Oppenheimer’s conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation.
A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.
Gödel’s conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy.
Likewise. Goedel didn’t go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing ‘privilege’.
Newton and Turing’s conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality.
Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing’s homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisexual Kim Philby nearly became head of MI6!) EDIT: pg137-144 of the Ramanujan book I’ve been quoting discusses the extensive homosexuality at Cambridge and its elite, and how tolerance of homosexuality ebbed and flowed, with the close of the Victorian age being particularly intolerant.
The right conjugate for Newton, by the way, reads ‘and his heretical Christian views were discovered, he was fired from Cambridge—like his successor as Lucasian Professor—and died a martyr’.
I have to make these stories up because if you’re poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.
The problem is, we have these stories. We have Ramanujan who by his own testimony was on the verge of starvation—and if that is not poor, then you are not using the word as I understand it—and we have William Shakespeare (no aristocrat he), and we have Epicurus who was a slave. There is no censorship of poor and middle-class Einsteins. And this is exactly what we would expect when we consider what it takes to be a genius like Einstein, to be gifted in multiple ways, to be far out on multiple distributions (giving us a highly skewed distribution of accomplishment, see the Lotka curve): we would expect a handful of outliers who come from populations with low means, and otherwise our lists to be dominated by outliers from populations with higher means, without any appeal to Marxian oppression or discrimination necessary.
Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology? If being poor didn’t make it harder to become a famous mathematician given innate ability, I’m not sure “poverty” would be a coherent concept. If you’re poor, you don’t just have to be far out on multiple distributions, you also have to be at the mean or above in several more (health, willpower, various kinds of luck). Ramanujan barely made it over the finish line before dying of malnutrition.
Even if the mean mathematical ability in Indians were innately low (I’m quite skeptical there), that would itself imply a context containing more censoring factors for any potential Einsteins...to become a mathematician, you have to, at minimum, be aware that higher math exists, that you’re unusually good at it by world standards, and being a mathematician at that level is a viable way to support your family.
On your specific objections to my conjugates...I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don’t start from a privileged position. Hardly a gross exaggeration. Goedel didn’t become clinically paranoid until later, but he was always the sort of person who would thoughtlessly insult an important gatekeeper’s government, which is part of what I was getting at; Ramanujan was more politic than your average mathematician. I actually was thinking of making Newton’s conjugate be into Hindu mysticism instead of Christian but that seemed too elaborate.
Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology?
I’m perfectly happy to accept the existence of oppression, but I see no need to make up ways in which the oppression might be even more awful than one had previously thought. Isn’t it enough that peasants live shorter lives, are deprived of stuff, can be abused by the wealthy, etc? Why do we need to make up additional ways in which they might be opppressed? Gould comes off here as engaging in a horns effect: not only is oppression bad in the obvious concrete well-verified ways, it’s the Worst Thing In The World and so it’s also oppressing Einsteins!
If being poor didn’t make it harder to become a famous mathematician given innate ability, I’m not sure “poverty” would be a coherent concept.
Not what Gould hyperbolically claimed. He didn’t say that ‘at the margin, there may be someone who was slightly better than your average mathematician but who failed to get tenure thanks to some lingering disadvantages from his childhood’. He claimed that there were outright historic geniuses laboring in the fields. I regard this as completely ludicrous due both to the effects of poverty & oppression on means & tails and due to the pretty effective meritocratic mechanisms in even a backwater like India.
Even if the mean mathematical ability in Indians were innately low (I’m quite skeptical there)
It absolutely is. Don’t confuse the fact that there are quite a few brilliant Indians in absolute numbers with a statement about the mean—with a population of ~1.3 billion people, that’s just proving the point.
to become a mathematician, you have to, at minimum, be aware that higher math exists, that you’re unusually good at it by world standards, and being a mathematician at that level is a viable way to support your family.
The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.
I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don’t start from a privileged position.
Really? Then I’m sure you could name three examples.
Goedel didn’t become clinically paranoid until later, but he was always the sort of person who would thoughtlessly insult an important gatekeeper’s government, which is part of what I was getting at
Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn’t have brought up insanity.
Ramanujan was more politic than your average mathematician.
Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?
the effects of poverty & oppression on means & tails
Wait, what are you saying here? That there aren’t any Einsteins in sweatshops in part because their innate mathematical ability got stunted by malnutrition and lack of education? That seems like basically conceding the point, unless we’re arguing about whether there should be a program to give a battery of genius tests to every poor adult in India.
The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.
Not all of them, I don’t think. And then you have to have a talent that manifests early, have someone in your community who knows that a kid with a talent for arithmetic might have a talent for higher math, knows that a talent for higher math can lead to a way to support your family, expects that you’ll be given a chance to prove yourself, gives a shit, has a way of getting you tested...
I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don’t start from a privileged position.
Really? Then I’m sure you could name three examples.
Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn’t have brought up insanity.
I was trying to elegantly combine the Incident with the Debilitating Paranoia and the Incident with the Telling The Citizenship Judge That Nazis Could Easily Take Over The United States. Clearly didn’t completely come across.
Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?
He was politic enough to overcome Vast Cultural Differences enough to get somewhat integrated into an insular community. I hang out with mathematicians a lot; my stereotype of them is that they tend not to be good at that.
He claimed that there were outright historic geniuses laboring in the fields.
And this part seems entirely plausible. American slaves had no opportunity to become famous mathematicians unless they escaped, or chanced to have an implausibly benevolent Dumbledore of an owner.
Gould makes a much stronger claim, and I attach little probability to the part about the present day. But even there, you’re ignoring one or two good points about the actions of famous mathematicians. Demanding citations for ‘trying to kill people can ruin your life’ seems frankly bizarre.
Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology?
The specific oppressions you led off with: yes.
I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas)
I thought we were talking about Oppenheimer and Cambridge? It looks like if Oppenheimer hadn’t had rich parents who lobbied on his behalf, he might have gotten probation instead of not. Given his instability, that might have pushed him into a self-destructive spiral, or maybe he just would have progressed a little slower through the system. So, yes, jumping from “the university is unhappy” to “the state hangs you” is a gross exaggeration. (Universities are used to graduate students being under a ton of stress, and so do cut them slack; the response to Oppenheimer of “we think you need to go on vacation, for everyone’s safety” was ‘normal’.)
“Oppenheimer wasn’t privileged, he was only treated slightly better than the average Cambridge student.”
I’m sorry, I never really rigorously defined the counter-factuals we were playing with, but the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn’t sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.
the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn’t sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.
I don’t see the relevance, because to me “Einsteins in sweatshops” means “Einsteins that don’t make it to ”, for some Cambridge equivalent. If Ramanujan had died three years earlier, and thus not completed his PhD, he would still be in the history books. I mean, take Galois as an example: repeatedly imprisoned for political radicalism under a monarchy, and dies in a duel at age 20. Certainly someone ruined by circumstances—and yet we still know about him and his mathematical work.
In general, these counterfactuals are useful for exhibiting your theory but not proving your theory. Either we have the same background assumptions- and so the counterfactuals look reasonable to both of us- or we disagree on background assumptions, and the counterfactual is only weakly useful at identifying where the disagreement is.
I don’t think Epicurus was a slave. He did admit slaves to his school though, which is not something that was typical for his time. Perhaps you are referring to the Stoic, Epictetus, who definitely was a slave (although, white-collar).
Whups, you’re right. Some of the Greek philosophers’ names are so easy to confuse (I still confuse Xenophanes and Xenophon). Well, Epictetus was still important, if not as important as Epicurus.
A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.
Likewise. Goedel didn’t go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing ‘privilege’.
Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing’s homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisexual Kim Philby nearly became head of MI6!) EDIT: pg137-144 of the Ramanujan book I’ve been quoting discusses the extensive homosexuality at Cambridge and its elite, and how tolerance of homosexuality ebbed and flowed, with the close of the Victorian age being particularly intolerant.
The right conjugate for Newton, by the way, reads ‘and his heretical Christian views were discovered, he was fired from Cambridge—like his successor as Lucasian Professor—and died a martyr’.
The problem is, we have these stories. We have Ramanujan who by his own testimony was on the verge of starvation—and if that is not poor, then you are not using the word as I understand it—and we have William Shakespeare (no aristocrat he), and we have Epicurus who was a slave. There is no censorship of poor and middle-class Einsteins. And this is exactly what we would expect when we consider what it takes to be a genius like Einstein, to be gifted in multiple ways, to be far out on multiple distributions (giving us a highly skewed distribution of accomplishment, see the Lotka curve): we would expect a handful of outliers who come from populations with low means, and otherwise our lists to be dominated by outliers from populations with higher means, without any appeal to Marxian oppression or discrimination necessary.
Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology? If being poor didn’t make it harder to become a famous mathematician given innate ability, I’m not sure “poverty” would be a coherent concept. If you’re poor, you don’t just have to be far out on multiple distributions, you also have to be at the mean or above in several more (health, willpower, various kinds of luck). Ramanujan barely made it over the finish line before dying of malnutrition.
Even if the mean mathematical ability in Indians were innately low (I’m quite skeptical there), that would itself imply a context containing more censoring factors for any potential Einsteins...to become a mathematician, you have to, at minimum, be aware that higher math exists, that you’re unusually good at it by world standards, and being a mathematician at that level is a viable way to support your family.
On your specific objections to my conjugates...I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don’t start from a privileged position. Hardly a gross exaggeration. Goedel didn’t become clinically paranoid until later, but he was always the sort of person who would thoughtlessly insult an important gatekeeper’s government, which is part of what I was getting at; Ramanujan was more politic than your average mathematician. I actually was thinking of making Newton’s conjugate be into Hindu mysticism instead of Christian but that seemed too elaborate.
