As a kid who grew up in the Midwest in the 1990s, my education did include Millikan's name, and the idea that California's work led to a ton of nasty German things.
It's not quite what you are asking for, but I thought this was a well done article by the current Black president of George Mason University on how he views the slave-owning namesake of his university: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/george-mason-universit...
George Mason University has been desperately trying to appear more diverse lately, unfortunately the selection of the new president only shows more of that desperation. The immediate past president, Angel Cabrera, was a complete disaster. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear this new president is going to change that.
Not sure about a founder but past Presidents and Trustees have had their names removed from buildings and other landmarks after this sort of thing came to the surface.
Shortly after removing Calhoun's name from the now-named Grace Hopper Residential College, members of the Yale community set their sites on statues and paintings of the university's eponymous slave-trading founder, Elihu Yale. There was/is talk of even changing the university's name.
>In making its recommendations regarding Millikan, the committee also considered his stances on gender, race, and ethnicity, finding them sexist, racist, xenophobic, and inexcusable by any standard.
>"It is fraught to judge individuals outside of their time, but it is clear from the documentation presented that Millikan lent his name and his prestige to a morally reprehensible eugenics movement that already had been discredited scientifically during his time," Rosenbaum said.
dont just downvote, present a counter argument that is based in science why I am wrong and use your own brains, don't just "defer to the experts".
Just because I used an extreme analogy to prove a bad point, that doesn't mean you shouldn't contemplate every bad idea along with the good.
I'm not saying we should practice eugenics on the human race, I am saying whether or not it is theoretically possible and whether or not scientists who brought up these ideas did so because they were nazis, or because they were pioneers traveling into dangerous lands for the very first time.
The sibling was flagged and killed while I wrote the following reply; I’m unwilling to let it vanish into the aether:
> Eugenics, the only discredited science, that seems to work exceptionally well when applied to plants, livestock, microbiology, horses, household pets, but magically fails when the idea is applied to the human race?
The failure is a result of the lack of a definition for “good genes” aside from whatever any random person thinks is good. That is, the fitness of an organism always and necessarily refers to a specific environment, and the characteristics (genes) that make it fit for that environment are not the same as the ones that make it fit for another environment. This means that there is no objective measure upon which to determine which genes are good and which are not. Eugenics is subjective.
> The idea is morally reprehensible, but the idea that all you have to do to cull out say "sickle cell disease" from the human race as a whole is to stop say "black people" from breeding is actually scientifically sound.
In the first place, sickle cell anemia provides some protection against malaria. So whether it is adaptive or maladaptive depends on the environment. But secondly, sickle cell evolved naturally, and removing it from the breeding population doesn’t stop that from happening again.
> Like I said the idea is morally reprehensible and we should never do that. But the idea that you couldn't theoretically control a population and eliminate "undesirable" traits from the gene pool is just willfully ignoring the obvious soundness of the mathematics.
I don’t think people are denying what you’re claiming here. They are responding by noting that there is an incredible power differential between the eugenicist and the people who are prevented from reproducing (I’m sure this is obvious) and there is no objective basis on which to scientifically decide who is supposed to reproduce and who is not. Together these facts create the inescapable impression that eugenics is about having kids and preventing the competition from doing the same.
I don't buy it. How do you define "standards of the day?" The worst of those at the time? The median?
There seem always to be people of the day that are in direct opposition to what you call the standard. As an example, Quakers and other abolitionists of the antebellum South famously aided slaves to escape to freedom via the "Underground Railroad".
Was anti-slavery the standard of the day? Or were the abolitionists progressive? Enlightened? Or were the slave-owners (the Millikan's) regressive. Provincial?
I think it's hard to say what the "standard fo the day" was. Maybe a historian can answer.
The slaves themselves had many a rebellion and uprising and ran away without assistance, they didn't need the Quakers or anyone else to tell them what the "standard of the day" was.
Read Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts for some amazing stories (what they don't teach in school)
And there were plenty of anti eugenicists even among the progressive crowds; it’s deeply annoying that eugenics is presented as some kind of de facto worldview in the early 20th century, when it was 100% a minority-held position - unfortunately the minority holding it were the ruling elite and primarily aimed at the most vulnerable and least politically connected members of our society.
Damn, 130 million americans were once under forced sterilization laws pushed by the human betterment foundation (HBF) which was chaired by those guys.
