Edison was better than Tesla in every way
It’s super popular among modern tech weebs to lionize Nikola Tesla and not think about Edison at all beyond identifying him with pointy headed bosses. This is insanity. While it’s possible that Tesla was very much ignored until my teenage years, just like the 80s era Yugoslavian propaganda services said, it is certainly not the case that Tesla is getting insufficient credit in current year. He is now extremely overrated. Tesla was indeed a great electrical engineer and inventor. However he is presently overrated; Edison is now underrated. So is Westinghouse, but we’ll keep it to Edison here, especially since Edison is propped up as some kind of villain versus somehow more heroic, rather than simply more lame Tesla.
Tesla was a lone inventor mad scientist type. He had helpers, but by and large he was a one-man band. Indeed the parts of his genius which made it into production, more or less three phase motors, he was employed by Westinghouse as a single contributor. Three phase current was a work of creative genius, but it was also an obvious innovation of the time. This will make ignorant Tesla fanboys mad, but it’s absolutely the truth. Same idea was invented independently around the same time by at least four other men, none of whom had nationalistic-communist intelligence agencies doing PR for them later. Let us name them and remember their equally great deeds: John Hopkinson an Englishman of Great Britain, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky a Russian-Pole of the Russian empire, Galileo Ferrais a Sardinian of Italy, and Jonas Wenstrom a dwarf of Sweden. If Tesla had never lived, there were already four other guys who basically put the same mark on the world and achieved the same thing. In fact, all four mostly forgotten men are even more praiseworthy than Tesla, both as inventors and human beings.
Tesla is given all kinds of credit for shit he didn’t really do; radio, x-rays, wireless transmission of electricity. Sure he was tinkering in his lab and came across some weird things, but as an inventor he didn’t get them right, at all. He was definitely very bright; a polyglot, allegedly photographic memory and was in possession of a great deal of personal charisma and charm. He was also great with getting media attention and moved in the high society of his day. He was decent at most things he tried (games, etc), and led a volcel abstemious life.
But we must be honest about Tesla; he was a semi-broken weirdo who needed a Westinghouse to bring discipline to his researches and make money. While it is sort of admirable that he spent all his time in researches which pleased him, what he did was also extremely self indulgent, and was ultimately almost entirely masturbatory nonsense, none of which actually mattered. He really wasn’t ahead of his time; he was a crank. He didn’t believe in almost any of physics which we now know is true: electrons and relativity were nonsense to him and he spent a lot of time attempting to refute it. He also despised fat people and mannish females, believed in eugenics, zapping people’s brains with electricity to make them smarter, and had many eccentric and anti-social habits we now associate with sperg-lord character defects; and yes, they are character defects. Not being able to shag JP Morgan’s daughter because she wears pearls, or hallucinating about pigeons is indicative of a pretty severe basket of character flaws.
Edison, on the other hand, was nothing like this. Edison was a much greater inventor, a greater businessman, leader, philanthropist and human being. Things Edison invented and shipped for profitable production: telephone microphones, phonographs, motion pictures, multiplexed telegraphy, light bulbs, iron ore separators, innovations in electrical power distribution, he delivered real X-ray imaging innovations, helped invent new forms of rubber from sunflowers, invented IR detectors, the stock ticker, the nickel-iron battery, invented new processes for plastics and other chemicals, and was basically the archetypical polymath genius. He made money on all of these things, brought every one of them from idea to market, unlike Tesla who could only bring stuff to market if someone else did that work for him.
Edison also had two wives and six kids, helped with the US war effort in WW-1, was active in an important social club, was briefly a Theosophist, was a monetary reformer, also abstemious in his diet, was a man of peace who would only work on defensive weapons (Tesla by contrast was always hawking quack death rays), and there are a dozen companies he founded which still exist and create value to this day. Edison didn’t exist in his own little mad scientist world; he led men and machines to build great things, which are literally used and create value 90 years after he dropped dead. By contrast, Tesla made a bucket of loot on the one important thing he did (mind you, something done independently by 4 other men) and spent it all on his own entirely worthless personal passion projects. Mind you, Edison achieved all of these marvelous things, deeply engaged with society and the real world while stone deaf. He also never went to college.
Westinghouse did win the current wars with his Tesla invented technology, and Tesla deserves credit for having the correct solution (again, something done independently by 4 other men) but Tesla wasn’t fit to spit-shine Edison’s boots. Neither as an inventor, a creator/businessman, nor even as a human being: Edison is a greater man all the way down the line. I guess it’s OK to identify with Tesla as an underdog or something if you’re having a hard time of it, but frankly, most underdogs deserve to be underdogs. The fact that Tesla worked for Edison ought to have given you the hint: this is the natural order of things.
