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The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

#111

Post by apcragg »

dcwca wrote: post #110
matte_black wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eugenics doesn’t inherently lead to human rights violations. You can define better genes objectively by looking at genes of people that live the longest and with the least health issues. Natural selection is poor at selecting for traits that lead to longevity.

> Eugenics doesn’t inherently lead to human rights violations Right, but it does in practice. What if we found that Japanese people lived the longest? Would we only allow Japanese to breed? Or bias towards them? How would you qualify how “Japanese” someone’s genes are? Can you not see how this leads to a toxic culture of racism?

I can't believe this person is honestly advocating for eugenics. That should have died in 1945.

Re: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

#112

Post by j45 »

WalterBright wrote: post #5

These days it's fashionable to venerate Tesla and denigrate Edison. Tesla's contributions to AC motors and power are great and beyond dispute. The others, not so much. For those who like to denigrate Edison by comparison, I challenge to read "Edison" by Josephson and maintain that opinion. I.e. Tesla transformed AC power, Edison transformed multiple foundational industries.

It's ironic this comment is attempting to eliminate comparisons between the two, when it was actually fashionable to let Tesla's story languish in obscurity for nearly 70 years while beautifying Edison towards some sainthood.

As a kid really into science I was a little appaled when I learned how little Tesla was included in curriculum, despite his enormous impact on today's age.

The recent attention on Tesla barely existed 10-12 years ago. I remember reading random websites wondering why he wasn't better known.

Beginning to give him his due has nothing to do with Edison for me, only that Tesla easily has a place right next to Edison and anyone else, which he was denied at the cost of folks like Edison.

In the eyes of some, part of the smell test Edison didn't pass was Tesla appeared genuinely an order of magnitude higher in some cases in innovating entirely new areas and received very little long term recognition for it. Tesla's didn't just make AC, he invented radio, xrays, transmitting electricity wirelessly, and using the ionosphere in new ways. It was straight up mad science perhaps a little like Einstein or Da Vinci.

Edison was a great business man. He did appear to take a prolific spitball approach to innovation in the eyes of some.

Edisons treatment of his contemporaries, can't be explained away when it wasn't held against him ultimately. It's fine to defend one's self, if one is that talented.. why proactively trash others? It didn't seem the same about Tesla, maybe because he wasn't American?

I don't know how Edison's top 10 inventions might compare to Tesla's top 10 innovations.

This is about giving Tesla his due for a society that was focused instead on a cult of personality towards others instead of recognizing things on their merit.

Re: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

#113

Post by j45 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #40
WalterBright wrote: post #5

These days it's fashionable to venerate Tesla and denigrate Edison. Tesla's contributions to AC motors and power are great and beyond dispute. The others, not so much. For those who like to denigrate Edison by comparison, I challenge to read "Edison" by Josephson and maintain that opinion. I.e. Tesla transformed AC power, Edison transformed multiple foundational industries.

I wonder if it's similar to the popular perception of Jobs and Woz. Steve Jobs is often regarded (for the right reasons) as an arrogant, unforgiving CEO who excelled by exploiting the works of a benign genius. The truth is, however exceptional Woz was, there are far more brilliant hackers than people who transform industries.

I was thinking about the same thing reading the comments here. Both may have innovated in their own ways but the overlap between their worlds may have helped propel certain innovations forward.

Re: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

#114

Post by obscurantist »

joering2 wrote: post #25

My tinfoil hat tells me that either neither Tesla nor Einstein were humans, OR both were in some sort of communication with aliens. I know on its face it sounds like horseshit... but with over 100 billion people ever lived on earth... how come we have so few geniuses that truly push the whole human kind forward 10x faster than all people combined thru a previous ten centuries? Even more - if we assume its just a coin…

There are maybe four people alive I would class alongside Einstein and Tesla in terms of sheer cognitive power:

Murray Gell-Mann

Grigori Perelman

Ed Witten

Saul Kripke

Re: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

#115

Post by MaxBarraclough »

rxhernandez wrote: post #62
WalterBright wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more of an indication of how our modern sensibilities have changed. When I was a kid I was taken to the local zoo, where lions were displayed in small, bare concrete cages. I felt sorry for them, and did not enjoy the trip. But that doesn't mean the zookeepers were bad people, people just thought differently about animals in those days.

You're right, it really is too difficult to live and let live. It's really too difficult to think, is everyone benefitting all that much from the pain I'm inflecting on whatever I'm hurting. Please, these are adults that knew what they were doing and that the pain they were causing didn't satisfy some need, but some want. If you don't want to go down in history as an asshole, don't be a dick when you or your tribe ar…

> these are adults that knew what they were doing

Not so. Mainstream attitudes on whether animal are even capable of suffering, have changed radically.

> that the pain they were causing didn't satisfy some need, but some want

It seems more likely that the poor conditions were because of underfunding, than sadism.

Re: The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

#116

Post by wellboy »

matte_black wrote: post #105
dcwca wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it leads to human rights atrocities, and there is no way to define “better” genes objectively.

Eugenics doesn’t inherently lead to human rights violations. You can define better genes objectively by looking at genes of people that live the longest and with the least health issues. Natural selection is poor at selecting for traits that lead to longevity.

Theoretically, maybe it doesn't but practically, it has terrible consequences, especially in countries where human rights aren't a thing anyway, it will lead to dystopian concepts. I would suggest to read up on eugenics a bitZ
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