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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think making someone a legend is the best way to celebrate an actual human being.

Leonardo da Vinci was human, he had flaws, he wasn't always right, and I think these are important things to point out in order to make the real achievements stand out.

Leonardo's flying machines were crap, which is to be expected when basic understanding of aerodynamics came hundreds of years after. Helicopters in particular are deceptively complex. And it would be a shame to put them on the same level as mechanisms he designed that actually worked.

I think it sets unreasonable expectations if you don't recognize the flaws of great men. And especially in science, being wrong happen, and it is not even a flaw.

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Thank you for setting the record straight. God forbid someone wants to have Leonardo Da Vinci as their personal idol.

I don't really understand nor respect such an opinion. It is putting yourself on a moral pedestal by pointing out the flaws of someone more accomplished than you. Superiority by proxy, and it adds nothing to the conversation.

No one has said to make a statue of him and celebrate it as deity. I'm saying it is not a FLAW to imagine and design something 500 years before we can build it in the first place. Of course it is faulty.

What have you designed that will be talked about in half a millenium?

Fair point.

However the idea is not to put myself on a pedestal. I am not special. Not only I have my own flaws, of course, but if you think I try to put myself on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci, which is true in some way, as we are both people, I also put you on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci.

I don't know you, but like me, you are probably not a genius people will hear about half a millenium later. But you probably have some qualities neither I nor Leonardo da Vinci have. And on these points, you would make a better role model.

> Leonardo da Vinci was human, he had flaws, he wasn't always right, and I think these are important things to point out in order to make the real achievements stand out.

I don’t think any, or many, people believe da Vinci had no flaws. He was, however, indisputably brilliant in many ways, and is the literal embodiment of the Renaissance Man / Polymath.

It takes a specific type of person to be confronted with a persons’ achievements and say “well, you know, they still had their flaws, and not all of their ideas worked.” Da Vinci was a known self-critic, nobody was harder on him than he was on himself: he lamented on his deathbed that he had offended god for not being better at his art.

I’m unsure what you are contributing to the discussion.

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