9 ms·
New Da Vinci bio portrays a man obsessed with knowledge, impossible to know
- iaw 9y agoThere is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as abrasive and severely arrogant.
- gizmodo59 9y agoWhile I'm not sure about Da Vinci and Newton, Einstein was always humble
- maxxxxx 9y agoWhen you read about his relationship with his wife and children he was not exactly easy or nice.
- on_and_off 9y agoWhile I admire him and read his writings with a lot of interest, I have got to admit : it sounds like he was a complete prick to absolutely all the women in his life.
- agumonkey 9y agothe intimacy of family relationships are a different matter altogether
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dogruck 9y agoFor much of history, men's relationships with wives and children was not held to the modern loving standards. Isn't this analogous to noting that "founding fathers owned slaves!"
- maxxxxx 9y agoI don't think it was ever common that a husband would write to his wife a letter clearly laying out rules like in this letter: http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/04/einsteins-demands.html http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/04/einsteins-demands.html No trying to demonize him but this definitely a little unusual.
- dogruck 9y agoI think by the standards of history, that letter would be deemed kind. Keep in mind that often times wives were essentially viewed as property, and subject to extreme (physical) abuse. And of course that hasn't stopped. I'm not supporting that behavior, of course.
- red75prime 9y ago> you will stop talking to me if I request it; I guess I can relate to what was happening there, and I can't dismiss the possibility of (extreme) psychological abuse from the other side.
- pizza 9y agoDid she not write one for him?
- indubitable 9y agoOutright dismissing quantum mechanics because of a personal belief in an linearly causal universe is not really what one would call humble. He's full of rather snarky quotes to express such dismissal ranging from "God does not play dice with the universe." to describing quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." Interestingly, the sarcasm of the latter has been lost in modern context and the former mostly used as an false indicator of religion from Einstein. I think Einstein's perceived humility was mostly a consequence of the fact that he was mostly right on everything he said, and people quickly acknowledged as much. Relativity overtook aether theory shockingly quickly for instance. There's the old quote that science progresses one funeral at a time. The meaning there being that people tend to obstinately hold onto past beliefs, so it is frequent that it takes the passing of one generation for progress to be effectively made by another. One of his only views that was not widely accepted was that of his view of quantum mechanics - and that's where his snidery started to emerge. But in other cases having your revolutionary ideas rapidly and universally adopted is going to make it rather easier to speak softly knowing your big stick is certainly up to task. And that's probably one too many quotes for a single post...
- n4r9 9y agoYou're being unfair to the poor guy. It's not as if those quotations are without context and basis. It's also not as if he doesn't have a whole raft of other recorded quotations which provide evidence for his humility. Consider, for example, > A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving... The dice quote makes more sense when you consider Einstein's personal philosophy, which had led him to discover relativity and aspects of QM. He strongly believed that once you uncover nature's secrets, not only do you understand the universe more, but you see why nothing else could possibly have been the case. Quantum mechanics as it was formulated/interpreted in his time violated this principle, thus he was motivated to look for the deeper secret. We're still arguing whether there's something deeper to this day. The particular type of model Einstein was exploring may have been dismissed, but you cannot fault his motivation - all physicists need one.
- EGreg 9y agoI think Newton was, especially to women. But Da Vinci strikes me as much more cordial and eager to fit into higher society, at least in his younger years.
- mbesto 9y agoOut curiosity - how do you (both you and GP) come up with your conclusions without ever having met any of these people personally? It's a bit like the portrayal of Steve Jobs. Sure, I can read testimonies about how he was an asshole - but how would I know for sure?
- EGreg 9y agoJust triangulation and heuristics based on accounts of them and their own letters to others. Such as http://www.businessinsider.com/leonardo-da-vinci-cover-letter-from-1400s-2014-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/leonardo-da-vinci-cover-lette... Also Leonardo was a vegetarian, and that's another data point. It's all based on correlation basically.
- maxxxxx 9y agoYou can never know for sure but with enough data points you can draw some conclusions. For example, it seems Wozniak was/is a very nice guy where Jobs was a more difficult guy to say the least.
- benbreen 9y agoI’ve read some of Newton’s letters while doing research at the Royal Society archives. He definitely comes off as severely deficient in social skills just from the random sampling I looked at - I think one was complaining about his land lady offering him food. Granted, it’s impossible to know many things “for sure” in history but “Newton had a difficult personality” is a pretty good bet, based on those letters and the bios I’ve read. Another fun fact from the letters - Newton invited the con artist George Psalmanazar over for lunch at some point circa 1703. Psalmanazar claimed to be a Taiwanese prince but had long blonde hair and a faint French accent. Unclear if Newton was taken in, but Halley was able to stump him with an astronomy-based question. Sounds like something from the Baroque Cycle but it all really happened.
- numismatex 9y agoGotta love the modern stereotypes downplaying intelligence and pretty much put most intelligent people into that box unless they have celebrity or a large amount of money, and often even then.
