7 ms·

Broken Genius – the case of William Shockley (2013)

39 points by jkuria 8y ago

jkuria 8y ago
Saw the movie Blackkklansman yesterday and in the new member induction scene, he is mentioned as a Klansman and a friend of the grand wizard. I got curious and did a lil research and sure enough...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
j9461701 8y ago
>Psychologists and biologists currently regard the controversy as outdated, and speak of the interaction between genes and environment. As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely. We've found even enviroment itself is heavily impacted by genetics, as people tend to strongly self-select what kind of day-to-day conditions they live in. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/ >Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races. Considering the Manhattan project had so many Eastern European jews involved it was joking referred to as a "Hungarian high school science fair project" this seems unlikely. But it wouldn't be the first time a racist ostensibly interested only in 'the biology of intelligence' conspicuously ignored the Jewish community's intellectual accomplishments.
- cfmcdonald 8y ago
  > As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely. How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits are 100% heritable"?
  - js8 8y ago
    I am not OP, but I guess it's a question of degree.. The reason why this is so controversial is that some people (not necessarily biologists) wanted nature to support the moral systems that are based on equality among people. So they didn't want the nature to have a significant effect. But the effect of the nature is significant. In this sense, this argument was lost. It's kind of natural that we want to tie our moral system to some objective, well, nature; for the sake of argument. I don't think it's generally tenable, but I do it myself in certain sense, too. People who argue with god often do it, too, by claiming there is some objective moral system that this god wants. Another example, from the opposite (liberal) camp, is claiming that being gay is unchangeable for biological reasons. We want nature to support our (I am a liberal too, in fact) moral wish that gays shouldn't be discriminated. And if it was true that being gay is unchangeable, you cannot so easily dismiss the behavior as immoral. So yeah, in that sense the nature won - it didn't let to lend itself to any ideology, however likable it might have been.
  - j9461701 8y ago
    The state of the field previously was anyone could be anything in the right enviroment. For example the following quote from John B. Watson: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." For many years this blank slate view predominated, on every topic of human nature. Leading to some tragic results occasionally, such as the case of David Reimer in which attempts to socialize him as a girl after a botched circumcision against his will likely contributed to his suicide. Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that this view was faulty. But more than that, the wishy washy "everything is nature and nurture all mixing together" fallback position was although not explicitly wrong profoundly disingenuous. Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the debate, as profoundly as it was ever possible to win it, and it annoys me seeing equivocation in the discussion of the matter.
    - 8y ago
- js8 8y ago
  "Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races." I think it shows how easy is it to misapply the idea of genetic (or natural) origin of intelligence. Jews were regarded as inferior in intelligence despite the fact that there is an actual evidence that they are not. I believe that some humans simply want to be xenophobes, and the actual reality doesn't matter for the categorization. In any case, I find the characters like Shockley to be very interesting. Apparently, they want to change society for the better but somehow "forget" that people have agency; the reason why to change society should always come from the wishes of individuals. There is an element of psychopath here, regarding people as things, trying to arrange them (the society) so that it follows certain pattern that is pleasant to the eye of the person who wants to arrange it. And this is not tied to any particular ideology. Plato, Ayn Rand, Lenin, Shockley.. they all wanted a very similar thing.
