The article opens with several references, from 1915 all the way to 1949, in which Einstein reports Hume's influence on him and says that without Hume it's possible he would never have come up with relativity. That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist. More importantly, though, this material is interesting and worth discussing rather than dismissing.

(That's in the site guidelines, by the way: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Thank you for the reminder. I was overly dismissive and I'm glad you called me out over it. To be more constructive though, I feel like the intersection of the sciences and philosophy now is purely driven by these kind of articles which seek to establish that in the past research ideas would borrow from concepts of philosophy. Globally education has shifted further and further from this view, and without articles like this, no living professional scientist would know Hume from Kant.

This declining relevance is true of other scientific works as well, but that is rarely touched upon. I suppose in some sense my comment expressed my annoyance that only philosophical roots are rediscovered every now and then.

You're being downvoted unfairly. There is of course a very simple reason why philosophy plays almost no role any longer, which was rightly pointed out by Stephen Hawking in 2010. Philosophers lack the mathematical training and maturity to follow what is going on in modern science. At Einstein's time this was not yet the case, at least Special Relativity was relatively easy to follow for philosophers (even though, to be fair, none of them managed to contribute anything of substance to it or anything of substance to early Quantum Mechanics).

It lasted up until the 1950s or so, and then philosophers started to fall behind. There has also be a substantial decline in math education for philosophers. Both Russell and Quine contributed directly to the foundations of mathematics, for instance. Even Kripke made substantial contributions to modal logic and semantic paradoxes. Nowadays you'll have to look very hard to even find a substantial contribution of a philosopher in logic, even though that's historically the mathematical discipline they know best.

As for the philosophical ideas without backing them up. People always grab some philosopher who had an idea and point out the "early roots", but they conveniently neglect the fact that simultaneously hundreds of other philosophers had patently absurd ideas as well. Even within philosophy there is a huge business based entirely on selection bias. People quote Aristotle as authoritative source, but of course only ever those parts of his work that remotely make sense. Democrit's theory of atoms is another typical example. It barely made sense at his time, and only so in opposition to other nonsense invented by "nature" philosophers then, yet he's misquoted as the inventor of the modern atom theory in every second slide show about chemistry.

That would seem reasonable if you consider Russell, for example, as a philosopher who knew mathematics.

But it seems equally valid to consider him a mathematician who knew philosophy. In which case, you could just as well frame the argument as mathematicians and scientists no longer have a good understanding of philosophy and are therefore incapable of contributing to the philosophy of their field.

I doubt that is anything to be concerned about, as we can reasonably expect that, among scientists, there will be a number following in the steps of Einstein and Bohr, taking a philospohically-minded approach to science - there's David Deutsch, for one. Ironically, many of the people objecting to Hawking's dismissal of philosophy offered, as counterpoint, the claim that Hawking's own work had philosophical components!

And there are a few philosophers, such as Tim Maudlin, who know the science well enough to persue its philosophical questions. Despite these exceptions, I think it is not unreasonable to ask if 21st. century academic philosophy has chosen to turn away from the philosophical issues of 21st. century fundamental science.

No-one is stopping philosophers from contributing to science.

Given the current state of the world, perhaps it's not a good thing that philosophical thinking has taken a backseat.

Please don't go on about downvotes. The site guidelines ask you not to "because it never does any good and it makes boring reading", and boy has that line held up after 10 years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Since we are throwing around shallow mantras in lieu of a discussion,

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

If my original thoughts on <that which is not to be discussed> bore you, I guess I'll skip my comparison of conditions around here to the peasant scene in "Monty Python's Holy Grail". [1]

On-list moderation makes boring reading, too. <Yawn.>

"Cheerio, old boy," as the gentry used to say.

--

[1] "Help, I'm being repressed...You saw him repressing me didn't you?" -- Michael

For sure, the moderation comments are tedious. If it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than to read [1].

However, even though they look the same as regular HN comments, they play a different role—they are out-of-band feedback signals which help the system regulate itself. Without them, the site guidelines would have negligible effect and HN would melt down into a hot core of rage and sensationalism.

One way to think of them is like a medicine which is toxic in its own right, but which you take when the alternative is worse. It would be wonderful if we could drop them altogether and have the site stay as good or better, but alas that's not an option.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The problem with a shallow dismissal is not just that it's thoughtless, but that it's thoughtless where everyone can read it. A downvote, in contrast, isn't something that wastes our reading time.

And there's also an element of fairness. Why should a thoughtless, low-effort comment require more effort to respond to?

> Einstein reports Hume's influence on him and says that without Hume it's possible he would never have come up with relativity. That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist.

I see what you're saying. If Einstein attributes his thinking to Hume's influence, nobody can deny it. That's true of admissions in a court of law, however, our understanding of how scientific ideas are generated lacks the same certainty. Personal reflection is no guarantee of insight into the formation of ideas.

Einstein's acknowledgement of Hume as an intellectual predecessor tells us he admires Hume. It doesn't tell us where Einstein's own thoughts came from. Our knowledge of neurology isn't advanced enough to draw that conclusion.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-...

What are you trying to say? It seems like the point you're making is that given a certain standard we are not able to say how someone's thoughts came to be for certain. But how is this a relevant or interesting point?

I am responding to dang's statement about Einstein's own analysis of the aetiology of his theory, for which he Einstein credits the influence of Hume.

Dang says "That's as solid evidence of a link as could exist."

I don't think it is the most solid evidence that could exist.

We don't even know how theories are formed in the mind, and we don't know the data format used by the brain. One day, we might be able to observe that empirically, in the same way we can examine source code versions of computer software in order to make informed statements about the aetiology of forked code. Today, we can't do that.

We can only guess at the origins of people's thoughts, and when the thoughts come from our own selves, no advantage or insight is conferred. That is considered in the Scientific American essay I linked to above. Do you have any constructive criticism to offer about that essay?

Einstein noted the limitations of this ontological discussion as well, in the preface clause of his remarks to Besso "In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater."

My point is that Einstein's awareness, like your own and my own awareness of where our own thoughts come from, is slim. That's an entirely different thing to wanting to associate ourselves and our ideas with great figures in history. On that point, Einstein and I both know that great minds think alike.