Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

This is bothersome as I have no beef with Tesla but his history of eugenics promotion gets swept under the carpet. His business failures, of course, have nothing to do with poorly thought out concepts and questionable return on investment, but by dirty tricks by Edison. Its also worth pointing out most, if not all of Tesla's patents, are based on previous works and are not original works.

Apparantly, Tesla fandom is impossible without absolutely hating Edison, which is bizarre. That's like being unable to appreciate Mercedes without hating Porsche. There's this terrible whitewashing of history with Tesla. His advocates clean up his image and purposely turn the narrative away from him toward Edison when presented with any criticisms.

I'd like this museum to show us the historical Tesla, not the fanboy generated meme that appears in web comics. I took my wife to a Tesla presentation at a science musueum in Milwaukee a couple years ago and it was the most shrill and factually questionable presentation I've ever seen. It was more or less an hour of Edison bashing with hints toward things like time travel, death rays, and free energy. I want Tesla to get his due, but not the whitewashed grandfatherly Tesla of meme legend, but the real very flawed guy. A bright engineer who failed in business for valid reasons.

I guess everyone likes an underdog story, but this one is beyond reasonable.

Eugenics quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1010618-the-year-2100-will-s...

While eugenics is indefensible, it was an extremely popular theory at the time with support from a large portion of the scientific community.

I'm not saying we should whitewash history and avoid talking about this detail of his life at all costs, but it is not a huge black dot on his record either that is relevant to the narrative of his life. Plenty of worthwhile individuals in history were slave owners. Homophobia only became socially unacceptable in the last decade. You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures.

> You can't always apply modern standards of morality to historical figures.

That's fine, but lets understand that this applies to Edison as well. Tesla fanatics judge him by modern business practices and regulations, but Tesla gets the hand-wringing reply of "but but at the time..." which seems unfair.

Lets also get something straight, its one thing to have a positive view of eugenics and another to be a fervent supporter. Tesla published that screed in, what we would call a sci-fi or futurist magazine, and signed his name to it in 1935, during the height of Jewish persecution in Germany. As an educated Serbian I'm sure he was fully aware of this.

Eugenics received widespread support pretty much until the truth came out about the treatment of the Jews in Germany, which is when the supporters suddenly woke up and understood what the realization of those ideas inevitably leads to.

But that truth was not fully revealed until 1945 with the liberation of various concentration camps. Until then, most details and rumors about the camps was dismissed as idle propaganda because noone believed the reality could possibly be so shocking.

In 1935, little was known about what was going on in with the Jews in Germany, and most of the really extreme ideas were not implemented yet. What discrimination occurred was not unique in Germany, as most nations of Europe practiced some minor forms of tacitly-approved anti-semitism

>But that truth was not fully revealed until 1945 with the liberation of various concentration camps.

This is harmful revisionism. What was going on in Germany in the 1930s and the laws and actions against Jews were well known at the time around the world.

Are you saying that what was going on at the camps was well known across the world in the 1930s, even though it wasn't even happening yet? Hitler was practicing on the mentally disabled, handicapped, and the poor at the time.

If you're saying that racial laws and discrimination against Jews were well known, that's clearly true. Eugenics has nothing to do with fair treatment, though, it has to do with sterilization and extermination. Discrimination against Jews by law in Europe is older than Christianity.

Just like what is going on with the Australian aborigines and the laws governing their 'management as a species' until the 80's are widely known around the world too, right?

(Hint: Australia was practicing real race-based eugenics programs until the 80's. Australian aborigines' weren't even considered human beings until the late 60's.. the point is that atrocities can occur right in front of our eyes, and if we're not willing to see them, they can just stay there ..)

Antisemitism is different than eugenics in fact, if not in spirit. Eugenics is the conceit that elites amongst the population should pick the winners of this generation in order to 'improve' the next. Antisemitism is saying that there's something in the nature of Jewish people that is bad for society in general.

One is about picking winners; the other is an opinion on how to pick them.

Except picking winners often breaks down to "acceptable" races and ethnicities vs the unacceptable ones. In this case the Jews were unacceptable.

Do you know the movie Idiocracy? That is basically propaganda for that idea.

You have to see that in context, this was before the second world war and he wasn't aware that in the future you can manipulate/analyze genes.

Today he would probably just be an advocate for that kind of technology.

Definitely not an easy topic, but also not black and white.

Maybe there is more from him, but your source indicates an opinion like that.

It's easy to absolutely hate Edison without being obsessed with Tesla.

As for his beliefs on eugenics expressed in that quote, they were very popular at the time and not even particularly illiberal by contemporary standards - being more associated with a sort of scientific socialism like the Fabians - unlike the beliefs of Ford, or Shockley, for example, which were far to the right of their peers.

"Its also worth pointing out most, if not all of Tesla's patents, are based on previous works and are not original works."

As is every other patent ever. No scientific breakthrough or cutting edge device is ever created out of thin air. Nearly all of them are through combining and expounding upon existing theory and research. Relativity, for all its brilliance, was an extension of existing thought in theoretical physics at the time that had been coming to a head over the course of centuries prior to that. It is no coincidence that so many great discoveries and inventions in recent history have ended in a race to the patent office or a highly publicized science drama between great minds. Often these great thinkers are working on the same things at the same time because those are the subjects the scientific world is chattering about. Even so, Tesla created a number of things, such as radio control, that were well ahead of his contemporaries and immensely improved upon existing ideas such as Edison's DC systems. He is definitely worth some fair criticism, but not on this basis.