  - rphlx 8y ago
    I certainly agree with the top half of your post but I believe the bottom is mischaracterizing Rand. As far as I know she did not wish to form a violent authoritarian state a la Lenin to "plan" society into a certain pattern. She seemed to think her desires would, when enough constraints on reasoned self-interest were removed, realize themselves through individual action. And she certainly did not forget that individuals have agency; on the contrary, Objectivism relies on individual self-interest to the intentional exclusion of pretty much all else.
    - js8 8y ago
      Ah, I see, perhaps I am being unfair to her. I deliberately omitted Marx from the list for a reason - by your description, his views were somewhat similar to Rand, not prescriptive, but descriptive. That is, if we just stop meddling with the human nature, we will arrive at society that looks like <whatever they wrote about>. Unfortunately, neither in Marx's or Rand's case, this is not what will happen. Both are utopian. But yeah, in my post, I should have probably used somebody who is more prescriptive of the society based on selfishness than Rand. I think somebody like Hayek would likely fit the bill better.
strken 8y ago
For some reason, I'm getting a 404. https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavoulian.com/2013/04/05/broken-genius-the-case-of-william-shockley/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavo...
zik 8y ago
Shockley was apparently awful to work for and reportedly tried to steal the credit for Bardeen and Brattain's transistor work. All in all he doesn't seem to have been a very nice person. "He (Shockley) called both Bardeen and I in separately, shortly after the demonstration, and told us that sometimes the people who do the work don’t get the credit for it." "Shockley took the lion’s share of the credit in public for the invention of transistor, which led to a deterioration of Bardeen’s relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management however consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor." https://alixus.wordpress.com/undeserved-nobel-prizes-transistor-2/ https://alixus.wordpress.com/undeserved-nobel-prizes-transis... Of course the FET transistor was actually invented by Lilienfeld twenty years earlier and was long since patented. Shockley and team were aware of it and referenced it in their own work. They were working around Lilienfeld's patent by doing things slightly differently with the BJT. So awarding Shockley's team the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor seems to overlook poor old Lilienfeld rather badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld And in the end the transistors in your CPU are FETs derived from Lilienfeld's design, not the BJT of Shockley's team.
- slededit 8y ago
  FETs weren't desirable at the time though - which is why they didn't attain widespread use. Its very difficult to get linear behavior from a FET and at that time the primary use of the devices was analogue in linear mode. The BJT was more than just a patent workaround. These days we can make linear FETs although they are still rare. Most are intended to be used in saturation as part of digital circuitry.
  - taneq 8y ago
    Ironic that BJTs were developed to work around FETs' undesirable nonlinearities for analogue systems, while now FETs are used to work around BJTs' undesirable inefficiency in switchmode use. Just goes to show that in engineering, "how good is X?" is a meaningless question without saying what X is used for.
kkylin 8y ago
Off-topic, but for anyone who didn't know, Bardeen really was one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen . Which makes this all the more remarkable: http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys798S/anlage/Phys798SAnlageSpring06/Josephson%20Physics%20Today%205153075.pdf http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys798S/anlage/Phys798SA... .
lordgrenville 8y ago
A lot of this material is also covered in The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's great book about Bell Labs.
j7ake 8y ago
The thing that bothers me about Shockley is how he was actually not that involved in developing the transistor. Bardeen and Brattain got it working without much input from Shockley. But once they got it working, Shockley swooped in and tried to take most of the credit. That's not how to live life.

