The Resurgence of Tesla Syndrome

It’s also a game of mere words. The author claims that Tesla, the company, was about “disruption“. Then, he contrasts this to true innovation, which, according to the author, is collective in nature. This is already a questionable claim (Lilienthal was laughed at when he built his first flying machines). But it also completely misses the purpose of the founding of Tesla. Which is the acceleration of the advent of sustainable energy consumption and production. How much more focused on the good of humanity as a collective can you get? (Let’s not even talk about SpaceX.)

That the author lists Elon Musk in the same sentence as Elizabeth Holmes, and does so without any qualification, to me, is testament to the fact that the author isn’t really seeking to understand anything and is merely going for clicks. Which is a pity, because the question of vanishing trust in institutions would have been a worthwhile topic.

Go home professor, you are drunk :D

Elizabeth Holes was successful? At what?

I think they were successful because they build companies that were successful.

> They’re a way of reminding everyone of who he is — that his capacity to transgress is the measure of his capacity to innovate profitably.

> Why has the idea that the best innovators are disruptive gained such traction over the past decade or so

I don't understand this, innovators were always disruptive. Usually its just not well document because it might be within a company and to the outside looks like incremental change.

> the end of the Cold War broke those connections.

Long before the Cold War ended, Ford/GM, IBM were long past their innovative glory days. Ford/GM were being crushed by Japan. And in other news, things like Vietnam had already broken much of that as well, if it ever existed.

> In the United States, about three-fourths of postsecondary faculty members are white.

This article seems to put a lot in racial terms. But it seems to me that the people who are most anti-science are bunch of white right wing people. They should be happy all those white professors are there and believe them.

Seems to me race really fails as an explanation here. Having more diverse professors will hardly get the alt-right and science back together. And for that matter far left wing considers the whole concept of race as a capitlaist distraction from class war.

The reality is that for the most part people never really believed these expert in a deep way, there was just very little way people could make that clear. Today every group/organization is pushing its own narrative of the world. In the past you needed a real ground movement to do that, the communists could do it (partly with state support) but other groups couldn't really do it.

Bottom-up Religious movements also clearly indicate this to me. These movement believe the most random absurd nonsense that is clearly not even anti-science but anti-basic reality and basic logic and still the often find huge amounts of support. And given my study of history, such movement are common all threw history.

> Innovation needs to come out of such communities, rather than imposed on them.

That is such a narrow demand. Innovations come from a place or company. There are 100000s of communities that could profit from GMO and in no future will every community ever figure out its own science and technology.

Other nations always had a difficult time to adopt technology and there was often debate, but most of the time technology won. As Stephan Kotkin says, modernisation is not a cultural but a geo-political process. Technology is adopted by other government and forced on their communities if they want them or not, because if they don't, their country will fall behind.

Never mind that, Tesla is more revered than Edison because Edison had an army of men [1] working for him and often took credit for their work. Afaik, Tesla invented on his own from the fruits of his amazing brain.

[1] Even Bill Wilson of Alcoholics Anonymous was offered a job by Edison:

"It also led to his first brush with fame when he was featured in a New York Times article discussing a test given by Thomas Edison to prospective employees. Bill Wilson was one of the few applicants to be offered a position with Edison, but for reasons known only to Wilson he opted against taking it"

https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&co...