It seems like such a waste of time to do all this renaming stuff for a bunch of hyper-sensitive freshmen (freshpeople?) but some of the sterilizations were for things like 'insanity' 'feeblemindedness' 'mentally diseased' 'mentally defective' and applied to you if you were below 70% of the average intelligence of your age group.
I certainly wouldn't like to live under those laws yet some part of me still values eugenics. Vasectomy for thee but not for me I guess.
I remember something about nazi schools teaching children the sterilised were victims of their ancestors, not nazi society. From what I recall they even had laws against treating the sterilised with contempt. Very progressive.
(I'm a Caltech and Ruddock House alum). Millikan is also on record writing in a letter to his wife in the 50s that if blacks in MS reached a majority of the population democracy there as we understand it would cease to exist. I say it's time for him to go.
I don't know what the comment you're replying to said, but guessing at its contents, I'd also throw in Ghana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, and Seychelles to round out the usual list of well-governed Sub-Saharan African countries.
It quotes, "More than half of the population in this state is made up of negroes — a very serious situation. For it means that under universal suffrage they could control the state now — an unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are."
In particular, the phrasing above of "reached a majority of the population" is exactly backwards, as Mississippi had been majority African American from the 1840s to the 1930s, and likely already wasn't at the time of Millikan's visit in 1951 (contrary to his assertion). African Americans historically have moved away from Mississippi and other southern states.
Yes I too was surprised to learn that many of Germany’s eugenicists were inspired by people and ideas in the United States.
Eugenics used to be a very respectable field of study. Highly intelligent people believed that unless the “feeble minded” were stopped from reproducing it would lead to the decline of the human race.
Institutes were established, Nobel prize winners wrote in its favor. It was seen as doing humanity a favor somewhat like how climate change is discussed today.
Take any random figure of western history who is widely admired. I’m not taking any names but odds are they believed that the rest of the world needed the guiding hand of western civilization to attain modernity.
Colonialism, Slavery and imperialism were seen as justified expressions of the natural order. Skulls were assembled from around the world and brain volumes meticulously noted down to “prove” this.
From this was born the ideology of the Nazis that humanity is a collection biological races constantly struggling for evolutionary dominance. And the duty of the superior race was to help this along by vanquishing the weaker races and sterilizing the feeble minded.
The under currents of this movement exist to this day. It has been rebranded as “Human bio diversity” to escape its Nazi past. Some writers hailed as truth telling heroes by people here have been recently revealed to have sympathies for these ideas.
These days it’s couched in extremely vague sounding dog whistles that are very hard to decipher. “Welfare bums” etc
By cutting our links with it we are not necessarily erasing the past but sending a message to those lurking beneath polite society that these ideas that have led to some of the most horrific massacres in history are unwelcome.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait to HN? You've unfortunately been doing a lot of that lately. It's not what this site is for.
> Colonialism, Slavery and imperialism were seen as justified expressions of the natural order. Skulls were assembled from around the world and brain volumes meticulously noted down to “prove” this.
And to expound a little more - most rational, intellligent people from those eras believed in these things as well. After all, they told themselves, most reasonable, compassionate people do.
As such, it's interesting to ask yourself what we do today that will be held as barbaric by some future generation. Chances are, it'll be something that most of us believe to be normal and right.
And if you're someone who doesn't have any opinion that your peers would find scandalous, or at least unorthodox, chances are you are participating in some act that a future generation will find appalling but that is entirely acceptable today.
Abortion?
Meat eating?
Or some other practice that most of us take for granted.
For the same reason, we shouldn't judge past generations by today's moral standards. It makes no sense.
> "It is fraught to judge individuals outside of their time, but it is clear from the documentation presented that Millikan lent his name and his prestige to a morally reprehensible eugenics movement that already had been discredited scientifically during his time," Rosenbaum said.
Why should I have a problem with the idea future generations might take my name off a building?
Why do anything. Why not just use whatever resources you can get your hands on and burn it all.
The concept of some sort of future is why some people do more.
You mightn't care, perhaps having kids is your thing, perhaps is extincting a species or designing a better ice cube, everyone's different, for some people it's buildings.
I think a lot of people are realising giving money to universities instead of building a bigger boat is a bad idea. They are probably right.
