Jayson_Virissimo comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Vaniver 02 August 2013 08:59PM

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Comment author: gwern 11 August 2013 04:54:13PM *  11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 11 August 2013 05:50:39PM *  6 points [-]

...and we have Epicurus who was a slave.

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).

Comment author: gwern 12 August 2013 03:14:40PM 5 points [-]

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.