39 points by jkuria 8y ago

Saw the movie Blackkklansman yesterday and in the new member induction scene, he is mentioned as a Klansman and a friend of the grand wizard. I got curious and did a lil research and sure enough...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

j9461701 8y ago

>Psychologists and biologists currently regard the controversy as outdated, and speak of the interaction between genes and environment. As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely. We've found even enviroment itself is heavily impacted by genetics, as people tend to strongly self-select what kind of day-to-day conditions they live in. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/ >Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races. Considering the Manhattan project had so many Eastern European jews involved it was joking referred to as a "Hungarian high school science fair project" this seems unlikely. But it wouldn't be the first time a racist ostensibly interested only in 'the biology of intelligence' conspicuously ignored the Jewish community's intellectual accomplishments.

cfmcdonald 8y ago
> As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely. How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits are 100% heritable"?
- js8 8y ago
  I am not OP, but I guess it's a question of degree.. The reason why this is so controversial is that some people (not necessarily biologists) wanted nature to support the moral systems that are based on equality among people. So they didn't want the nature to have a significant effect. But the effect of the nature is significant. In this sense, this argument was lost. It's kind of natural that we want to tie our moral system to some objective, well, nature; for the sake of argument. I don't think it's generally tenable, but I do it myself in certain sense, too. People who argue with god often do it, too, by claiming there is some objective moral system that this god wants. Another example, from the opposite (liberal) camp, is claiming that being gay is unchangeable for biological reasons. We want nature to support our (I am a liberal too, in fact) moral wish that gays shouldn't be discriminated. And if it was true that being gay is unchangeable, you cannot so easily dismiss the behavior as immoral. So yeah, in that sense the nature won - it didn't let to lend itself to any ideology, however likable it might have been.
- j9461701 8y ago
  The state of the field previously was anyone could be anything in the right enviroment. For example the following quote from John B. Watson: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." For many years this blank slate view predominated, on every topic of human nature. Leading to some tragic results occasionally, such as the case of David Reimer in which attempts to socialize him as a girl after a botched circumcision against his will likely contributed to his suicide. Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that this view was faulty. But more than that, the wishy washy "everything is nature and nurture all mixing together" fallback position was although not explicitly wrong profoundly disingenuous. Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the debate, as profoundly as it was ever possible to win it, and it annoys me seeing equivocation in the discussion of the matter.
  - 8y ago
js8 8y ago
"Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races." I think it shows how easy is it to misapply the idea of genetic (or natural) origin of intelligence. Jews were regarded as inferior in intelligence despite the fact that there is an actual evidence that they are not. I believe that some humans simply want to be xenophobes, and the actual reality doesn't matter for the categorization. In any case, I find the characters like Shockley to be very interesting. Apparently, they want to change society for the better but somehow "forget" that people have agency; the reason why to change society should always come from the wishes of individuals. There is an element of psychopath here, regarding people as things, trying to arrange them (the society) so that it follows certain pattern that is pleasant to the eye of the person who wants to arrange it. And this is not tied to any particular ideology. Plato, Ayn Rand, Lenin, Shockley.. they all wanted a very similar thing.
- rphlx 8y ago
  I certainly agree with the top half of your post but I believe the bottom is mischaracterizing Rand. As far as I know she did not wish to form a violent authoritarian state a la Lenin to "plan" society into a certain pattern. She seemed to think her desires would, when enough constraints on reasoned self-interest were removed, realize themselves through individual action. And she certainly did not forget that individuals have agency; on the contrary, Objectivism relies on individual self-interest to the intentional exclusion of pretty much all else.
  - js8 8y ago
    Ah, I see, perhaps I am being unfair to her. I deliberately omitted Marx from the list for a reason - by your description, his views were somewhat similar to Rand, not prescriptive, but descriptive. That is, if we just stop meddling with the human nature, we will arrive at society that looks like <whatever they wrote about>. Unfortunately, neither in Marx's or Rand's case, this is not what will happen. Both are utopian. But yeah, in my post, I should have probably used somebody who is more prescriptive of the society based on selfishness than Rand. I think somebody like Hayek would likely fit the bill better.

strken 8y ago

For some reason, I'm getting a 404. https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavoulian.com/2013/04/05/broken-genius-the-case-of-william-shockley/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180905024656/https://rupensavo...

zik 8y ago

Shockley was apparently awful to work for and reportedly tried to steal the credit for Bardeen and Brattain's transistor work. All in all he doesn't seem to have been a very nice person. "He (Shockley) called both Bardeen and I in separately, shortly after the demonstration, and told us that sometimes the people who do the work don’t get the credit for it." "Shockley took the lion’s share of the credit in public for the invention of transistor, which led to a deterioration of Bardeen’s relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management however consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor." https://alixus.wordpress.com/undeserved-nobel-prizes-transistor-2/ https://alixus.wordpress.com/undeserved-nobel-prizes-transis... Of course the FET transistor was actually invented by Lilienfeld twenty years earlier and was long since patented. Shockley and team were aware of it and referenced it in their own work. They were working around Lilienfeld's patent by doing things slightly differently with the BJT. So awarding Shockley's team the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor seems to overlook poor old Lilienfeld rather badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld And in the end the transistors in your CPU are FETs derived from Lilienfeld's design, not the BJT of Shockley's team.

slededit 8y ago
FETs weren't desirable at the time though - which is why they didn't attain widespread use. Its very difficult to get linear behavior from a FET and at that time the primary use of the devices was analogue in linear mode. The BJT was more than just a patent workaround. These days we can make linear FETs although they are still rare. Most are intended to be used in saturation as part of digital circuitry.
- taneq 8y ago
  Ironic that BJTs were developed to work around FETs' undesirable nonlinearities for analogue systems, while now FETs are used to work around BJTs' undesirable inefficiency in switchmode use. Just goes to show that in engineering, "how good is X?" is a meaningless question without saying what X is used for.

kkylin 8y ago

Off-topic, but for anyone who didn't know, Bardeen really was one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen . Which makes this all the more remarkable: http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys798S/anlage/Phys798SAnlageSpring06/Josephson%20Physics%20Today%205153075.pdf http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys798S/anlage/Phys798SA... .

lordgrenville 8y ago

A lot of this material is also covered in The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's great book about Bell Labs.

j7ake 8y ago

The thing that bothers me about Shockley is how he was actually not that involved in developing the transistor. Bardeen and Brattain got it working without much input from Shockley. But once they got it working, Shockley swooped in and tried to take most of the credit. That's not how to live life.