Everyone who works in software knows some Teslas; his self-regarding, grandiose sperg-lord nature is a familiar character. Such people may have done something that made them some loot, but then they spend it doing research into some quackery, or on polyamorous midget juggling prostitutes or whatever. None of you know an Edison, or if you do know a lesser Edison, he is probably a very great man. Edison lived in the real world rather than the self-indulgent world of cranks. Edison was a leader, a deeply moral man, and a man of affairs rather than a lone weirdo laboring on things nobody cares about. If you must emulate one of the two, don’t be a Tesla, be an Edison. It really is the virgin Tesla versus the chad Edison.
Early article, I think commissioned by Yugoslav spooks, which set me on my early Tesla fanhood, and probably everyone else’s:
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/tesla-scientific-saint-wizard-or-carnival-sideman
Locklin on science 
Geez Louise, Scott, this may be the most dangerous thing you’ve ever posted. Edison better than Tesla? That’s a heresy! Incoming feces to hit the fan in 3…2…1
It’s very symbolic of a time that can make no technological progress and has weaponized autism against workers rights that nerdy patent trolling Tesla of all people is lionized and Edison is demonized. Anyway it is my curse to always state the obvious.
Pretty sad when a car brings you back from history. Who dares to compare Tesla to Edison?
This is something related to the larger cultural shift that has taken place in recent decades. Yesterday I saw a video about how in Hollywood jocks have turned into the epitome of bad guys because the vast majority of the people working in the Lizard Vally were nerds that didn’t get any in high school and now that they have access to a wider audience they transmit their personal jealousy and hatred of naturally more successful people, turning it into a mainstream ideology. That’s why cultural symbols have shifted so drastically, we are now run by elitist losers, who survive and thrive purely on nepotism, closing the doors to the outside, whereas in a natural state of competition, Chads like Eddison would be on top of the hierarchy purely by their merit. The same losers are responsible for almost any other moral pandemic today – fat acceptance, porn glorification, drug use, SJWism etc.
It really takes some serious brain damage to claim that autistic engineers are responsible for spreading ideas such as fat acceptance (and porn glorification is what?). You really think highly of aspies’ capabilites and somehow believe Edison would be a Chad bulldozing through high school chicks. Amazing what one can come across on the internet. (and maybe you couldn’t get into FAANG so can claim it’s all nepotism – which is the mirror image of the raging nerd who couldn’t get any in HS as you say.)
One of my great pleasures in life is reading deranged gibberings by nerdoids whose jimmies I have apparently rustled. Thanks brah.
https://delicioustacos.com/2021/05/30/the-beating/
‘Their new thing is “you MUST have emotional intelligence.” They dated a tech guy for money. Couldn’t stand it. The wealth generator of our age is autism. It severed the money/ pussy connection.’
Delicious Tacos :thumbsup:
“It really is the virgin Tesla versus the chad Edison.”
“Edison lived in the real world rather than the self-indulgent world of cranks. Edison was a leader, a deeply moral man, and a man of affairs rather than a lone weirdo laboring on things nobody cares about.”
Impressive; very based.
I realize “master of obvious” carries a negative connotation, but imo it’s a positive in a time when many either don’t have the stomach to accept obvious truths, or accept much beyond the bounds of dumbfuck conventional wisdom. Post masters the hell out of some obvious.
Nerds have self conception as underdogs, even if they objectively aint and never were (aka Elon Musk), so I guess the cartoon view of Tesla is something designed to appeal to nerds. But scratching the surface it’s obviously very much untrue.
For some reason my favorite thing about him is his response after the huge fire. From https://www.businessinsider.com.au/thomas-edison-in-the-obstacle-is-the-way-2014-5
According to a 1961 Reader’s Digest article by Edison’s son Charles, Edison calmly walked over to him as he watched the fire destroy his dad’s work. In a childlike voice, Edison told his 24-year-old son, “Go get your mother and all her friends. They will never see a fire like this again.” When Charles objected, Edison said, “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”
Later, at the scene of the blaze, Edison was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” He told the reporter that he was exhausted from remaining at the scene until the chaos was under control, but he stuck to his word and immediately began rebuilding the next morning, without firing any of his employees.
I get why people lionize Tesla. A lot of people just want some of his more out there quackery to be true (“free energy” and such). Like Mulder: They want to believe. And I say more power to those free energy weirdo folks tinkering in their garage workshops. I hope they prove those things right, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
There are quite a few of those “free energy weirdos” working on cold fusion. That at least does not contradict basic laws of physics.
Yes indeed. I’ve been pretty fascinated by “cold fusion”/LENR for a while now. I’m not a trained scientist so I just have a layman’s understanding of the whole thing. I wish those smart weirdos the best of luck.
The people who lionize Tesla identify with him because they are like him. It boils down to the picture comparison Scott posted and the preceding paragraph. Those with characteristics on the left side of the picture like Tesla.
By coincidence I watched yesterday “The current wars”, a movie from 2017. It is a great example of modern Hollywood propaganda. It portrayed Edison as self-obsessed pathetic evil man. The movie did not make Tesla the main protagonist, that title went to Westinghouse, who was made almost a saint who archived his success thanks to help of his wife.
