Einstein's travel diaries reveal attitudes towards people he met in Asia

After your death all of your life's browser history, every facebook/youtube/reddit/HN/myspace/etc comment and submission you ever wrote, every photo you ever took, every off-hand remark you ever made in the presence of a smartphone with facebook installed .. will be published for all of the world to read and judge.

Better get that road rage under wraps!

Why is it so "shocking"? Discussing racial differences was more common in his time, and being a great scientist does not necessarily coincide with general wisdom.

I hope this story will help people realize that we should not ban the work of people who have said problematic things.

I don't see what the big deal is ... everyone thinks stuff like this in their head, and it's a personal diary. Only recently do we live in a globalized & diverse economy which makes it less polite to say stuff like this. It is a big stretch to equate lack of politeness with racism.

Without taking any sides in this particular case, i highly recommend everyone read Intellectuals and Race[1] by Thomas Sowell. It is a concise, well researched, and largely damning look at how the same intellectual class that is leading the charge of globalized western morality (particularly in regards to enforced diversity, ethnic erasure, race based policies, and identity/victimhood politics) is cut from the very same cloth of their predecessors in the early 20th century (the Progressives) who championed Social Darwinism, racial segregation, and eugenics. He draws many parallels between the two groups, including but not limited to the perceived unanimity of thought amongst the "greatest, leading minds," the utter incomprehensibility by the status quo to even consider dissenting ideas, the ostensible moral superiority, and the faith based reliance upon unproven assertions. It is a brief and powerful read. Regardless of one's politics, Sowell forces the reader to honestly confront preconceived notions not with emotional exhortation, but rather hard facts and verifiable data.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Race-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0...

I think if Einstein were alive today he would see his words and repent to them. Especially in light of other things he has said like: "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.". Though this had nothing to do with race he understood something in those times that many others didn't in regards to human nature.

These comments, particularly those about toilet habits don't really look too different from the comments I was reading 5 years about about the behaviour of Chinese tourists, so I'm not sure what to think about this.

If you took a contemporary Chinese sophisticate and transported him or her back to 1920s China, what would his or her comments be like?

This is one of those examples of holding a man born in the 19th century to the standards of the 21st. I'm pretty sure lots of the things we think, say, and do will be seen as very problematic in the 22nd century.

This is more click-bait journalism; I'm not sure why Einstein should be singled out for sharing the same beliefs as others in the society in which he was raised. "Europeans in 1922 were Xenophobic" is not worthy of an editorial.

The writer claims that Xenophobia was not Universal, and therefore this is interesting. No view is universal; there are people alive today who believe the earth is flat, although they are a minority. In 1922 Europe, only a very small minority of people would not have been Xenophobic.

I think people in those days had a very exaggerated idea of the scale of genetic differences between people of different ethic groups. Nowadays we know such differences are a rounding error and that looking at differences in genomes between individuals, those attributable to ethnicity are generally a minority. Back then, this wasn't known.

EDIT - I had a bit of a laugh at the quote about the Chinese supplanting other races. I'm a WASP, but my wife is Chinese and our kids are pretty obviously half Chinese.

It strikes me as odd that anytime a person references a characteristic of some people from some particular country, it is generalized into racism against all people who even vaguely look like them so long as the people in question are not white.

If one says "the French are cowards", no one takes it to mean that you believe that all white people are cowards.

This is true even if the speaker is not white themselves, but merely living in a 'white' country.

To me, this means that no statement really stands on its own, but we constantly filter it through our lens of expectations, and current context. Given that, it's hard to look at someone from the past---a fundamentally alien context---then damn them using modern morals.

---

As a personal example of how we see racism within an implicit context, this poster[1], mentions "negroes" and my immediate feeling is to damn him for racism as in the modern era using that terminology is a sign of racism.

This is despite the fact that my CV could list me as a beneficiary of the Negro College Fund.

20 years ago, the term "coloured" was considered racist to some segments of the USA. Any variations of it, would be simiarly damned. Now, we are all people "of colour" as an accepted truth, and using 'black' is seen as vulgar, and 'african american' is seen inaccurate. Context matters immensely in these topics.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17303571

The more they pull this historical muckracking crap, the less people are going to care when real racism is happening right in front of them.

It goes unnoted in the article, but you could probably get an entire second piece out of the phrase "...defending themselves against the formidable blessing of offspring."

At the time it was written, Einstein had three children (though his first child's story is basically unknown, and she was either adopted or died in infancy). He was also divorced from their mother, with whom both his sons lived, but corresponded with them throughout their lives. I'd be rather interested to see an ambivalent comment like "formidable blessing" put in the context of these relationships.

The quotes are translated from german into very specific english word that carries connotation. Going by the translation however, I find the interpretation made by Rosenkranz to be with odds of my own. I see a comment about too high population growth, while Rosenkranz claim it is about "how Chinese men can find their women sufficiently attractive to have offspring with them". A question about why there is a too high population growth is not the same as a question about why there is any population growth.

And where is the relevancy of looking at someone's thoughts that he never communicated publicly or acted upon whatsoever? Are we doing a psychoanalysis or something?

It’s hard to visit a different culture for the first time and not notice their differences as a group. It’s only with extended interaction with people from a different culture that their individuality stands out.

I’ve always thought that the cure for xenophobia is travel, but it’s more than just travel that’s required. You can’t just breeze through as a tourist, you have to spend an extended length of time and get to know people as people.

When a white person in historic America encountered the negro slave trade for the first time, becoming aware of the harsh living conditions of millions of people, he have to either conclude that their values regarding justice and the human condition were either in obvious conflict with their own society and culture, or accept the narrative of white supremacy, i.e. blacks were less human and so suffering was OK because it was their natural state. Most chose the latter, as it had the least cognitive dissonance.

A Westerner observing a typical 1920's Chinese person's life for the first time would have experienced the same assault on their fundamental values, especially more humanist values. It was a feudal society, where quiet tolerance in the face of extreme hardship is a cultural value, as is producing as many (male) offspring as possible. Moreover, given harsh standard of living and the large population, human life (especially those of children) was cheap and easily discarded. Finally, post-Qing China would have seemed extremely unsanitary to Western eyes -- even today Chinese authorities struggle with promulgating basic 20th century standards of hygiene (since hygiene is a norm, not a trait).

The foreigner would have been aware that 100's of millions of people lived this way (no one knew China's population was a billion plus until the CCP did the first modern census).

It would have been all to easy to take a dim view on the Chinese as people.

Sounds more like "Chinese culture" phobia to me. He said good things about Japanese people.

Indiscriminate application of BS modern fad notions like "xenophobia" reveal shallow journalism.

Newsflash: Einstein was as human as anybody else.

How is this relevant to HN?

This is disgusting. I mean, publication of private diaries is disgusting.

Fuck you, Rosenkranz. I see why Hamlet did not like you that much.