As technology for saving premature babies continues to improve, I think elective second trimester abortions (mostly illegal in Europe, but constitutionally protected in the United States under Roe v. Wade) will come to be seen in a different light. It’s legal to abort a 22 week old fetus in about half of states (including the states where most of the population lives) even without any special emergency or medical condition: https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/week-by-week/week-22..... The record for saving a premature baby is a bit under 22 weeks: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/11/14/mo...
Would it then be feasible to replace second trimester abortions with early births? I think most pro-choice people would accept early birth as an alternative if it were safe.
*read the whole comment and the link before you flag*
Eugenics, Genocide, DnR, does a rose by any other name ...
I am all for forced sterilization, but it won't be an IQ test the decides it.
The UK is using covid as cover to dispose of its retarded. Yeah, that isn't the term we use anymore. But that is how it feels when we mark our fellow humans as subhuman and queue them for death.
One of the things we’ve learned about eugenics is that even if you agree with it in principle (and to be clear, I do not), it’s painfully clear that in practice it slides down to Nazism and genocide very rapidly. This is why these ideas have been purged from polite society, and people who openly espouse them are shunned and shamed. We’ve seen where these things lead, and most people are rightly horrified by it.
The road between “these people are ‘feeble minded’ and we should sterilize them for the good of the species” and “these aren’t even people we should kill them” is very short and paved in literal millions of dead bodies. The processes that allow one to forcibly sterilize a fellow human being against their will requires some degree of dehumanization, which is why it goes to even worse places than where it started.
I agree that eugenics is problematic for many reasons. However, when people were thinking these things out, many or most thought they were doing it to improve humanity (I guess we’d breed out the undesirable traits). From that PoV I would not try to erase their memories.
This reminds me of the cultural revolution and the four olds (sì jiù). There are other important things to attend to.
Learn to live with your warts. You don’t have to look like a pristine model. Nor does society.
One day you find out your parents were cheats. Or they stole Amazon packages, whatever. Do you think those people should go ahead and change their surnames?
So what? The point is that we don't name awards after them. They aren't erasing Millikan from the history books but rather choosing not to blindly use his name as a honour.
My secondary school house was named after a slave trader, they recently changed it - good riddance.
Of all the bad things modern reappraisal culture is leading to, this isn't one of them.
Buying and selling people is not the same. There is no science. It’s just brutality. Eugenicists were looking to better society, albeit absurdly. It was bullshit but back then it wasn’t.
It’s like condemning shamen and medicine men and women. Sure it was bullshit, but they thought it was real and effective.
We’re going to Mars. Maybe Elon will be first. Most everyone would be excited.
Maybe some day in the future it’ll be the worst thing we ever did as a species. Do we vomit on them because now we know better?
Well maybe, having the name "in the public" like that will make it more likely that people will stay aware of the history. If the name is removed from the public and found only in books that are dusty on the shelves of an archive, that's less likely.
Maybe the answer is a somber monument, "Horrible People in Our History" somewhere on campus.
> Well maybe, having the name "in the public" like that will make it more likely that people will stay aware of the history. If the name is removed from the public and found only in books that are dusty on the shelves of an archive, that's less likely.
In my experience, organizations tend to downplay the misdeeds of those whose name and likeness are prominently displayed in or around their buildings. It's just not terribly easy for an organization to talk frankly about such things without it getting really awkward, so they tend to just ... not talk about it.
I also supremely doubt that many people learned about Millikan's life from the building, ditto for his more troubled aspects. I also doubt that many people here have, or ever will, visit that building. The move to rename this building probably taught more people about his troubled aspects than the building itself ever did.
Instead I think it's more fair to say that naming a building after anyone is a tribute and an attempt to hold someone up as a model to be followed by those who go there. I think there's an interesting and nuanced discussion to be had about whether Millikan's negative aspects justify his removal, but I think arguing that we need his name on a building in order to remember him and his eugenicist past are a bit silly, frankly.
> I agree that eugenics is problematic for many reasons. However, when people were thinking these things out, many or most thought they were doing it to improve humanity (I guess we’d breed out the undesirable traits).
Agreed. The idea that someone might have done horrible things while having good intentions is an apt lesson for us all. Caltech should absolutely keep him up on their website and official history, and discuss both his contributions and his shortcomings.
> From that PoV I would not try to erase their memories.
