Hold the patronizing inanity, thanks
The discussion at Cosmic blog of Allen Esterson’s research on the ‘Einstein’s Wife’ myth has continued. Some of the comments indicate why mythic history can get traction.
So far as I know, both Einstein and Maric are dead and continued discussion of who contributed what to either’s research would be pointless (unless you’re dead set on using the work of long-dead scientists to promote your own injured sense of your gender’s worth and equality.) Wouldn’t a more relevant topic be whether or not Einstein’s or Maric’s conclusions were valid, or that their work was useful?
Well, continued discussion might be pointless if it were taking place in a vacuum, but given that there is a story out there that is given prominence on a public television website and is being taught in schools and is wrong, then no, it’s not pointless. Teaching history as pretty, self-esteem inflating stories that aren’t actually true is not helpful. Rigoberta Menchú did not help her cause by exaggerating and embroidering parts of her story. Japan doesn’t do itself any good by minimizing what happened in Nanjing. Turkey is not covering itself in glory by prosecuting anyone who so much as whispers the words ‘Armenian genocide.’ Holocaust denial is neither useful nor benign. Yosef ben-Jochannan didn’t advance black empowerment by giving lectures in which he said that Aristotle had stolen his philosophy from the library at Alexandria. Truth has to apply everywhere in inquiry if it’s going to apply anywhere; once you decide it’s okay if you play games with it in just this one place – you’ve given up on it entirely (for one thing, because you’ve made yourself unreliable). As a reply to the above comment at Cosmic Blog says:
There are probably a lot of people who would agree with you. Thirty years ago I might have been among that number. However, I think there’s something to be said for truth. Some years ago I read an article by the historian Mary Lefkowitz in the paper entitled, “Greece for the Greeks: History is not Bunk.” Very enlightening little essay that inspired me to continue on and read her book “Not out of Africa.”
Interesting. I was inspired to read Lefkowitz’s book too, some ten years or so ago, and that’s why she’s one of the first people I asked to write something for B&W. She did, too – her article is the first one I published here. The next is by Richard Evans and also about why truth matters in history. (Then a couple of interviews – with Norm Levitt and Steve Pinker – and an article from TPM and then there’s the first article Allen sent – so we come around in a circle. We all think history does matter and truth matters and truth in history matters. The commenter at Cosmic Blog goes on:
If Maric really did deserve a share in the Nobel that would be a good thing to know – for everyone. But the evidence for such a thing is extremely feeble, even where it exists. The grotesque exaggeration of her involvement is a disservice to the facts, to ourselves, and most especially to her. There is a tendency now in some quarters to say, “B was a downtrodden class of individuals. They did not have the opportunities that DWMs (Dead White Males) had and their contributions were ignored or downplayed. In many cases they were actually punished. THEREFORE, as a matter of social justice, we must go back and give them retroactive credit for things they might have done had they not been oppressed.” The movement to elevate Maric’s recognition is an extreme example of this…Also, when it comes to teaching our kids – my OWN daughters, one of whom has decided to be a chemist – I want them to know the truth as far we are capable of discerning it. I want to inspire them to their level of brilliance and beyond – using the real accomplishments of those who have come before, and not the imaginary and inflated accomplishments that amount to patronizing inanity.
Yep. Patronizing inanity is no favour. Thanks all the same.
Ophelia, congratulations on an excellent article but I think that in one respect you are guilty of wishful thinking. You write : Teaching history as pretty, self-esteem inflating stories that aren’t actually true is not helpful. Rigoberta Menchú did not help her cause etc… . Tut! Tut!
It is clear from the context that what you mean by pseudo-history being ‘not helpful’ is that telling yarns is self-defeating, that lying is not even in the interests of the liar, that liars are not only immoral but that they are also foolish, that they are hoisted by their own petards and that history itself is a kind of morality play in which the good guys win in the end.
This is so obviously mistaken that it can only be explained by your conviction that truth WILL out simply because it SHOULD out. But this is not so. There are countless cases in history in which evil has triumphed, in which prevarication has been profitable, in which the nice, truthful guys finish last. Perhaps you may be right in the very, very long run. But in the short run and the medium run you are in error. Examples coming up if you want any ….
Still, thanks for the enlightening references – much appreciated. Hadn’t known you were also a Levkowitz fan. But it’s the sheer energy expended by yourself et al. in refuting science’s and history’s illusionists that impresses me most.
