Comment by retr0rocket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by retr0rocket | Hacker News Reader

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but this is bullshit, in almost all of the sciences we advanced because of someone who had more insight then anyone else, if any one of those stumbled we might not of gotten anywhere close to what we have today.

what if edison has succeded and we built a bunch of dc waystations across the entire country would we ever consider switching to AC? what if all the railway/trolley companies werent destroyed by the car/oil companies? what if we recounted bush vs gore would 9/11 still have happened? if Hitler's mom aborted would Germany still have turned out militant? what if einstein died in the holocaust and no one figured out general relativity till 50 years later? what if sony never broke with Nintendo and we ended up with a console monopoly by Nintendo?

historical determinism is bullshit spewed by people who cant create and try to bring down the accomplishments of others. just because you cant contribute shit doesn't mean other people wont.

edit: sorry, people that actually believe historical determinism piss me off

If Hitler hadn't been born, you would still have Mussolini and Stalin.

If Edison had succeeded, we could never have had anything like a national grid because DC transmission was too inefficient until long after the invention of the transistor.

Einstein was only one of several scientists working on theoretical physics near the turn of the 20th century; he didn't go from cave painting to special relativity all on his own.

The rest of your examples have nothing to do with scientific advancement.

You should read What Technology Wants. The first chapter or two contains a few leaps of logic, but the rest of the book makes a compelling case for emergent behavior leading to most of our scientific results.

but no holocaust and Mussolini/stalin were fuck ups, stalin only got power because of sheer population and being on the winning side.

EXACTLY we would of had a shitty inefficient grid because edison had a stranglehold at the time, this would of pushed back everything.

when einstein came up with special reliativity it was dubbed only 3 other people could understand it and no one else could of came up wit hit, he sped up the field by who knows ho many years.

so many of the world events were based on little things, and if we kept using electrical trolleys are knowledge of systems like that would of been much better.

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