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jhuffman comments on Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation - Less Wrong
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Does he know that Einstein's letter was not mailed? Alexander Sachs was given the letter, setup a personal audience with the President and read it to him.
There are other instances where I am less certain he is wrong but this idea that our present culture is so much worse for scientific research than our culture in the earlier part of the century seems weakly supported to me.
Yes. To strengthen the point:
After Roosevelt got the Einstein letter, very little happened. The White House did not actually jump into action or start spending money. The thing was referred to a committee that moved very lethargically. Progress only picked up several years later, once the British, independently, had figured out that a bomb was practical, and had started making noise about it.
That's interesting, but I didn't know that. In any case, that detail doesn't matter because he was obviously being rhetorical - there are no studies showing the White House mail room has unusually high loss-rates. :)
It was rhetorical but he was still wrong - he seems to think science was taken more seriously at that time. It wasn't. Asr already pointed this out - but to add to it even before the "do nothing commission" was started the scientists wrote another letter to the President because he had taken no action on it at all after several months. Then he appointed a commission to do nothing for a good while longer. Then the bureaucracy got started on the org charts and Powerpoints. Er...you get the idea.
Einstein's world changing paper, "The electrodynamics of moving bodies" would not be publishable today. He was not an academic, his paper lacked citations, and so on and so forth.
In June of 1905, when he submitted "The electrodynamics of moving bodies", he had a PhD in physics and had already published several papers in the same journal. He didn't hold a university post, but he very much a member in good standing of the physics community. I don't see why somebody in an analogous post today would have trouble publishing papers.
The lack of citations is interesting, but I think you're reading too much into it. It shows that scientific publication norms have changed since 1905, but it's not as though Einstein would have been unable to add the appropriate references if the journal had expected it. You might equally well say "the paper couldn't be published today because it's in German, not English".
[See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Academic_career ]