That's where we diverge. In no way are they actually erasing his memory. Naming buildings after people and building statues of people isn't just history, it's an endorsement. It is a group of people coming together saying "this person should be celebrated and held up as someone to be emulated".
There is no obligation for Caltech to continue to hold up Millikan as someone to be proud of, or as a name that deserves honor and emulation going forward. Nor does renaming a building mean that we're magically going to forget him. Keep him in the history books, but name the building after someone that students should look to emulate.
Ironically, renaming this building probably taught more people about Millikan than the building itself ever did. I think the number of people who actually learned about Millikan because of that building is approximately 0. Most either have no clue who he was (I'm in this category), or knew about him beforehand from his work in physics.
> This reminds me of the cultural revolution and the four olds (sì jiù).
Flip side of this; if China eventually became a democracy, would you demand that the worst perpetrators the cultural revolution get to keep their places of honor in schools and statues? Or would you understand why these hypothetical future citizens of this democracy might not be super happy about having their kids attend a school named after someone they consider to be an awful person?
I think fundamentally, everyone has a line where they say "that person is too awful to name a school building after", and I think it's a bit silly to pretend that saying that is to erase history or start a cultural revolution. You would probably be rightfully shocked and appalled if someone tried to make an Adolf Hitler memorial art school, and I doubt you would argue that renaming such a school back to something reasonable would be to "erase" Hitler's memory. The difference is that you don't seem to think that Millikan's behavior is bad enough to warrant renaming over, while I disagree. I think that's a perfectly reasonable disagreement to have too! Unlike Hitler, Millikan made great contributions to science, and doesn't have a directly attributed body count. But let's actually have that conversation rather than pretending that we'd forget about him if it weren't for that single building in Caltech that neither of us have probably been to or even heard of before this.
> There are other important things to attend to.
In times and places, I think that this can be an issue. But if Caltech has a single committee over the summer and decides to rename a building, are they really wasting any resources that could've been spent elsewhere? A few hours to discuss and create a single press release doesn't really seem like it's distracting too much from anything important, and is probably pretty minor in the grand scheme of low value university meetings. The cynical part of my soul wonders if the committee members ever do anything useful, and if having them off renaming buildings and similar instead kept them off the backs of the people who actually do real work around there.
I also think universities do all kinds of things that waste administrator's time, or cause them to have too many administrators in general, distract students from education, or otherwise waste resources. But of course concern over such things only get brough...
there is a whole section of mathematical economics that is devoted to conducting effective warfare, should we claim that entire branch of science is fake just because it's resulted in millions of people's death who typically belong to a specific non-white race?
What I believe is that a person can be shitty, but also be a really great scientist to the point that we should overlook the personality and honor them for the contribution.
I mean, hell are we going to start scrubbing Edison's name off of everything just because all the PETA people are offended that he used to electrocute dogs, cats, horses (and even an elephant i believe) just to prove that inefficient DC is safer than Tesla's magical, "can transmit through the air and electrocute you to death while walking down the street" AC?
No we shouldn't just because we hate their personal beliefs and actions. First of all we shouldn't scrub them from the history books so we don't forget their atrocities and failings, but secondly we shouldn't scrub them out because the contribution has had a far more valuable and beneficial contribution to society.
Like I pointed out in another comment you say it's bad because the idea led to a horrifying geopolitical conclusion.
But what about all of the medical miracles that eugenics led to like establishments of bioengineering in both crops and microbiology?
You could literally say that people like Robert A Milikan are indirectly responsible for all the lives saved with this COVID vaccine just as much as he is indirectly responsible for all the lives lost in the holocaust.
Idk, was he probably a shitty human being? Sure but so were most of our grandparents. Are we going to start chiseling out the names on tombstones so society doesn't have to suffer the eyesores of their cultural blights?
Despite your arguments in an earlier (deleted) comment, eugenics is not good science. Furthermore, this isn't "scrubbing them from the history books". It's removing their names from some awards and buildings. You'll still be able to find their papers in the library and read about them on Wikipedia.
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
I go the other way on this. We used to erase Millian's awfulness and celebrate the rest. We now decline to do so.
We're embracing all of the history in full, considering it and treating it the way we feel is right. We may revisit decades hence and treat it differently again, who knows? I don't see history being "erased" here.