I can see it. Today Tesla would be on Joe Rogan with Michio Kaku.
I think there’s something unseen or unknown about the fanboy interaction with the industrialists. Like when Boldt isn’t building castles up in A Bay or at his hotel he’s funding electrified air out in Shoreham. Shoreham? Is it just as simple as some exotic charlatan rolls up on Park Avenue and demos this glowing ball and George rings up JP and the Fricks and the Coffins. I don’t know, but maybe it was that simple. That without these benefactors we’d never know about him.
I have no doubt that the Yugoslav secret service was behind at least some of this – they were very active, and very, very nasty. Because Tito broke with Stalin, he gets a better press than he deserves, but his secret police killed more anti-Communist activists overseas than even the KGB. The only problem that Tito had with Stalin is that he wanted to change places with him, that’s all. People who say that Ho-Chi-Mihn could have been “an Asian Tito” may be right, but I do not think that means what they think it means…
I have a distinct memory that this has been documented at some point; Tesla Society address was a consulate or something that obvious.
I notice you mocking the vegheads from time to time. Out of sheer curiosity, why? Sure, there are a lot of insufferable vegan activists, but I think it’s rather obvious that many of these people just want to latch onto an excuse to be antisocial. There are at least some “carnists” who are the same way if not worse [1].
Not here to argue, as that’s pointless and this your personal blog. But I’d like to hear a more in depth explanation as to why you think the vegans/vegetarians are wrong or worthy of mockery as a group.
[1] Look at the guy at 4:38
Ha, what a group of assholes. Thanks for pointing out a time because I couldn’t watch 15 minutes of that.
You weren’t asking me but what gets me are the people that have to sell their lifestyle: vegans, carnvivores or otherwise. I don’t care. I am just not wired like that, never mind videoing my accosting people in public. I don’t have that gene. I think that video would have been better if one of those dude bee-lined for the girl and broke her jaw. Nobody trained for that scenario.
What do you think about the arguments that vegans make. I.e., health, ethics, environment? Centenarians do seem to eat more beans than steaks. And factory farming is pretty bad also.
Sanctimony over food is often indicative of larger mental illness. Particularly when it’s tied to some assinine argument about mortality. Otherwise I can’t be arsed to give a shit what people eat.
American food is grotesque though, so I wouldn’t blame people for wanting to stuff not actively poisonous.
It’s an interesting correlation when you note that vegans, crossfitters, Mormons, Muslims, and Jews all have these idiosyncratic dietary rules that they insist on adhering to, in order to be religiously pure.
I think it’s a marker. It’s also a means of separating the groups out from general society, and making them feel “special”. As a ploy, it’s very much the same as the sorts of behavioral ticks you find with abusive personalities–They first pick out their targets, and then they work at reducing their relationships to others, cutting them out of the herd, so to speak.
So, as a behavioral “thing” with these groups, the dietary “law” BS is very much a marker for other behavioral dysfunctions. Same-same with a lot of the other stuff these groups come up with–It’s all about the brainwashing and the behavioral conditioning.
It’s exactly the same with gangs, the military, and other groups. “Jumping in” with a gang pretty much equates to the sort of initiation rites you run into with military units, and it’s all part of the same spectrum. We were probably doing these exact same sort of things back when we were hunter-gatherers, and you had to go through some sort of “rite of passage” to become a hunter.
None of this stuff is random; it’s all there for a reason, and that reason is that it speaks to something within us, something that may be atavistic as all hell, but which we still need in order to maintain our identities and pass on our cultural “heritage”.
I do agree that over-emphasis on any of this stuff is pretty much indicative of mental illness. Precisely as is an obsessiveness with that which they’re referring to as “sexual/gender identity”. Most normies look inside their pants at some point prior to adolescence and go “Oh, I’ve got an ‘innie’… I’m a girl…”, or “I’ve got an ‘outie”, mean’s I’m a boy…”, and that’s where they leave it. No questions or issues; simple acknowledgement of natural fact. Only the folks with mental imbalances take it much further, and obsess over what nature wrought. Which is why there’s such a high rate of mental imbalance observable in the “alternative” community. It’s a marker.
Modern people are definitely trying to fill a quasi-religious/nationalistic hole in their brains with some form of baloney; marketing, politics and so on depend on it. It’s easier to just call them “crazy fucks” than declare them heretics.
Would you agree that Steve Jobs’ lifelong eating disorders were obvious signs of his derangement? The dude was a fruitarian most of his life, and a breatharian at various points, and these food “ideologies” are like the Al-Qaeda of the food world. Hell, I’ve read the Isaacson biography and I was stunned at various things he subsisted on. He once had a months-long diet of only carrot juice.
Screwing around with your diet to see what happens is fine by me. Both Edison and Tesla did the fad extreme diets of their day (which were milk based, lol).
