User talk:Starmagic

Einstein's learning disability?

 * Hi, I didn't mean to be a pain there, but the reason for my suspicion is that a lot of these claims about his difficulty in school and absentmindedness in life are seriously contested by historians. The famous "Einstein flunked math" claim is based on a misunderstanding of the grading system in Einstein's time, and as our article on Einstein says:
 * There are innumerable legends which suggest that Einstein was a poor student, a slow learner, or a sufferer of autism, dyslexia, and/or attention deficit disorder. According to the authoritative biography by Pais (page 36, among others), such legends are unfounded. An article in The Washington Post on April 24, 2001 further debunked these legends.
 * It's only because these claims have come up here before that I removed them without much comment (I considered leaving a message here, but never got to it). There are some people who claim that Einstein suffered from certain learning disabilities (i.e. autism), but like most cases of post-hoc attribution of mental disabilities, they remain pretty dubious diagnoses, from the point of view of historians, anyway.
 * There are a lot of myths floating around about world-class figures like Einstein, repeated by very smart and well-meaning people, so when it comes to things which have a high likelihood of being apocryphal, we tend to stray on the side of conservatism unless we have a really definitive statement supporting it. In this case, we have a fairly definitive statement saying that it is unlikely to be true (Pais's biography).
 * Hope that clears things up. --Fastfission 05:49, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Rachel, I posted this on the Albert Einstein talk page and am repeating it here:

"our article" that Fastfission referred to is the Wikipedia Albert Einstein article we are discussing. The WaPo article can be located by searching their on-line archives, which I've done for you; here's the abstract (it loads slowly; be patient -- make some coffee, walk the dog ...), you'll have to pay for the full article: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/71706692.html?dids=71706692:71706692&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&fmac=&date=Apr+24%2C+2001&author=&desc=EXTRA+CREDIT

P.S. What you need to understand about WP is that there is already a very large knowledgeable community of people who have added to the knowledge database, and there are demanding standards (policies) that "trivia" that you have "learned" but for which you cannot pinpoint "decades of documents" do not meet. Each of our "learn"ings, while they seem like facts to us are, in a more objective framework, merely our opinions in the absence of substantiation -- and there are policies against adding such opinions to WP articles; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines, which refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources

Of course, we're all human and fail to live up to these standards, but it's a goal to strive toward. You seem to be a diligent person who is open to such standards and quick to appreciate input (unfortunately, many contributors to WP stray very far from those traits), so you should fit in well here and will no doubt make some wonderful contributions. -- Jibal 12:01, 18 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Second that. Don't take reversion personally; when you gain more experience you will see that we have a problem with POV-pushing edits of Albert Einstein, and long-time editors of the physics pages have good reasons to be frustrated with editors who insist on repeating as true questionable urban legends concerning Einstein's alleged disabilities, personal life, blah, blah, blah. ---CH 03:31, 21 June 2006 (UTC)