not the only one who thinks like that. I remember Freeman Dyson saying something like that in article.

"I have come to the conclusion that if he was born today he would probably be a college drop out."

And without mentors, his gift to the world then might have been squandered.

There was a Feynman, but not much since then.

Yeah. I've never heard of Feynman or Hawking or anyone either.

I'm pretty sure both of them are anti-authoritarian.

Einstein was lucky as well as smart. He was a curious kid while the cracks in the foundations that Newton laid were growing too wide to ignore; he graduated just as the whole structure collapsed. The things he and his contemporaries built in its place still stand, and they didn't leave room to build beside them. By mid century, not even Einstein could do what Einstein did.

Look at how fast and wide the field of physics has grown in the past 70 years. The proliferation of new theories, discoveries, inventions, and solutions, across such vast practical and theoretical disciplines in physics, almost makes me think the "Einsteins" of our generation are not individuals, but groups of people working together. With the ability to share data quickly and effectively, we have become able to have multiple persons working on the same problems at the same time, which has allowed us to accomplish some unbelievable things. We've built particle detectors to observe elementary particles that are fundamental to the Standard Model. We've discovered carbon nanotubes and graphene. We've potentially discovered dark matter. We have our geniuses too, and some are famous (e.g., Hawking), but maybe they are not as famous as their predecessors because their contributions seem to blend with the overall march of science and our expectation of radical advance (jetpacks and all)?

The nice thing about dead people is that they rarely object to how they are used.

I think your summation of this article is way off.

First - It was written by a lone PHd over a year before the NIMH blog post (which was written by a lone MD).

Second - I don't think this author was presenting his article as "the last word".

Lastly - The speculation on Einstein is grounded in comments by one of Einstein's biographers. I wouldn't call that groundless.

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