There's already another holocaust ongoing (see what the CCP is doing to the Muslim Uighur population). No one seems to care. It's all about the money at the end, all the holocaust museums didn't seem to prevent a repeat.
shaggyfrog says >They are asking that he no longer be honoured as a consequence of what he said.<
But he said a lot! E.g., Millikan contributed greatly to science and had some views that are unacceptable today. So do we celebrate his useful contributions or do we punish him after death by un-naming buildings, etc.? Could we not possibly do both?
What if we found a letter written by Albert Einstein that derogatorialy used the N-word? Would we never again speak of Einstein, of his opposition to nuclear warfare, of his personal trials as a Jew, etc? Would every reference to Einstein initiate a conversation that ended with the mention of his (here hypothetical) N-word letter?
The end-game of this woke attitude is the death of history (since no history will be acceptable and all will be subject to revision downward at any time) and, in the long run, the end of social knowledge.
We reproduced the experiment in one of my laboratory courses. I don't remember if the controversial aspects of Millikan's data collection were discussed; whether it could even be called fraudulent seems somewhat debatable. But interestingly, Feynman had a quote about Millikan's successors[0]:
> We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
> Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
The case for painting Sanger as a eugenicist, or even a sympathizer, is pretty weak. Anti-abortion activists have been trying to make that argument for decades, but it just doesn't fit.
The case is much stronger with W.E.B Du Bois. Neither applied Social Darwinian thinking in racial dimensions, though. And that seems to be what puts Millikan over the top. His racial animus seems to have been rather typical of whites back then. (And arguably up until the 1980s or later!) On the other hand, his aggressive advocacy for applied eugenics seems exceptional, and therefore arguably places more culpability for the harms upon his shoulders. But eugenics doesn't play well in public debates; racism is what revs people's engines, especially on the left. So not surprising how people keep hammering on his racism.
> If we remove Millikan, do we also remove Napoleon? Do we also remove George Washington? Do we also remove Edison?
The answer used to be "no", but now I suppose it's becoming "yes". No historical figure is safe from being cancelled. Pick some random but important historical figure. Now google the name along with the word "racist" and you'll find some opinion piece about how that person was racist and needs to be cancelled. Henry Ford, Mark Twain, heck, you can even find articles about Abraham Lincoln holding "problematic" views.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] threadExcept the standards of the day.
Source: the next sentence of the article.
Just because I used an extreme analogy to prove a bad point, that doesn't mean you shouldn't contemplate every bad idea along with the good.
I'm not saying we should practice eugenics on the human race, I am saying whether or not it is theoretically possible and whether or not scientists who brought up these ideas did so because they were nazis, or because they were pioneers traveling into dangerous lands for the very first time.
> Eugenics, the only discredited science, that seems to work exceptionally well when applied to plants, livestock, microbiology, horses, household pets, but magically fails when the idea is applied to the human race?
The failure is a result of the lack of a definition for “good genes” aside from whatever any random person thinks is good. That is, the fitness of an organism always and necessarily refers to a specific environment, and the characteristics (genes) that make it fit for that environment are not the same as the ones that make it fit for another environment. This means that there is no objective measure upon which to determine which genes are good and which are not. Eugenics is subjective.
> The idea is morally reprehensible, but the idea that all you have to do to cull out say "sickle cell disease" from the human race as a whole is to stop say "black people" from breeding is actually scientifically sound.
In the first place, sickle cell anemia provides some protection against malaria. So whether it is adaptive or maladaptive depends on the environment. But secondly, sickle cell evolved naturally, and removing it from the breeding population doesn’t stop that from happening again.
> Like I said the idea is morally reprehensible and we should never do that. But the idea that you couldn't theoretically control a population and eliminate "undesirable" traits from the gene pool is just willfully ignoring the obvious soundness of the mathematics.
I don’t think people are denying what you’re claiming here. They are responding by noting that there is an incredible power differential between the eugenicist and the people who are prevented from reproducing (I’m sure this is obvious) and there is no objective basis on which to scientifically decide who is supposed to reproduce and who is not. Together these facts create the inescapable impression that eugenics is about having kids and preventing the competition from doing the same.
There seem always to be people of the day that are in direct opposition to what you call the standard. As an example, Quakers and other abolitionists of the antebellum South famously aided slaves to escape to freedom via the "Underground Railroad".
