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Comment by tappio | Hacker News Reader

Have you read his work? There are many things which are memes without real background, such as people believing in the past that earth was flat. No. They didn't. Medieval people didn't believe earth was flat. This is something invented by 1800s historians. Einstein is the same kind if meme. Everyone keeps repeating how smart he was, but not many people have first hand information and know other researchers of his time. I don't know if he was smart or not. I've read some of his texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he was better at physics. Or maybe those texts I've read even weren't Einsteins, but written by someone who just wanted to use his name to push an agenda. Who knows? Why does it matter? I'm wondering why people are so obsessed with this kind of things, because I've never been and it is hard for me to understand. Maybe you can provide some insight?

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> I've read some of his texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he was better at physics.

You know, Einstein was famous for his works in physics and was hailed as a world genius by his contemporaries? His insights into other topics might not have been ground breaking, but it is hard to argue about it with for physics.

Edit: The thing is, judging his intelligence based on his writings about politics is like judging the intelligence of famous politicians by how well they write about physics. People who aren't experts at a field will always look like idiots when they write about it and are still learning about it.

I didn't judge Einstein, and my question was not about Einstein. I'm not in the position to judge his works in physics. I really know nothing about him, all I know is what they teach in school and what you occasionally read online. Like most of us.

It is interesting that one might get defensive when they think that someone questions Einsteins intelligence. Why is this meme so important? It's almost as if he was some sort of a God.

People are obsessed with Einstein because he made three fundamental breakthroughs in physics in a year, then beat everyone else to general relativity. They were real contributions, and they were pretty creative. He wasn't a computing machine like Von Neumann, but Einstein was a clever guy. Don't know why you're judging based on political contributions.

To me your response reads like the perfect high school text book answer. But I'll take your response as if it came from someone who really knows his work, and assume that what you said is true. Let's not question this meme any further.

I didn't really mean to judge Einstein. When a story sounds "too good to be true" it most often tends to lean towards fiction. My 'judgement' was towards people who blindly believe everything about memes.

In reality, there really was no point and it does not really matter if this particular story is true or not. I just like to question things that people assume obvious.

Hey man, sorry about that. It was a high school answer to a question from someone who sounds like a high schooler.

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