Anotheroneagain (u/Anotheroneagain)

Anotheroneagain commented on Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/Hooke

leoc · a year ago

Re-reposting this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo from the 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 of this Smithsonian article on leaded gasoline https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-... . The MentalFloss article about Clair Patterson is especially good. Pasting the comment in full (again, this is heymijo's work not mine):

> Two beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Campai...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965

It's a rambling article that provides no real evidence, only speculation about future discoveries (which never came) and absurd arguments why its concentration is supposed to be smaller.

Anotheroneagain commented on Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/Hooke

lupusreal · a year ago

This guy is a notorious troll/schizo who has been at it for years. He's had ample time to back up his claims with some evidence but never has.

Of course you are welcome to give him the benifit of doubt and try to engage with him in good faith. I sincerely doubt it will lead anywhere, many have tried before you with no productive results.

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

To be honest, I never figured out what the evidence could even look like.

Normally, you would try to falsify the existing theory, but, that is not an option, since it never existed - the proponents came with the claim that it had always been known and insisted relentlessly. It has subtle, nondescript symptoms, the only clear sign of the poisoning is its presence in the blood. There are some other measurable chamges, but that would only get stuck on me claiming that it proves its essentiality, vs you claiming that it proves the poisoning. All the evidence like the presence in bones, 250kyo neanderthal teeth, phosphates, coal and so on has supposedly been somehow proven irrelevant. The lack of improved health and intellect, rather the increasingly undeniable presence of the inverse is being ignored. It's essentially unfalsifiable.

Anotheroneagain commented on Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/Hooke

sjsdaiuasgdia · a year ago

Ok dude, sure. What's your daily lead intake, and in what forms?

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

I just take a bit of red lead or lead sugar, whatever I have at hand. A huge dose by any modern claim.

Look, why do we suffer from all those intractable "lifestyle diseases", need glasses and in general are the most unhealthy population in recorded history, and why is everything falling apart? People are literally insane, its toxicity is the lie.

Anotheroneagain commented on Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/Hooke

sjsdaiuasgdia · a year ago

LOL what is this nonsense?

"Lead’s toxicity was recognized and recorded as early as 2000 BC and the widespread use of lead has been a cause of endemic chronic plumbism in several societies throughout history. The Greek philosopher Nikander of Colophon in 250 BC reported on the colic and anemia resulting from lead poisoning. Hippocrates related gout to the food and wine, though the association between gout and lead poisoning was not recognized during this period ( 450-380 BC). Later during the Roman period, gout was prevalent among the upper classes of Roman society and is believed to be a result of the enormous lead intake."

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_o...

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

The quotes are literally just made up. I looked it up once and the exact same person provided several recipes with heavy metals. Rome fell after they stopped using it, because its deficiency causes schizophrenia. People are not intelligent, they are making things up.

Anotheroneagain commented on Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/Hooke

jmyeet · a year ago

In the US, crime basically kept increasing until the 1990s and have been on a downward trend ever since. If you've fallen for the modern crime panic, it's completely manufactured. Look at any graph that goes back 40+ years and then tell me what the trend is.

The reason for this is hotly debated.

One theory is that it coincides with being 18 years or so after abortion was legalized [1]. The argument is that not forcing people to be parents who don't want to be and aren't equipped to be as well as this skewing to lower socioeconomic status. The link between poverty and crime has been well-established going back to Ancient Greece. In some ways, this is an uncomfortable argument because it's basically eugenics. In support of this, abortion access varied state-to-state by up to several years and the trends tend to follow that.

But this is a US-specific argument and I believe the trend was present in other countries.

The second big argument is removing lead from gasoline (in particular, but also water because of lead pipes) [2].

I really wonder what societal problems and public health incidents in the future will come down to micro-plastics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

It's because people learned that alcohol damages the fetus.

Anotheroneagain commented on Complex dynamics require complex solutions mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11387... · Posted by u/ckemere

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

No, I think he's completely wrong.

The world isn't being ruined by a meme. On the contrary, our problem is the complexity bias, which seems to have developed over the previous century.

As the result, nobody understands anything anymore. I fact it seems that more complex solutions have been worked out, that allow to run on sone kind of protocol, with little to no thinking involved.

Time is being wasted on dealing with problems in overly complex ways, and there is no room left for what can't be simplified.

Anotheroneagain commented on The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time cpubenchmark.net/year-on-... · Posted by u/doener

giljabeab · a year ago

It’s everyone jumping ship and switching from 14th gen to AMD

Anotheroneagain · a year ago

I mean the CPUs were tested early on, but later they failed, and no longer raise the average. It should be visible in more detailed statistics if it is so.