Was anti-slavery the standard of the day? Or were the abolitionists progressive? Enlightened? Or were the slave-owners (the Millikan's) regressive. Provincial?
I think it's hard to say what the "standard fo the day" was. Maybe a historian can answer.
Wikipedia article on Maroons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroons?wprov=sfla1
Read Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts for some amazing stories (what they don't teach in school)
And there were plenty of anti eugenicists even among the progressive crowds; it’s deeply annoying that eugenics is presented as some kind of de facto worldview in the early 20th century, when it was 100% a minority-held position - unfortunately the minority holding it were the ruling elite and primarily aimed at the most vulnerable and least politically connected members of our society.
It seems like such a waste of time to do all this renaming stuff for a bunch of hyper-sensitive freshmen (freshpeople?) but some of the sterilizations were for things like 'insanity' 'feeblemindedness' 'mentally diseased' 'mentally defective' and applied to you if you were below 70% of the average intelligence of your age group.
I certainly wouldn't like to live under those laws yet some part of me still values eugenics. Vasectomy for thee but not for me I guess.
I remember something about nazi schools teaching children the sterilised were victims of their ancestors, not nazi society. From what I recall they even had laws against treating the sterilised with contempt. Very progressive.
Here's some newspaper clippings by the HBF.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.0020380g/?st=gallery
It quotes, "More than half of the population in this state is made up of negroes — a very serious situation. For it means that under universal suffrage they could control the state now — an unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are."
In particular, the phrasing above of "reached a majority of the population" is exactly backwards, as Mississippi had been majority African American from the 1840s to the 1930s, and likely already wasn't at the time of Millikan's visit in 1951 (contrary to his assertion). African Americans historically have moved away from Mississippi and other southern states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
Eugenics used to be a very respectable field of study. Highly intelligent people believed that unless the “feeble minded” were stopped from reproducing it would lead to the decline of the human race.
Institutes were established, Nobel prize winners wrote in its favor. It was seen as doing humanity a favor somewhat like how climate change is discussed today.
Take any random figure of western history who is widely admired. I’m not taking any names but odds are they believed that the rest of the world needed the guiding hand of western civilization to attain modernity.
Colonialism, Slavery and imperialism were seen as justified expressions of the natural order. Skulls were assembled from around the world and brain volumes meticulously noted down to “prove” this.
From this was born the ideology of the Nazis that humanity is a collection biological races constantly struggling for evolutionary dominance. And the duty of the superior race was to help this along by vanquishing the weaker races and sterilizing the feeble minded.
The under currents of this movement exist to this day. It has been rebranded as “Human bio diversity” to escape its Nazi past. Some writers hailed as truth telling heroes by people here have been recently revealed to have sympathies for these ideas.
These days it’s couched in extremely vague sounding dog whistles that are very hard to decipher. “Welfare bums” etc
By cutting our links with it we are not necessarily erasing the past but sending a message to those lurking beneath polite society that these ideas that have led to some of the most horrific massacres in history are unwelcome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And to expound a little more - most rational, intellligent people from those eras believed in these things as well. After all, they told themselves, most reasonable, compassionate people do.
As such, it's interesting to ask yourself what we do today that will be held as barbaric by some future generation. Chances are, it'll be something that most of us believe to be normal and right.
And if you're someone who doesn't have any opinion that your peers would find scandalous, or at least unorthodox, chances are you are participating in some act that a future generation will find appalling but that is entirely acceptable today.
Abortion?
Meat eating?
Or some other practice that most of us take for granted.
For the same reason, we shouldn't judge past generations by today's moral standards. It makes no sense.
Why should I have a problem with the idea future generations might take my name off a building?
The concept of some sort of future is why some people do more.
You mightn't care, perhaps having kids is your thing, perhaps is extincting a species or designing a better ice cube, everyone's different, for some people it's buildings.
I think a lot of people are realising giving money to universities instead of building a bigger boat is a bad idea. They are probably right.
Eugenics, Genocide, DnR, does a rose by any other name ...
I am all for forced sterilization, but it won't be an IQ test the decides it.