As to his business success, I can hardly see how that's even relevant. Few great scientists have also been great entrepreneurs. I'll agree he didn't fail solely on the basis of Edison's supposed feud with him, but neither does his lack of success at business diminish him as a successful engineer and scientist.

Beginning to resemble American politics. A backlash from our reaction to the original backlash.

I admired Tesla's research. Now I've heard his words on eugenics, my admiration only grows. Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed.

Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention

We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of national heroes (including Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg) were proponents.

The "real" problem of Eugenics is that, much like Communism inevitably mutates in an ugly direction, no matter what Eugenics starts as, it virtually always turns into something really, really ugly where some group of people, no matter what pretty words they may use to draw a veil of obfuscation over their actions, are just killing off some group they don't like.

Eugenics generally gets lumped into the activities of the Nazis leading up to and during WW2. Because of this, most people probably don't know that the United States and its citizenry were fairly fond of it and put it into practice regularly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

Tesla: "prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization"

Who decides who is "unfit"? In the not too distant past, and possibly even today, that might include the non-white, non-straight, non-wealthy, etc. I find it incredibly scary that you could so easily agree that others should decide who gets to enact their human instincts. Let's face it, it would almost certainly be old, white, wealthy men that would make those decisions.

That program is extremely controversial, as your link says.

Drug addiction is all about the inability to commit to long term plans in favour of the quick short term happiness. Drug addicts are not capable of making rational decisions when faced with cash on the spot. There is a reason why we don't have a problem with boxing or MMA, but "bum fights" is unethical and looked down upon.

Offering drug addicts money for sterilization is unbelievably unethical. It is reinforcing the idea in their minds that their addiction is irreparable, probably guaranteeing after the fact that they will never seek help and recover. And if they do turn their lives around and are faced with different priorities than they did during addiction? Too bad so sad?

By the way, I'm not at all expecting to change your mind on this. Given your use of phrases like "left-wing metropolitan elites", I don't see how you could possibly be interested in a debate that involves you questioning your preconceived perspectives.

I'm not sure if you're serious, but the problematic history of eugenics goes back to a nice long way.

For a good time, read the proceedings of the international conferences, starting in 1912 and running for the next ten years or so. Some great scientific efforts, combined with some pretty appalling work, as well.

Check out 'The Cause of the Inferiority of the Physical and Mental Characters in teh Lower Social Classes' to start, from 1912: https://archive.org/details/problemsineugeni00inte

What? Just because Roosevelt et. al. were proponents doesn't make it a good idea. You hypothesis presupposes something about human nature that I think is fundamentally flawed, namely that people will be inclined to evenly disperse the benefits of such a program. Much like communism, or some sort of stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?) it sounds nice on paper if you squint and hand wave away the way real people actually behave.

"stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?)"

Anarchism. [1] "Stateless libertarian" is by most useful definitions an oxymoron.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism - the popular conception of the term and the totality of what is lumped under that term are quite dissimilar. Non-disclaimer, I'm not an anarchist, only a libertarian.

I'm familiar with the word, I didn't use it because I was trying keep the focus on libertarianism which I don't necessarily connect with anarchism. Maybe Propertarian Utopia would have better captured what I was trying to say.

> Eugenics is not about killing people. It's about ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed.

No, its not. Eugenics is about ensuring that only people with the "best possible" (from the point of view of its proponents, which is always subjective) genetic makeup live. Killing people with undesired genetic makeup, penalizing or preventing reproduction by those with undesired genetics, and promoting or compelling reproduction by those with desired genetics are among the means of eugenics.

"Ensuring children are born into the best possible environment for them to succeed" is not eugenics.

> Left-wing metropolitan elites always seem to crush any debates around eugenics, but whilst we're not allowed to talk about it, it's happening here in 2014. Project Prevention are doing great work in sterilizing drug addicts (voluntary sterilization in exchange for cash) to prevent children being born into misery.

Aside from discussion of whether that's a desirable policy, if it's really motivated by concern for childhood environment and not about eradicating drug addiction on the assumption that it is purely hereditary and preventing drug addicts from reproducing will prevent drug addiction, its not eugenics at all (as your wikipedia link correctly states, its been compared to eugenics, which is not the same thing as being eugenics.)

> We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics and consider why a number of our national heroes (including the likes of Walt Disney) were proponents.

Just because someone is a "national hero" because they did (or are national mythology has attributed to them) something good in one domain doesn't stop them from holding reprehensible views in other domains. "National heroes" are not gods, and we are poorly served by treating virtue in one domain of life as granting special consideration in unrelated domains.

Eugenics range from encouraging some people to reproduce to genocide and includes everything in between: selective anti-conception, sterilization, and abortion. Reducing it to just genocide is dishonest.

And, if we're going to judge by modern standards, it's not even unpopular in our times. The word was dropped after the atrocities carried out by Germans but often the same people who express their horror at the idea laud and support Planned Parenthood despite its roots and policy.

This is one of the most abhorrent ideas I've read about in quite a while. To call an addict's decision to do this "voluntary" is disingenuous to say the least.

> We need to stop reeling off Godwin's law straw-man arguments against Eugenics

This is one of the few cases in which Godwin's Law probably doesn't apply. The implementations of the National Socialist Party by themselves are an excellent argument against eugenics of any sort.

Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning here that Winston Churchill, while a "national hero" to some people, was unusually strongly racist even for his time. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...

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