I’m perfectly happy to accept the existence of oppression, but I see no need to make up ways in which the oppression might be even more awful than one had previously thought. Isn’t it enough that peasants live shorter lives, are deprived of stuff, can be abused by the wealthy, etc? Why do we need to make up additional ways in which they might be opppressed? Gould comes off here as engaging in a horns effect: not only is oppression bad in the obvious concrete well-verified ways, it’s the Worst Thing In The World and so it’s also oppressing Einsteins!
Not what Gould hyperbolically claimed. He didn’t say that ‘at the margin, there may be someone who was slightly better than your average mathematician but who failed to get tenure thanks to some lingering disadvantages from his childhood’. He claimed that there were outright historic geniuses laboring in the fields. I regard this as completely ludicrous due both to the effects of poverty & oppression on means & tails and due to the pretty effective meritocratic mechanisms in even a backwater like India.
It absolutely is. Don’t confuse the fact that there are quite a few brilliant Indians in absolute numbers with a statement about the mean—with a population of ~1.3 billion people, that’s just proving the point.
The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.
Really? Then I’m sure you could name three examples.
Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn’t have brought up insanity.
Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?
Wait, what are you saying here? That there aren’t any Einsteins in sweatshops in part because their innate mathematical ability got stunted by malnutrition and lack of education? That seems like basically conceding the point, unless we’re arguing about whether there should be a program to give a battery of genius tests to every poor adult in India.
Not all of them, I don’t think. And then you have to have a talent that manifests early, have someone in your community who knows that a kid with a talent for arithmetic might have a talent for higher math, knows that a talent for higher math can lead to a way to support your family, expects that you’ll be given a chance to prove yourself, gives a shit, has a way of getting you tested...
Just going off Google, here: People being incarcerated for unsuccessful attempts to poison someone: http://digitaljournal.com/article/346684 http://charlotte.news14.com/content/headlines/628564/teen-arrested-for-trying-to-poison-mother-s-coffee/ http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=85968
Person being killed for suspected unsuccessful attempt to poison someone: http://zeenews.india.com/news/bihar/man-lynched-for-trying-to-poison-hand-pump_869197.html
I was trying to elegantly combine the Incident with the Debilitating Paranoia and the Incident with the Telling The Citizenship Judge That Nazis Could Easily Take Over The United States. Clearly didn’t completely come across.
He was politic enough to overcome Vast Cultural Differences enough to get somewhat integrated into an insular community. I hang out with mathematicians a lot; my stereotype of them is that they tend not to be good at that.
And this part seems entirely plausible. American slaves had no opportunity to become famous mathematicians unless they escaped, or chanced to have an implausibly benevolent Dumbledore of an owner.
Gould makes a much stronger claim, and I attach little probability to the part about the present day. But even there, you’re ignoring one or two good points about the actions of famous mathematicians. Demanding citations for ‘trying to kill people can ruin your life’ seems frankly bizarre.
The specific oppressions you led off with: yes.
I thought we were talking about Oppenheimer and Cambridge? It looks like if Oppenheimer hadn’t had rich parents who lobbied on his behalf, he might have gotten probation instead of not. Given his instability, that might have pushed him into a self-destructive spiral, or maybe he just would have progressed a little slower through the system. So, yes, jumping from “the university is unhappy” to “the state hangs you” is a gross exaggeration. (Universities are used to graduate students being under a ton of stress, and so do cut them slack; the response to Oppenheimer of “we think you need to go on vacation, for everyone’s safety” was ‘normal’.)
I’m sorry, I never really rigorously defined the counter-factuals we were playing with, but the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn’t sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.
I don’t see the relevance, because to me “Einsteins in sweatshops” means “Einsteins that don’t make it to ”, for some Cambridge equivalent. If Ramanujan had died three years earlier, and thus not completed his PhD, he would still be in the history books. I mean, take Galois as an example: repeatedly imprisoned for political radicalism under a monarchy, and dies in a duel at age 20. Certainly someone ruined by circumstances—and yet we still know about him and his mathematical work.
In general, these counterfactuals are useful for exhibiting your theory but not proving your theory. Either we have the same background assumptions- and so the counterfactuals look reasonable to both of us- or we disagree on background assumptions, and the counterfactual is only weakly useful at identifying where the disagreement is.
I don’t think Epicurus was a slave. He did admit slaves to his school though, which is not something that was typical for his time. Perhaps you are referring to the Stoic, Epictetus, who definitely was a slave (although, white-collar).
Whups, you’re right. Some of the Greek philosophers’ names are so easy to confuse (I still confuse Xenophanes and Xenophon). Well, Epictetus was still important, if not as important as Epicurus.