Exactly. It takes more than intelligence to do what Einstein did. Education, ambition, opportunity, a semblance of social freedom, etc... If you’re born in the wrong country, or the wrong social class, or for various reasons lack motivation to use your gifts... then it doesn’t matter how smart you are.
I’d argue there have been people smarter than Einstein, but simply never existed under the right set of circumstances. A lot of luck involved, sadly. Too much.
In spades for Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Fourier, Tesla, etc. Sure, they were all reasonably bright, but if they had been born to a life that made them a subsistence farmer with no connections to academia and/or finance...
Part of his nurturing was the time his mother spent helping him so he can go back to regular school (if I remember correctly). People don't spend enough time with their children to even think about doing this. Let alone all those lost genius children in impoverished countries.
I mean Einstein was actively against quantum physics, so you shouldn't give him too much credits. I mean, after all quantum physics has lead to some extraordinary discoveries and some amazing inventions. (Also Niels Bohr won)
This is kinda pedantic. My point wasn’t about Einstein. It’s about how many minds like his may have been lost to circumstance. Replace Einstein with your preferred genius, and the actual point I’m making still holds true.
Some do, but get silenced and persecuted for various political, religious, and other reasons.
I believe what happened to Galileo happens, sometimes secretly and other times publicly, every day to people who would've become great thinkers and scientists if only they were given some of their basic rights like freedom of speech and the right to think freely without being judged and/or harmed for stepping outside the herd and thinking for themselves.
That's only because he ran out of material in school, so it is a good argument. It's not like he would have just mastered calculus at 14 on his own without ever being introduced to math.
I mean, it was, but he was from a wealthy family and was able to attend a good school. Another problem is, just because we find another person who is that smart, there's no reason to expect them to go into physics over something that makes money like programming, investment banking, etc.
Also, the problems we struggle with today even Einstein couldn't solve.
From a young age the community around him was educated individuals (family and family friends). His family was secular and instilled value in education over religion as they were non-observant/secular Jews. He also had his own personal tutor outside of class.
My great aunt was fortunate to meet Albert Einstein on multiple occasions as her older sister was friends with him. (Her family were German, educated, non-observant Jews, financially secure). He would come over to their family’s house for dinners. My great aunt (who died at 99 b. 1907) didn’t recall much about him but very vividly remembered him using his napkin at the table as paper and writing ideas/equations/notes on it throughout meals.
That would only have an effect if there was some statistical bias towards the aborted to be more likely to achieve Einstein's success than the unaborted. Considering the two biggest parts of Einstein's success were his upbringing in a wealthy educated family and his intelligence. Since abortion biases towards lower income communities, that means they would have grown up in environments that would make them less likely to achieve Einstein's success. So technically, more abortions would bias the odds more in favor of finding a potential Einstein towards more likely than less.
Which is a terrible thing obviously, because that's how eugenics works.
Don't try to argue a moral framework as a practical framework just because the issue is important to you. It weakens your position.
Not really unless you can correlate total births with abortion rate. For example, a person who is 17 having an abortion might have kids later in life when they can afford it, while a person who doesn't might never be able to get out of the poverty hole caused by a teenage pregnancy and never be able to afford another child. There's also the whole carrying capacity problem. If you outlawed abortions today and for some reason people magically decided to not have them illegally, then eventually any perturbations to the population growth rate would fall back to the current rate. An example of one of the processes responsible for this would be that it is possible to have 2 abortions over the course of 6 months but not two full-term pregnancies. Taking into account that the number of abortions is not equal to the number of potential babies just from chronology, you also have an issue where not every abortion would have even been a viable full-term pregnancy, since the miscarriage rate in the first 5 weeks is about 20%, abortions are more likely to affect pregnancies that would have miscarried.
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u/Rodot Apr 10 '19
Problem is that many of them never receive the education they need to succeed.