Telling people they must eat the crickets or whatever or baby gaia will die, or that meat is “corpse” or whatever vegetarians like sheckelgruber call it: that’s the kooky part.
FWIIW I have it from early Apple employees Jobs is an asshole, and that’s good enough for me. He was an effective asshole though. Company has been shit since he died.
Show me a single normal, rational and successful leader of any sort, and I’ll show you someone who is actually vanishingly rare. All the notable “great leader” types seem to have associated character and behavioral flaws in them that make them nearly impossible to cope with as rational people. Wozniak? Great guy, probably a really outstanding engineer and human being. But, if it had been left up to him, Apple would probably still be making homebrew computers in a garage somewhere in Central California, and we’d never have heard of them outside the narrow community that implies.
I don’t know what it says about humanity, but almost all of the people we term “great leaders” seem to be utterly nuts. I’ve met a few of them, over the years, and they’re generally insufferable assholes with egos as big and wide as the sky–Patton’s son, for example? You met the guy, and suddenly whole swathes of WWI and WWII history snapped into sharp focus. Whatever his dad had, he seemingly had it as well, and you were hard-pressed to be able to tell the difference between what was “him” vs. what was “the act” he was putting on.
I honestly can’t think of too many humble, self-effacing types who were really effective at getting large-scale things done. You almost have to be a sociopathic monster in order to be able to “achieve” at the level of an Alexander, a Napoleon, or a Hitler.
Which I think goes a lot of the way to explain the difference between Edison and Tesla. Edison had the ego and the sociopathy to carry off being “effective big leader guy”, and did so. Tesla, on the other hand? Genius, but utterly lacking in those traits. And, for those that think Tesla was merely some sort of propaganda ploy by the Yugoslavs, consider the Tesla Valve, which he patented in 1920. He was a tortured genius, but he was also a bit of a polymath and I’m not sure he was actually as nutty as they say he was.
Recent article highlighting this:
https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/07/20/new-3d-images-of-shark-intestines-show-they-function-like-nikola-teslas-valve/
I think there’s a bit of an argument to be made that the “successful leader traits” that help these types get to the top and get things done are more than somewhat pathological in nature. The trick is, you have to be able to harness them and keep them from self-destructing while taking the organizations they lead down with them. Someone at Apple really should have smiled at Steve Jobs and said “Steve, your fruitarian diet and such is all well and good, but your ass is going to see a conventional oncologist for treatment, because we really can’t afford to lose your contribution around here, as nutbar-crazy insufferable as you are…”.
The other side to that coin is that you need a social matrix surrounding things such that when the inevitable happens and the “effective leader” types go off the rails, you don’t follow them down into the Führerbunker with the rest of the enterprise. You have to be able to think critically as you’re following these types, and know when to dismount the tiger.
You get down to it, and I think there’s an argument to be made that a lot of these people are as psychologically impaired as some of your Asperger’s Syndrome types are–It’s just that it is all expressed in a way we don’t really consider particularly “insane”, kinda like that hot chick we all know who can somehow persuade everyone around her to do her will while never, ever considering the consequences.
To be clear, I don’t think that Tesla was only an op by Yugoslav , he was certainly a man of genuine intelligence and accomplishment, but there’s no doubt that the Yugos turned the dial up to eleven in hyping his accomplishments. The USSR did the same thing under Stalin, taking every Russian or Soviet scientist that had ever accomplished anything and hyping them to the skies – unless, like Kapitza, they weren’t very good Communists.
Interesting about Patton’s son, Kirk – did he have the genius of his old man, or did he just get the loony aspects? I’ve never heard much about him. At any rate, it sounds like he turned out better that did Mac Arthurs kid, who became a music-obsessed recluse.
I lack the perspective to really evaluate the younger Patton as an effective officer. All I saw were the sort of things that a junior enlisted person would observe, and those pretty much conformed with the whole “showman” aspect of his father’s reputation.
Couple of officers I later knew and came to respect had diametrically opposed views of the man. One thought he was a political stooge who enabled a bunch of cronyism in his units, encouraging all sorts of cliquish behavior. The other guy thought he was an outstanding leader who could motivate men to do their best, and while he said that, he was nothing like Patton’s projected personality himself, and freely admitted that he could not carry that off.
Military leadership is something that tends to create strong opinions with people who’ve undergone time with the charismatic types. Myself, I far prefer the sort of steady non-charismatic typified by men like Field Marshal Slim. The Montgomerys and Pattons? Y’all can keep them; I do appreciate their necessity and effectiveness, but I don’t want to work for or around them. Men like Slim, or Robert T. Frederick, the guy who built and led the First Special Service Force in WWII are the guys I want to be following off to war, should the need arise.