How many hours must Allen Esterson have devoted to ploughing through wossername that double-barrelled feminist linguist’s garbage about Maric wossername! You really have to suffer fools gladly, I reckon. Or Richard Evans checking Irving’s fraudulent references one by one. Or all those scientists who scorned delights and lived laborious days in demolishing Lomborg’s expanded WSJ op-ed junk entitled ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’. As Mark Twain (I think) said, a lie is travelling round the world while the truth is still putting her boots on.
Then, you’ve done all the work, and the general public still don’t get it, still saying “I read somewhere that perpetual motion machines are about to hit the market etc etc”. General public? One of my German acquaintances is a physician who is convinced that homeopathy is science and to whom I have tried in vain to explain the meaning of Avogadro’s number, how if you dilute an active substance by one tenth thirty times over you have fewer molecules of it left than you find in tap water. Doesn’t work – even though she must have done chemistry/physics courses to qualify for her profession. And doctors are supposed to be part of Germany’s cognitive elite.
Sweat breaks out …
Richard Evans didn’t do all that checking for the hell of it (I also assume he was paid reasonably for his work). Without that work, it would not have been possible to defeat in court the suit that Irving brought in order to shut up someone who had publicly pointed a finger at what he was doing. It’s true that a lot of people wrongly thought that a win for Irving would mean the Holocaust hadn’t happened or that its deniers had won in a more general sense, but I think in many ways it was as scale-tipping as the Dover trial. No, of course, the “other” side isn’t going to give up just because it loses in court time and again. Maybe it looks Sisyphean and maybe it is, but, bad as things are, I don’t want to imagine how bad they would be without those fighting on “our” side.
Cathal wrote:
>How many hours must Allen Esterson have devoted to ploughing through wossername that double-barrelled feminist linguist’s garbage about Maric wossername!< Once you have seen something is amiss (e.g., the ludicrous claim by Troemel-Ploetz that Einstein needed help with the quite elementary mathematics he used in his 1905 special relativity paper), there is something satisfying about methodically checking the other claims one by one and finding (sometimes to your own surprise) that beyond the deficient logic which abounds in T-P’s much-cited 1990 article, the alleged ‘facts’ are not infrequently reported inaccurately. Speaking for myself (and I suspect a lot of other people who research original sources on which claims are purportedly based), there’s an intellectual satisfaction in getting on top of the subject matter, and exposing as phoney claims that have been widely accepted. >Then, you’ve done all the work, and the general public still don’t get it, still saying “I read somewhere that perpetual motion machines are about to hit the market etc etc”.< Unfortunately this goes beyond the general public, and applies to many people who ought to know better than to take something as a fact on the basis of an academic’s say-so. (Among others, senior producers at PBS come to mind.) And, of course, this is even more so in the case of Freud, whose claims about his clinical experiences, and more general claims about his ‘discoveries’, were taken at face value by huge numbers of intellectuals through much of the twentieth century. Both the claims about Mileva Maric, and about Freud’s supposed voyages of discovery into the human psyche, make great stories. Human beings are suckers for great stories. And Goebbels was right when he said (or implied) that the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it. Outside of politics and sex, people don’t tend to wonder if an unequivocal assertion made in the course of such public story-telling is true, they presume it is. And here I must add that I don’t for one moment think that Troemel-Ploetz is other than utterly convinced about her central contentions. Is there a name for the stating of documentably false contentions when the perpetrator sincerely believes in the truth of her story? “Lying” is not right in such a case, with its implication of deliberate deception. (Polite suggestions only, please.)
Let’s take your conviction about Troemel-Ploetz at face value. Would you say she is the norm in this kind of case? And how does one then account for the selective quoting from correspondence? Does she experience genuine blindness regarding what is implied by what she omits?
Is there a name for the stating of documentably false contentions when the perpetrator sincerely believes in the truth of her story? “Lying” is not right in such a case, with its implication of deliberate deception. (Polite suggestions only, please.)
I think the fairest term is ‘self-deception’ — and I agree with you that one should avoid the term ‘lying’ unless one has copper-fastened evidence to that effect.
Thanks for your comments — and glad to learn that your intellectual satisfaction in debunking Troemel-Ploetz and the Viennese quack generously compensates for the slogwork!
I don’t think one needs extraordinary powers of imagination to conjure up a “got it! nailed the bastard!” moment for Richard Evans when he hit pay dirt in his research on Irving’s shenanigans.
I do more wondering about what went on in Irving’s head while he was going about it. Did he have moments of “got it through the publishers, now the public is bound to fall for it”?
