The quotable Einstein

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1. davidbessisNov 2024
   Dear cutemonster,

   I know this reply may not suffice to convince you, but unfortunately I won't be able to argue forever.

   Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble?

   FYI, the concept of innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia. Two of the authors I'm citing in my book (Descartes and Grothendieck) believed that innate talent existed and they both declared they would have loved to be naturally gifted like these or these people they knew.

   You're declaring that these incredibly smart people were wrong about their own domains, which is a pretty bold claim to make. What do you have in support of this claim? A fake Einstein quote?

   It's a sad fact of life that most quotes attributed to Einstein are fabricated. Next time, please check "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein", compiled by Alice Calaprice.

   This may come as a shock to you, but Google page 1 isn't always a reliable resource. Nor is Wikipedia, even though it's quite often correct. As it happens, there's a pretty large "Heritability of IQ" bubble on the internet. It's active and vocal, but it's also quite weak scientifically — the page you're citing is a typical symptom, and it absolutely doesn't reflect the current scientific knowledge.

   The IQ heritability claims that you're citing are based on twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS.

   It's true that a number of people have been fooled by twin studies, most notably Steven Pinker, in Chapter 19 of the Blank Slate (did you read it?)

   You see, Pinker is a linguist and apparently he isn't mathematically equipped to fully comprehend the intrinsic limitations of Bouchard's approach. Did you read Bouchard's 1990 paper on twins reared apart? Do you find it convincing? Are you aware that even The Bell Curve's Charles Murray thinks that this approach, abundantly cited by Pinker, is structurally flawed? Are you aware of the fundamental instability of IQ estimates based on twins reared together? Aren't you concerned that even a mild violation of Equal Environment Assumption, plugged into Falconer's equation, would drastically reduce the estimates?

   If you don't understand what I'm talking about, if you've never read the authors and the primary research I'm citing, then it's quite likely that you're the one living in a social media bubble.

   If you're interesting in learning more about the actual science of IQ heritability, I recommend using Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/comments-on-no-intel...

   Feel free to also subscribe to my own Substack, where I plan to cover these topics in the coming months: https://davidbessis.substack.com

   All the best, David.

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2. thaumaturgySep 2012
   Er, no, you cannot, by definition.

   Einstein is a popular example cited by both sides because he's become the very caricature of a scientist, and because he said things which satisfies many religious views.

   I own a copy of The Quotable Einstein, and that book has several nice qualities: it is short (and easy to browse); it is organized by subject; and within each subject, the quotes are organized chronologically.

   So it is easy for me to see that Einstein's views on God and religion changed throughout his life, and as he became older, he left his belief in a personal God and moved towards a belief system where "God" merely referred to the intrinsic beauty of what Einstein saw as the laws that govern the universe.

   For example, in 1915: "Why do you write to me, 'God should punish the English'? I have no close connection to either one or the other. I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him." (In a letter to Edgar Meyer, a Swiss colleague. Note that here Einstein is not actually claiming a lack of belief in such a deity -- yet.)

   In 1930: "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual who survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts." (From "What I believe".)

   In 1952: "My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as 'laws of nature'."

   In 1953: "To assume the existence of an unperceivable being ... does not facilitate understanding the orderliness we find in the perceivable world."

   In 1955: "I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."

   People who say that Einstein "believed in God" should read more of what he wrote. :-)

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