The UK is using covid as cover to dispose of its retarded. Yeah, that isn't the term we use anymore. But that is how it feels when we mark our fellow humans as subhuman and queue them for death.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-do-not-res...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The road between “these people are ‘feeble minded’ and we should sterilize them for the good of the species” and “these aren’t even people we should kill them” is very short and paved in literal millions of dead bodies. The processes that allow one to forcibly sterilize a fellow human being against their will requires some degree of dehumanization, which is why it goes to even worse places than where it started.
This reminds me of the cultural revolution and the four olds (sì jiù). There are other important things to attend to.
Learn to live with your warts. You don’t have to look like a pristine model. Nor does society.
How is choosing to no longer use their name for a building or award erasing their memories?
A bunch of goodie-two-shoes.
The great majority thought they were doing good. We know different today. We know now the new Soviet man is bullshit. Back then they believed in this.
My secondary school house was named after a slave trader, they recently changed it - good riddance.
Of all the bad things modern reappraisal culture is leading to, this isn't one of them.
It’s like condemning shamen and medicine men and women. Sure it was bullshit, but they thought it was real and effective.
We’re going to Mars. Maybe Elon will be first. Most everyone would be excited.
Maybe some day in the future it’ll be the worst thing we ever did as a species. Do we vomit on them because now we know better?
Not honoring someone isn't vomiting on them.
Maybe the answer is a somber monument, "Horrible People in Our History" somewhere on campus.
I don't mind that.
And Millikan's name will probably last for a millennia because of his work in physics.
In my experience, organizations tend to downplay the misdeeds of those whose name and likeness are prominently displayed in or around their buildings. It's just not terribly easy for an organization to talk frankly about such things without it getting really awkward, so they tend to just ... not talk about it.
I also supremely doubt that many people learned about Millikan's life from the building, ditto for his more troubled aspects. I also doubt that many people here have, or ever will, visit that building. The move to rename this building probably taught more people about his troubled aspects than the building itself ever did.
Instead I think it's more fair to say that naming a building after anyone is a tribute and an attempt to hold someone up as a model to be followed by those who go there. I think there's an interesting and nuanced discussion to be had about whether Millikan's negative aspects justify his removal, but I think arguing that we need his name on a building in order to remember him and his eugenicist past are a bit silly, frankly.
Agreed. The idea that someone might have done horrible things while having good intentions is an apt lesson for us all. Caltech should absolutely keep him up on their website and official history, and discuss both his contributions and his shortcomings.
> From that PoV I would not try to erase their memories.
That's where we diverge. In no way are they actually erasing his memory. Naming buildings after people and building statues of people isn't just history, it's an endorsement. It is a group of people coming together saying "this person should be celebrated and held up as someone to be emulated".
There is no obligation for Caltech to continue to hold up Millikan as someone to be proud of, or as a name that deserves honor and emulation going forward. Nor does renaming a building mean that we're magically going to forget him. Keep him in the history books, but name the building after someone that students should look to emulate.
Ironically, renaming this building probably taught more people about Millikan than the building itself ever did. I think the number of people who actually learned about Millikan because of that building is approximately 0. Most either have no clue who he was (I'm in this category), or knew about him beforehand from his work in physics.
> This reminds me of the cultural revolution and the four olds (sì jiù).
Flip side of this; if China eventually became a democracy, would you demand that the worst perpetrators the cultural revolution get to keep their places of honor in schools and statues? Or would you understand why these hypothetical future citizens of this democracy might not be super happy about having their kids attend a school named after someone they consider to be an awful person?
I think fundamentally, everyone has a line where they say "that person is too awful to name a school building after", and I think it's a bit silly to pretend that saying that is to erase history or start a cultural revolution. You would probably be rightfully shocked and appalled if someone tried to make an Adolf Hitler memorial art school, and I doubt you would argue that renaming such a school back to something reasonable would be to "erase" Hitler's memory. The difference is that you don't seem to think that Millikan's behavior is bad enough to warrant renaming over, while I disagree. I think that's a perfectly reasonable disagreement to have too! Unlike Hitler, Millikan made great contributions to science, and doesn't have a directly attributed body count. But let's actually have that conversation rather than pretending that we'd forget about him if it weren't for that single building in Caltech that neither of us have probably been to or even heard of before this.
> There are other important things to attend to.