Stewart wrote:
>Let’s take your conviction about Troemel-Ploetz at face value. Would you say she is the norm in this kind of case? And how does one then account for the selective quoting from correspondence? Does she experience genuine blindness regarding what is implied by what she omits?< Trying to get inside someone else’s mind is tricky at the best of times. My best guess is that, having heard that Einstein used “we” and “our” in relation to some of his work in letters to Maric, she looked through Einstein’s letters in the Einstein/Maric correspondence published in the first volume of the AE Collected Papers (1987) searching for those particular personal pronouns, and ignored everything else. I’d describe it as a kind of wilful blindness to evidence that contradicted what she was seeking. Maybe tunnel vision might be another description. Is she the norm in this kind of case? I think she is a fairly extreme case. Evan Harris Walker is another person who did the same, but in his case I would describe him as bizarre:
http://www.esterson.org/Evan_Harris_Walker.htm
In relation to his book *The Physics of Consciousness*, Walker’s nephew reports in an obituary on the website of the Parapsychological Association that he recently asked Walker “how we would know if someone ever actually changed history retroactively as that new history would be all we remember. He said there would be some subtle indicator or something that looked like a coincidence. He told me that, one might notice the cars in a parking lot were arranged in such a way as to spell out a name or, someone or something might appear in an unexpected place as in Woody Allen’s movie, Zelig…”
http://www.parapsych.org/members/e_h_walker.html
So if you notice some very improbable coincidence it may be a SIGN that someone has time-travelled back from the future.
Another suggestion about Troemel-Ploetz occurs to me. Maybe she thinks that Einstein’s rare use of “our” trumps the very many more occasions when he wrote “my” in relation to specific extracurricular ideas he was working on. Rather like one black swan trumps the claim that all swans are white.
Remarkable (Walker). Thank you.
Another point that must not be underestimated about T-P: her profound ignorance of the subject matter she is commenting on. In the single instance Einstein (unspecifically) wrote collectively of “our work on relative motion” he was (in 1901) still working with classical Galilean relative motion, and presuming the existence of the ether. It was nearly four years later that he came up with his epoch-making special relativity principle that discarded the ether concept. Somehow I don’t think T-P quite grasps the significance of this.
I was on the campus this afternoon (University of Washington), and went into the astronomy building. It has a long row of glass entry doors, and on every one was a notice of a lecture (a guest lecture of some sort – that’s not a usual way of announcing routine lectures). The opening paragraph of the notice talked about Einstein and the revolutionary nature of his work. Not one of the many notices had scrawled on it “Einstein and Maric!!!!” I thought that was a good sign.
Cathal, please don’t be so silly.
“It is clear from the context that what you mean by pseudo-history being ‘not helpful’ is that telling yarns is self-defeating, that lying is not even in the interests of the liar, that liars are not only immoral but that they are also foolish, that they are hoisted by their own petards and that history itself is a kind of morality play in which the good guys win in the end.
This is so obviously mistaken that it can only be explained by your conviction that truth WILL out simply because it SHOULD out. But this is not so.”
I have no such conviction, I have the opposite conviction, which I have written about here more than once. Obviously I don’t expect you to know that, but don’t tell me what my convictions are when you don’t know and have no reason to think so. And your reading is wrong anyway: the examples I gave were all ones where the truth in fact did out, no doubt because the falsifications are all so public and gross. Do try not to lecture me. Disagree, but don’t lecture. I’m not your pupil.
Re Ophelia’s remarks about the U. of Washington, there is a strange dichotomy between such lectures and College webpages on physics, and the frequent citing of Maric as Einstein’s collaborator elsewhere on the internet. Take the case of one Matthias Tomczak, an Australian Oceanographer who has an impressive website that includes a 35 lecture series on Science on Society that he evidently delivers at his university. In lecture 28, on the atom, quanta and relativity, among information about the work of the giants of twentieth century physics who feature we find the following:
“In recent years evidence has turned up in personal letters between Einstein and his first wife Mileva Einstein-Maric that Einstein developed the core ideas of relativity in close collaboration with her but did not mention her contribution anywhere and possibly actively suppressed her name from his papers on special relativity. Mileva’s fate is indeed an important part of the history of science of this period and a vivid demonstration of the discrimination under which women scientists had to suffer.”
http://www.es.flinders.edu.au/~mattom/science+society/lecture28.html
Maric’s name is linked to her own short webpage on which there are several erroneous statements. On his main page Tomczak writes: “Comments, corrections and suggestions are always welcome; please email…”
I took up his invitation and spelled out some of the errors. He thanked me and said he was working on revisions of the lectures, and later notified me he’d made the changes, and hoped I now found it acceptable. I found the changes were close to negligible, and the above paragraph remained unchanged. I emailed him again, this time giving him the full works about his errors, with links to the relevant articles. No reply – and no change to the ‘revised’ material on Maric.