FWIIW one of the fellows in my men’s club back in SF had an uncle who was a prisoner in Stalag Luft III. He gave a talk on his experiences to the club. Patton apparently “liberated” them at some point, and he was decidedly not a fan of Pattons. Mind you he and the lads he was locked up with would fly their prison guard out from Germany for all their yearly reunions, so they were typically good sports. He also didn’t think much of the British, who, unlike in the movie, pretty much kept to themselves. Funny how a lot of history is baloney.
Patton was one of those people about whom nobody had indifferent feelings. A friend’s father served under him and thought that he was great. Others had, well, other opinions, but almost no one who knew the man was like “Patton? Eh, I could take him or leave him”. Douglas MacArthur seems to have been the same way. But I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about Slim, so inspiring strong feelings is obviously not an essential part of the job description.
I’ll say this: I know people that eat a ton of meat (particularly fresh and wild game meat) as part of a balanced and moderate diet that includes unprocessed foods and is devoid of caloric excess. They are active people that never get sick, have no health issues, and while they may not become centenarians, they live a quality existence well into the north end of the actuarial tables.
I know some vegans that are seemingly healthy people. Most vegans I know wind up sick or deficient. Eating some oysters and clams and other things that have no soul and have B vitamins would probably solve this issue. People seem to be wired differently. I know some freakishly fit people that live on carbs. I will say that while people appear to be wired slightly differently wrt how they get macros, the common variables are moderation, variety, and freshness.
People are soft, at least in the US and parts of Europe. To much food, booze, consumerism, mindless entertainment, a lack of belief system to replace religion/bushido, and general protection from physical and (now) emotional harm has turned people into mush.
The effects of diet on life span is overrated. Just look at conditional life expectancy of Mongolians who eat only meat (horses, sheep, camels with heavily fermented milk) and people from India, who is mostly vegetarian. Last time I looked at birth Mongolians had halve a year longer expected lifespan, then at the age of 45 Indians had couple of years more, then at the age of 70 the expectancy matched. So despite vastly different diet and disease profiles, the end result is roughly the same.
Also, one cannot even blame modernity on perceived sickness of people in West. The child mortality in West has been extremely low the last, say 70 years. It could be that a lot of people that are chronically ill nowadays would die as children at different times. Observational studies simply cannot resolve this.
The question that nobody has ever really addressed is the fact that there’s a hell of a lot more going on with our gut bacteria than we’ve been willing to acknowledge, and that the variety of gut bacteria we’ve been living with has gone down dramatically from even as (relatively) recently as the Middle Ages.
I’ll lay you long odds that there’s a vast interrelationship between genome, commensal bacteria, and diet that we don’t even begin to recognize, let alone understand. It is not, to my mind, entirely unlikely that some humans are genetically adapted to their environment in terms of food sources, and that their gut bacteria are similarly adapted to those foods. It may be that there’s an actual relationship between longevity and diet, but that the benefits of that particular diet are only accessible to the right set of adapted genes in accompaniment with the right set of commensal gut bacteria.
Which likely also feed back into an awful lot of things we consider “behavioral”. I have to look at a lot of these kids we’re identifying as being “autistic”, and then asking if perhaps a part of the problem is that they’re not getting the right set of nutrients and bacterial inputs. The reason I have for saying this is that of the two separate cases of autism that I know of which were ones where the kid was developing normally until all of a sudden they weren’t…? Both of those were kids who’d been dosed with absolutely massive amounts of antibiotics for something in their recent past. I don’t think the linkage is “antibiotic-then-autistic”, but “antibiotic-dead/changed gut flora-then-behavioral issues start up”.
Human sentience is a fragile kludge. You would not surprise me one damn bit were you to tell me that there’s a complex interaction going on between things like gut bacteria, genetics, and all the rest in order to bootstrap consciousness up out of the morass that is our biology. If diet and gut bacteria influence things like autism, which some recent research is starting to suggest, how hard is it to make the leap over into those same things influencing things like behavior, as well?
I think that there’s a solid chance that our descendants, if we manage to have any, are probably going to look back at much of what we’ve done and considered us not too much smarter than we consider the Romans, with all their use of lead in their cooking and water technology. You wonder why society has gone nuts around us in the last few generations? Ask yourself this: How likely is it that all those wonderful plastic softeners that mimic estrogen-like compounds aren’t having an effect? What is the impact of the drastically reduced variety of our gut bacteria? What wonderful things are all these artificial hormones from birth control doing to our minds, as they permeate our environment? You eat all that meat with hormones in it, drink all that milk with the same stuff, and wonder why the kids you’re feeding with it aren’t “acting right”?
I’ve noted a distinct downward trend in what I would have termed “manliness” when I was a young man in today’s teenage males. One of my darker suspicions is that this isn’t just a cultural thing, but a biological result stemming from the things we’ve put into these kid’s environments. Just like all the pet cancers we’ve got everywhere, these days. Some of this stuff ought to be scaring the ever-lovin’ crap out of the environmentalists, but they’re all focused on the stupid, like “nuclear power bad”, and ignoring the bird strikes that are killing off the bird population as effectively as Mao killed China’s sparrows.