In times and places, I think that this can be an issue. But if Caltech has a single committee over the summer and decides to rename a building, are they really wasting any resources that could've been spent elsewhere? A few hours to discuss and create a single press release doesn't really seem like it's distracting too much from anything important, and is probably pretty minor in the grand scheme of low value university meetings. The cynical part of my soul wonders if the committee members ever do anything useful, and if having them off renaming buildings and similar instead kept them off the backs of the people who actually do real work around there.
I also think universities do all kinds of things that waste administrator's time, or cause them to have too many administrators in general, distract students from education, or otherwise waste resources. But of course concern over such things only get brough...
What I believe is that a person can be shitty, but also be a really great scientist to the point that we should overlook the personality and honor them for the contribution.
I mean, hell are we going to start scrubbing Edison's name off of everything just because all the PETA people are offended that he used to electrocute dogs, cats, horses (and even an elephant i believe) just to prove that inefficient DC is safer than Tesla's magical, "can transmit through the air and electrocute you to death while walking down the street" AC?
No we shouldn't just because we hate their personal beliefs and actions. First of all we shouldn't scrub them from the history books so we don't forget their atrocities and failings, but secondly we shouldn't scrub them out because the contribution has had a far more valuable and beneficial contribution to society.
Like I pointed out in another comment you say it's bad because the idea led to a horrifying geopolitical conclusion.
But what about all of the medical miracles that eugenics led to like establishments of bioengineering in both crops and microbiology?
You could literally say that people like Robert A Milikan are indirectly responsible for all the lives saved with this COVID vaccine just as much as he is indirectly responsible for all the lives lost in the holocaust.
Idk, was he probably a shitty human being? Sure but so were most of our grandparents. Are we going to start chiseling out the names on tombstones so society doesn't have to suffer the eyesores of their cultural blights?
Woodrow Wilson was probably the nadir of that ideological dead end: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-12-08/woodro...
The Cornerstone Speech is another example of science invoked in support of a terrible thing, in that case slavery, in juxtaposition to the religious zeal of the abolitionists: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto...
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
It’s a bit like statues. A statue in a museum is history. A statue in the town square is an honor or endorsement. They’re different things.
We're embracing all of the history in full, considering it and treating it the way we feel is right. We may revisit decades hence and treat it differently again, who knows? I don't see history being "erased" here.
So you're saying the way to prevent a repeat of the holocaust is to setup awards and honors in the name of Adolph Hitler?
It's just a name on a building.
No one is calling for this person to be erased from history. They are asking that he no longer be honoured as a consequence of what he said.
Indeed, teaching people what he did and said will be the best way to prevent history from repeating.
But he said a lot! E.g., Millikan contributed greatly to science and had some views that are unacceptable today. So do we celebrate his useful contributions or do we punish him after death by un-naming buildings, etc.? Could we not possibly do both?
What if we found a letter written by Albert Einstein that derogatorialy used the N-word? Would we never again speak of Einstein, of his opposition to nuclear warfare, of his personal trials as a Jew, etc? Would every reference to Einstein initiate a conversation that ended with the mention of his (here hypothetical) N-word letter?
The end-game of this woke attitude is the death of history (since no history will be acceptable and all will be subject to revision downward at any time) and, in the long run, the end of social knowledge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
> Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
A classic example of herding[1].
0: https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm
1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollst...
[0] https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...
The case is much stronger with W.E.B Du Bois. Neither applied Social Darwinian thinking in racial dimensions, though. And that seems to be what puts Millikan over the top. His racial animus seems to have been rather typical of whites back then. (And arguably up until the 1980s or later!) On the other hand, his aggressive advocacy for applied eugenics seems exceptional, and therefore arguably places more culpability for the harms upon his shoulders. But eugenics doesn't play well in public debates; racism is what revs people's engines, especially on the left. So not surprising how people keep hammering on his racism.
Many a famous person has been an absolute arsehole. That doesn't mean he wasn't productive to the world as a whole.
If we remove Millikan, do we also remove Napoleon? Do we also remove George Washington? Do we also remove Edison?
Knee-jerk reactions require more thought before doing what is the first thought.
The answer used to be "no", but now I suppose it's becoming "yes". No historical figure is safe from being cancelled. Pick some random but important historical figure. Now google the name along with the word "racist" and you'll find some opinion piece about how that person was racist and needs to be cancelled. Henry Ford, Mark Twain, heck, you can even find articles about Abraham Lincoln holding "problematic" views.