From the evidence of his website, Tomczak is a very bright and knowledgeable scientist. But when it comes to the Maric story, he prefers the new ‘revelations’ to the banal truth based on documentable facts. Alas, I fear that goes for an awful lot of people, regardless of their education.
Correction: The name of Tomczak’s lecture series should have read “Science and Society”.
But Allen, as long as you keep on correcting yourself just because you made a mistake instead of finding justifications for not doing so, you’re going to be out of step…
How true, Stewart! But to be serious, just for one moment:
1. The main culprits don’t find justifications for not correcting their errors, they don’t admit they made any errors!
2. When challenged by rebuttals (indeed refutations) of their contentions, the people in question typically ignore the rebuttals and simply repeat what they said before. This applies equally to Troemel-Ploetz (on Maric) and to Jeffrey Masson (on Freud’s seduction theory).
One imagines working step-by-step through the evidence and the reasoning with such people to find out precisely where one diverges. It has the whiff of faith a la religion. Everything seems fine, but getting too near the soft underbellies of certain ideas trips a mechanism to avoid those ideas getting hurt. I did have experiences quite a few years ago with a work colleague who’d gone religious and we had discussions, because I wanted to understand her thinking and find out her responses to what I felt were very weak points. Up to a certain point, it was all reasonable discussion, with her answering me as herself in her own voice. But when I asked the questions that were really tricky about the underpinnings, she fell back on her faith in the authority of those who understood these things better than she did. We never really got to the decision she obviously had made that these individuals merited her blind trust, without which they could have no influence on her life.
“Is there a name for the stating of documentably false contentions when the perpetrator sincerely believes in the truth of her story? “Lying” is not right in such a case, with its implication of deliberate deception. (Polite suggestions only, please.)”
G Tingey must be on holiday, because the obvious answer is “religion”…
By the way, I’m not sure Lomborg belongs in such august company as obviously as Cathal implies. Sure much of what he said has been disputed/updated but his underlying thesis that a lot of hysterical nonsense is being talked about climate change seems to me to be incontrovertible.
Why do they do it? Perhaps because to err is human but to admit to it is divine.
Yes, I agree re Lomberg. You needn’t accept his thesis but you can’t very well dismiss his work as dishonest or lacking rigour, since no dishoensty or lack of rigour has been shown. He hasn’t needed to revise the work very substantially in the light of criticism for the new edition. It looks like pretty robust stuff to me.
I’m not sure Lomborg belongs in such august company as obviously as Cathal implies. Sure much of what he said has been disputed/updated but his underlying thesis that a lot of hysterical nonsense is being talked about climate change seems to me to be incontrovertible.
I acknowledge that Lomborg is no fool and it is certainly true that an awful lot of nonsense has been generated on the subject of climate change.
But his ‘underlying thesis’ is not that a lot of nonsense has emerged from the less enlightened advocates of the ‘other side’ — it’s that there’s no need to worry very much about global warming, that economic growth can continue indefinitely, and that overpopulation isn’t a big deal. It’s the ‘no sweat’ philosophy in 500 pages plus 2930 footnotes.
Still, he is certainly not as obviously ludicrous as T-P, so perhaps I should have omitted him from the rogues’ gallery.
“rogues’ gallery”
Maybe OB can get one installed on the site and then criteria could be established to see who belongs. Of course, the whole of B&W is that, in a sense, but maybe there are a few select individuals who merit a perpetual spotlight.
Re SciAm and Lomberg:
One of the would-be demolishers is Stephen Schneider, who writes on “GLOBAL WARMING: Neglecting the Complexities”. During the 1970s this individual was perhaps the prime pusher of the idea of “global cooloing” aka the imminent-arrival-of-the-next-Ice-Age-if-we-don’t-do-something-about-it. If anone deserves to be in a rogues gallery it is Schneider. Not that his stupidity of yesteryear stops him from pontificating or stops others in his camp from treating him as some sort of oracle on the future of climate.