Not to mention that serotonin is made in the gut, and the gut is lined with 100 million neurons, leading some scientists to call it a brain onto itself.
Then there’s the idea that we may be born with bacteria unique to each of us, and a single blast of antibiotics might extinguish it for all time, ie. you’ll never recover. Terrifying.
> Some of this stuff ought to be scaring the ever-lovin’ crap out of the environmentalists
It does.
> but they’re all focused on the stupid, like “nuclear power bad”
No we’re not.
On the food issue, here’s a pre-print paper of researchers trying to figure out the obesity epidemic. The conclusion? More processed foods eaten = more PFAs eaten
https://osf.io/x4fk3/
You would probably be interested in GUT by Giulia Enders. I have read it and it confirms many of your suspicions.
Well, well, well… It would appear that my theory about gut bacteria and longevity may actually be an accurate supposition:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-centenarians-distinct-microbiome-longevity.html
Ain’t going to say “I told you so…” because this is a relatively easy inference to make, given the data out there. I was pretty sure someone was researching this already, and it’s even possible that I read about the research program somewhere and forgot about having done that, just adopting the idea as my own.
In any event, I will not be at all surprised to find out that 90% of our health issues stem more from interaction with our various commensal organisms than actual disease agents or environmental poisons. After all, we’ve been all over this planet for a long time, and there’s been plenty of time to adapt to the local biomes. The root of a lot of our issues, I am sure, is that we’ve so thoroughly disconnected ourselves from the environment. Granted, of course, that that disconnection can have positive effects, as well…
Most of the vegan talking points are false. Their brains are warped from missing key nutrients in their diet.
Factory farming is bad but there alternatives like buying meat from local ranches, and there are firms popping up like Butcherbox that provide this.
Mormons are one of the longest-lived groups in the United States, and they eat tons of meat. Yeah, there are lots of confounding factors, but there are with vegans as well. At any rate, it doesn’t seem to hurt them any.
Eat whatever you want, or don’t want – just shut up about it.
I only know Tesla for his Tesla coil which is a useless and dangerous contraption, but it is really cool. I have no idea what else he did, honestly. It’s never come up anywhere. I just assumed people like Tesla not for the inventions but because he was kinda crazy and that appeals to people now because the crazier you are, the smarter you must be, obviously due to reasons and that one movie about a magical guy who wrote equations on the windows.
Tesla would have been much more effective if he had a nagging wife or worked for an asshole boss that kept pushing him to produce. Given current family court system, I am no proponent for modern marriage but a wife and kids keep you focused on what is important, are an incentive to produce economic results in your field and act as a brake from diving into rabbit holes. Even when she divorces you and takes the kids, you still have to produce to support them. Married or divorced men are usually more productive than ones never married because they have to be, even if they do not want to be. It sucks for the man, but society benefits. I know too many childless men and women that do just enough to get by and spend their free time on video games, fantasy sports, social media, watching TV all day, drinking enough alcohol to float a battleship, etc. Another example is
Sir Isaac Newton spending much of his time on alchemy since he did not have anyone to keep him focused.
Holy hell that’s one of the most insightful things I’ve read on the internet. I’m a pseudo-intellectual rabbit hole diver, and have gotten less “productive” with time, though I have a lot more fun and “work” on much more interesting things than decreasing production costs of widgets.
I don’t know how insightful I am but I learn from my personal experience and try to observe other’s behavior to avoid their mistakes. Concerning “work” and “fun”, I tell my fellow coworkers that one of the secrets of life is to take your personality disorder and turn it into a well paying career. Temple Grandin is a good example.
On the gripping hand, it’s also entirely possible that the addition of a family and conventional responsibilities might well mean that the “genius” in question never gets out of the humdrum day-to-day grind of things to ever achieve much of note beyond raising some kids and building himself a nice house…
Family and responsibility are a double-edged sword in this regard: Sure, you give yourself a set of spurs, but you’re also hobbling yourself at the same damn time. A great spousal relationship is a wonderful thing, as are kids and the household duties. However, comma… Bad ones? Oh. My. God. I can think of about six guys who were ruined by their wives, several couples who were ruined by their kids, and I could go on and on about it.
Simple fact is, I’m not sure that you can look at the odd bachelor and say “Yeah, he’d have done better with a wife, kids, and responsibilities driving him onwards and upwards…”, because it’s equally likely you’d find as many or more cases where it was “Yeah, he’d have done a lot better without those kids or the nagging wife that drove him into an early grave…”.
You want answers to the question? It’s about like asking “Hey, what if WWI had never happened…?”. Counter-factual data can only be presumed into existence; it can’t actually be tested.
“Sir Isaac Newton spending much of his time on alchemy since he did not have anyone to keep him focused.”
Daniel Waterhouse did as much as he could!
