Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

Those that denigrate Edison in favour of Tesla often ignore or aren’t aware of Tesla’s own dark side.

Here’s an article, a few years ago and also from Smithsonian Magazine, telling of some of Tesla’s disturbing opinions.

For example, advocating forced eugenics to weed out ‘undesirables’ from the human race. He felt that the forced sterilisation of criminals and mentally ill in Nazi Germany didn’t go far enough.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nikola-tesla-the-euge...

View on HN

I'll play devil's advocate, since there's more truth to Tesla's words than you're giving him credit for. The comforts of modern society allow the proliferation of dysgenic traits. The system rewards reckless breeding of people who don't have the means to support children. Genetic selection happens whether we talk about it or not. We meddled with better pets, livestock and crops. Why not give improved humans a try? You don't need compulsory programs: abortion clinics are very efficient and completely voluntary.

So you're saying we should give eugenics a try?

Why not really? It doesn’t affect anyone currently alive and only helps promote better genes, which is what the human race is doing now anyway, but very inefficiently.

I’d like to see it happen. The only thing that gives me pause is what if we accidentally make humans with critical genetic flaws we did not see coming, or low genetic diversity.

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.

Because longevity isn't essential to our survival. You're suggesting that diverting energy away from other traits in favour of longevity would have no negative impact.

IMO there are all sorts of possible negative side effects that might emerge. Like a longer life making us more cautious, individualistic, and short sighted (not personally but on a species scale). You could argue this is already happening due to environmental comforts and medical advances. In fact dramatically tweaking a trait like longevity for a new generation would likely have a massive impact on their personality and culture... talk about a generation gap.

> 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.

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

You might feel differently if the state decided you don’t meet the minimum requirements for permission to breed.

Your comment doesn't contain an argument, and it is even attacking a strawman as the GP did explicitly call out non-compulsory as an aspect of it. But I will bite anyway.

Taken GP's reasoning to the extreme, what do you think if the state prohibit someone from having children if (hypothetically) it is known at 100% certainty that their offsprings will inherit a horrible genetic diseases that causes pain and suffering their whole lives, and their life expectancy is 15 years?

Bit too big brother for me... and very short sighted. Diversity in both genetics and environment have been essential to survival and evolution. Haven't we already proven that monoculture is a bad thing in the long term? I'm reminded of the bananas from the 60s...

We're not nearly competent enough yet to play god at this level. It's scary knowing there are egos chomping at the bit to do it.

Ill respond by simply pointing out that eugenics doesn’t work to remove “dysgenic” traits Nazi Germany eliminated 70-100% of their schizophrenics and just a generation or two later Germany has levels of schizophrenic patients same as everyone else. It even had higher than normal levels after the eradication. Killing off people with shitty genetic traits simply doesn’t work to reduce it in your population.

https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/36/1/...

Surely there must be some traits we could improve by selective breeding. Strength, intelligence, better digestion. Applying that study to anything other than schizophrenia is a faulty generalization. My post was not meant to promote any violent resolution. Your comment was fascinating and I'll take a deeper look at that paper.

To be fair to Tesla, and to history, this was pretty normal at the time. The Supreme Court even endorsed it: in fact, they didn't even just endorse it, it was appatently so important that they ruled in 1927 in Buck vs Bell that sterilization of the unfit did not violated due process (what!?).[1]

It took generations of education, whatever you want to call it, to change our collective minds.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

To add to that, California was still force sterilizing people as recently as the 1960s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com