IMHO SciAm became a joke when it published this article.
IMHO SciAm became a joke when it published this article.
Paul, if you can refer me to ANY article in ANY peer-reviewed scientific journal that supports Lomborg’s position on climate change, please let me know. I have found nothing so far, though I admit I haven’t searched AWFULLY hard.
Thanks in advance :-)
Cathal:
What is his position?
Cathal:
On second thoughts I am not going to let you away with this. You specifically sought to show the errors in Lomberg by referring to the infamous SciAm hatchet job. I showed you why this was not valid . Either stand by Schneider and all his works or else withdraw that particular comment.
This is not about Lomberg. It’s about Schneider& SciAm and your adducing of them against Lomberg.
Lomberg replied to the SciAm article at some length on his website but SciAm threatened to sue him for breach of copyright unless he withdrew it, which he eventually did. It’s true that he had quoted the article at length, basically Fisked it, but nonetheless this strikes me as odd behaviour (from SciAm) to say the least. It does seem to betray a lack of confidence in their article.
“When challenged by rebuttals (indeed refutations) of their contentions, the people in question typically ignore the rebuttals and simply repeat what they said before.”
That sums up so very very much of life…
Paul, JohnM
I can’t write a dissertation on the subject — and yes, I am aware that Schneider sometimes overstates his case. Lomborg’s position on climate change (from what I remember from reading TSE) is that (a) Kyoto sucks, will only reduce warming by 0.2 degrees centrigade at best etc. (with which I agree) and (b) climate change isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be (in contradiction with the views of virtually all climatologists).
As I mentioned, I’m quite happy to change my opinion on this matter if you can refer me to any authoritative sources that support YOUR view. I don’t know enough about the subject to be overly dogmatic.
No WSJ op-eds please, but articles from WSJ science section acceptable (betcha won’t find any that pay homage to BL, though).
I speak as one who was a Julian Simon fan until four years ago.
But I no longer live in darkness …
Here’s a site that might enlighten you, my brothers:
http://www.realclimate.org/
Please, read the other side — you might also change your mind.
Cathal:
“in contradiction with the views of virtually all climatologists” is not my understanding. Replace “climatologists” with “climate modellers” and you’ve got it.
As for how bad things will get, I was not aware there was much, if anything at all, on the economic aspects of the question in the scientific literature. Hence the need for the ridiculous Stern report.
Cathal,
Sorry for appearing so aggressive.
Paul — no sweat. You are gentle as a fawn compared with what I’m used to!
‘Ridiculous’ Stern report?
Now please write me a 100-page essay justifying your use of that somewhat judgmental adjective.
:-)
Cathal:
How about being attacked by William Nordhaus on the whole question of costings (http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/SternReviewD2.pdf), after having written postiviely about him. As Nordhaus writes, referring to the headline conclusions, “These results are dramatically different from earlier economic models
that use the same basic data and analytical structure.”
Just to give a flavour of what we’re facing:
George Monbiot in the Guardian, and he does not appear to be joking:
‘There was one proposal in Sir Rod Eddington’s report to the Treasury with which, when I first read it, I wholeheartedly agreed. He insists that “the transport sector, including aviation, should meet its full environmental costs”. Quite right too: every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.’
Coupled with calls to censor the sceptics, this field is in danger of falling into Lysenkoism. And, for the record, I consider that anyone who thinks like Monbiot as quoted should do humanity a favour and stop “polluting” the earth immediately, by the simple step of ceasing to breathe out.
Only just happened on this thread after looking over the excellent critique by Allen Esterson of the PBS. But the idea that Lomborg is is anyway like Maric’s false friends is just simple nonsense. The SCIam critique of Lomborg was superficial and in places demonstrably wrong. Moreover Lomborg’s views on global warming follow most of the published economic analyses. The Stern report differs not because it says that the end of the world is at hand. Instead it discounts the future a lot less than standard analyses with the result that losses to what are assumed to be much richer future generations matter much more. But there is no doomsday in the Stern report.
And anybody looking at Real Climate, te should also look at http://www.climateaudit.org/.
Real Climate was set up in part to rubbish the critique of the so-called hockeystick of Michael Mann by Steve Mcintyre and Ross Mckitrick. That critique seems to me and many others entirely valid (see for example the Wegman report). The Mann response to the criticisms seems to me much more like Ms Holton’s response – never directly answer criticism and repeat assertions which have been shown to be questionable – than it is like a proper scientific exchange.
Thanks, Mike.