A kindred spirit on the Edison/Tesla Manichean religion? Where *were* you all these years! 😛
Without putting Tesla down, I’d often mention the many many inventions in Edison’s career, and I was always put off by this gratuitous demonization and simplification of a great man. No he didn’t “steal all his inventions” from his employees, and he was the sponsor of many scientists at the start of their careers. Irving Langmuir, pioneer of plasma physics in the US.
I think what’s driving this cartoon story in history is what these people want to be true about how genius and great success work. Very similar things are driving the Mozart/Salieri dichotomy as sensationalized by the one movie their teacher made them watch on classical music. Or their hatred of the Victorians.
When they can abide the idea that individual creativity and genius exists at all (see all the MYTH OF THE LONE GENIUS!!! shrieking on the first 10 pages of google.), they want it to be the result of some effortless victory arising from some unconscious and automatic inspiration that places the accomplishment beyond the reach of envious mortal men. They’re allergic to the idea that accomplishment can be had as the result of Apollonian disciplined effort, as opposed to some Dionysian eruption of passion. They want to sneer at the efforts of “strivers” and tell themselves that all true accomplishment either happens or it doesn’t.
I’ve been reading Kelly Johnson’s autobiography. He grew up in grinding poverty and worked as a child to put food on the table along with the rest of his siblings in his Swedish immigrant family in upper peninsula Michigan. He took up reading as a child, went to the library and studied hard. As a teenager, he built houses. In college, he worked. He drove himself to California for the first time with a buddy after they figured out how to save gas by leaning-out the fuel-air mixture of the engine. He worked hard at Lockheed. He went home and worked hard to build his own house. He kept horses. He worked hard at the wind tunnel. He worked hard in flight testing. He worked hard at airmanship. He worked hard at the drafting table.
All I see in the book so far is work, work work. Few of us are equal to this level of work these days. The result of his work? THe apotheosis of air frame design in the SR-71. Was he smart? Sure! Likely though, he was malnourished as a youth and his hard work had more to do with his success than anything. He was the Thomas Edison of aircraft.
He was also a pillar of his community, serving on the Chamber of Commerce, etc.
“What accounts for the success of the Harry Potter series, as well as the “Star Wars” films whence they derive? The answer, I think, is their appeal to complacency and narcissism. “Use the Force,” Obi-Wan tells the young Luke Skywalker, while the master wizard Dumbledore instructs Harry to draw from his inner well of familial emotions. No one likes to imagine that he is Frodo Baggins, an ordinary fellow who has quite a rough time of it in Tolkien’s story. But everyone likes to imagine that he possesses inborn powers that make him a master of magic as well as a hero at games. Harry Potter merely needs to tap his inner feelings to conjure up the needful spell.
….
A culture may be called decadent when its members exult in what they are, rather than strive to become what they should be.
What characterizes the protagonists of great fiction in an ascendant culture? It is that they are not yet what they should be. The characters of Western literature in its time of flowering either must overcome defining flaws, or come to grief. Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet must give up her pride; Dickens’ Pip must look past the will-o’-the-wisp of his expectations; Mann’s Hans Castorp must confront mortality; Tolstoy’s Pierre must learn to love; Cervantes’ Don Quixote must learn to help ordinary people rather than the personages of romance; Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister must act in the real world rather than the stage.
Failure to correct defining flaws, of course, leads to a tragic outcome, as in Dostoyevsky or Flaubert. …
The more one wallows in one’s inner feelings, of course, the more anxious one becomes. Permit me to state without equivocation that your innermost feelings, whoever you might be, are commonplace, dull, and tawdry. Thrown back upon one’s feelings, one does not become a Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, but a petulant, self-indulgent bore with an aversion to mirrors. “
Modern culture has abandoned any form of a “sense of duty”, responsibility, or accountability.
Nobody wants to tell anyone “You. You are wrong, you are evil, and you need to be punished for your actions. I am holding you to account.”.
Everyone wants to laud the virtuous with encomiums galore, but the diametric opposite? Nope; they remain wordless in the face of confronting someone else with their malfeasance.
Moral relativism is the order of the day, and we reap what has been sown in the fields of the cultural commons where those ideas were first allowed to flourish like the weeds they are.
Nobody has the balls to tell the various idiots like Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle that her ideas are not only flawed, but fundamentally erroneous and innately destructive. She and her ilk should be run out of power like the parasitic imbeciles that they are, but nobody is going to. Why? Because Durkan and her like piously mouth all the shibboleths of moral relativism’s cultural baggage, refusing to admit that the criminal should be held accountable and given their just deserts. They’re afraid to say these things, cowards in the face of insurrection and depravity, silent in the face of anarchy. Why are they afraid? Because, generations ago, some assholes started telling us it was wrong to judge others, and that we should look to “root causes” for why bad people do bad things, excusing them their trespasses.
Reality? Maybe that’s a moral stand you could take, an ethical stance of great virtue. The problem with it? It doesn’t work.