- fao_ 9y agoI have grown up surrounded by two people with extraordinarily high IQs, and they were normal people. They have more curiosity than normal people, and they have lots of interests that span many, many subjects, but for all intents and purposes they are normal in manner and demeanor. This fashion for conflating intelligence (of all kinds) and egotism is utterly beyond me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- navigator01 9y agoAgreed. If you're really smart and a prick, well, then you're just a really smart prick. Intelligence and emotional mastery are divorced from one another.
- erasmuse 9y agoIntelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense. Their creativity is rather directed towards fitting in more effectively and being more social than the norm. Which in extreme cases looks like multiple personality disorder, i.e. changing one's responses according to context, the opposite of integrity, including the intellectual integrity required to create new stuff.
- fao_ 9y ago> most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a heavy love of language, a decent dollop of it. Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube-Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.
- gt_ 9y agoDid anyone else find the ostentacious sentence structuring in the article distracting, and a little infuriating? Sure, writing is an art form; I get it. I sometimes wonder if this very thing is what readers of The New Yorker actually want.
- s17n 9y agoI didn't... you mean the overuse of commas?
- gt_ 9y agoThat's the main thing, I think.
- marak830 9y agoThat depends on how you were taught, if you were taught using the Oxford style, than it really becomes more natural to write, as if you speak. An example being, each time you would make a slight pause in your sentence, than a comma is required, otherwise you would keep writing until a sentence has ended with a period, or as I was originally taught, a full colon.
- Retra 9y agoWhat is "Oxford style?" Do you have a reference? If you're talking about the 'Oxford comma', then that is definitely not a style advocating for gratuitous comma usage in general, only an extra one on the final item of a list. Outside of lists, commas are used to separate clauses. They are never used so separate subjects and verbs, as that is always awkward and superfluous. It has nothing to do with pauses, and much more to do with coordinating intonation patterns.
- empath75 9y agoThat’s very much the New Yorker style but I didn’t find it hard to read.
- gt_ 9y ago
- revmoo 9y agoCan we just all agree to stop posting articles with pop-ups?
- Alex3917 9y agoIf you're going to read one bio from HN today, the one to read is the Joni Mitchell one and not this: https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mitchell-pop-music-canon https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mit... (This one is also good, the Joni Mitchell one was just better.)
- partycoder 9y agoThe idea that Europe went from the middle ages into the Reinassance unassisted thanks to a handful of people in Italy is eurocentric revisionism. What really happened was: After the Spanish Reconquista (the fall of Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain), the Toledo school of translators translated all the material brought from early Islamic Universities (aka Madrasas) into Latin. Those books were then used in the first European universities and scholar centers such as Oxford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th... ...also the Islamic empire was razed to the ground by the Mongols after the Siege of Baghdad. A bunch of knowledge carefully collected for centuries conveniently fell in European hands and today we have this urban myth of people like Leonardo Da Vinci figuring it all out on his own. There is merit in the Reinassance and people like Leonardo, but they are a part of an uninterrupted chain of teaching and learning, not reclusive geniuses that came out with all the answers out of nowhere, a premise that has been used as the foundation for an arrogant sense of exceptionalism. You can downvote this all you want but it won't make it false.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoWho is denying that others had their own civilizations, cultures and inventions?
- partycoder 9y agoThat was not my point. My point is criticizing the revisionism surrounding the origins of the Renaissance and creating a more realistic measure of merit around the central figures of it.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoIf you haven't done so yet, read a PHP dissertation or a scientific paper. You'll notice dozens or hundreds or citations--recognizing other people's earlier contributions. The same with Da Vinci etc., they didn't reinvent the wheel but...
- eecc 9y ago
- rdslw 9y agoThis article is a (one of many) in recent time due to promotion of new book: https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501139150 https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/150... Not to deny Leonardo's might, but quite similar to the pattern of (e.g.) more Depeche Mode songs on the radio signals new album/tour.
- acdanger 9y agoYes. And it's a fact mentioned right in the first sentence. So what?
- rdslw 9y agoIt's not. There is nowhere stated: reason for this article is to promote the book sale. Knowing true reason/motivtion of somebody's actions is important. You can also draw conclusions if somebody is hiding their true motivation under pretext.
- maxerickson 9y agoI saw a feature about this book on CBS Sunday Morning that lead me to believe any biography written by Isaacson is likely to be a hagiography.
- durango 9y agoDo you, by any chance, have any information on Da Vinci that's negative?
- maxerickson 9y agoMy comment is about Isaacson. Unfortunately I haven't taken the time to read multiple biographies to try to put his books into reasonable context. My comment is an attempt at getting someone who may have to weigh in.
- drannex 9y agoThe book was published yesterday, and I just got it this morning. I just got finished with the first 150 pages, and this book is amazingly great at conveying how obsessed with knowledge he had while dissecting all of his works. Highly recommend everyone to read it.