I’m a pragmatist. I’m an empiricist; if you show me something that works, and don’t have the theory to explain to me why it works, I’ll happily accept that it works while looking for an understanding to back up why I’m doing it. Likewise, you show me some happy theory, and I can see that it doesn’t work? Baby, you’d best be hitting the door before I throw you out of it.
The majority of what’s going wrong with modern society is that we’ve abandoned those three things I mentioned there at the beginning, and that we’ve listened to these idiots who “wanted change”, and never held them accountable for actual, y’know… Results.
I don’t particularly care that we’re spending a billion dollars a year on the homeless problem in Seattle. What bothers me? Nobody is looking these assholes in the face and saying “Hey, you said that if we gave you this much money and this much power, that you’d solve this problem…”. Instead, we’ve got more and more of it, and you can’t even safely use the parks we’re paying for at night, let alone walk down our sidewalks unmolested by human feces. What. The. F**k?
I mean, literally… Friend of mine was walking their dog in Seattle. Dog craps on sidewalk, she discovers she’s got no dog poop bags to pick it up. She leaves it, intending to go home, get some and then come back to clean it up. Before she does that, though? She gets ticketed, ‘cos “Dog poop”.
That’s not the capper, though. The actual capper was her having to listen, while the officer was writing her her ticket, to one of Seattle’s finest homeless taking a crap, grunting heavily (‘cos narcotics make for really nasty constipation…) not six feet away in the alley. She’s like “Uh… Hey… Aren’t you going to ticket him?”, and the cop tells her that a.) not only is it legal for a human being to do that in the open and not clean it up, b.) he’s under instructions not to “harass” the homeless.
If you’re wondering, ohbytheway? I think it’s pretty ‘effing clear that our entire society has demonstrably gone mad. Causatory factor? No real idea, but I do have my suspicions.
> Nobody has the balls to tell the various idiots like Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle that her ideas are not only
> flawed, but fundamentally erroneous and innately destructive.
You live there, have you?
I haven’t, because cowardice can be rational, especially when it promotes self-preservation.
Empiricism entails no morality I know of. (I agree with your sentiment, however)
Which isn’t surprising at all, because empiricism and morality are two entirely different things. Empiricism is a thought process based on observation of phenomena and seeing what works, drawing one’s conclusions from those observations. You don’t begin to drag morality into things until you’re applying empiricism to questions about the reasons society and social institutions work the way they do–It’s literally apples and purple.
Empiricism is a way of looking at the world. The conclusions you draw from that observation may be distilled into moral codes and whatever else derives, but they’re not necessarily congruent or even related. I can use purely empiric observations to note that touching a red-hot stove hurts, and that that’s not a good idea. There’s no morality involved in the question, whatsoever.
For those of us (speaking for myself) who don’t find ourselves in possession of blinding automatic genius, or overflowing gifts in childhood, who nevertheless want to accomplish something and understand the world, the existence of people like Edison are an inspiration. It isn’t secret, and he makes no magic act about how his successes work – you can see the gears turning.
To the Tesla people, that’s all illegitimate and false.
I don’t really care whom was better.
I am just glad you are not dead.
And still posting your – uh – posts.
☮
I read online that Tesla caused the Tunguska Event with his death ray. That’s gotta count for something.
Glad that we finally got that cleared up…
>Three phase current was a work of creative genius, but it was also an obvious innovation of the time.
Where are the obvious innovations of today?
Microsoft tests its applicants on how they would move Mt. Fuji.
Edison tested his on where the Magdalena Bay is.
Edison created this trivia test because he found college grads didn’t have the “proper knowledge” to work.
https://gizmodo.com/take-the-intelligence-test-that-thomas-edison-gave-to-j-1689489019
Fun test; I remember reading about it when I was a kid. While I’m sure he didn’t use any linear regression models to see if it had predictive power on performance, it’s probably as good as anything else. I know people good enough at trivia they’d nuke this test; they’re the type of people who are good at everything.
Any books about Edison you recommend? Was thinking of reading Edison by Edmund Morris because I enjoyed his Roosevelt series
Hey Scott! Interesting post as usual. Just wanted to know your sources on Edison & Tesla for this post; wherever you got this info on Edison from especially sounds like a fascinating read(s).
I haven’t read about either one of them since I was a teenager. I googled for a list of Edison inventions.
I heard that Tesla fucked a pigeon. Edison would never do that.
Scott did you write this “Token Economics” paper for the Brave browser people? Assuming “yes” basic on smart-ass style. How many Scott Ls can there be?
Any way it’s pure gold. would be keen to hear your take on Scott Sumner’s monetary model, if you have such a take.
AFAIK there are two other Scott Locklins; one a retiree in Texas, another a young gentleman surveyor in Florida. I don’t think about economics unless somebody pays me, AND has blackmail material they threaten to release; otherwise, it’s all bullshit. Witaly and Kyle’s “economics” was particularly laughable bullshit. As is most ‘token economics.’