Whoohoo!
Another victim of Less Wrong. =D

All in all, it's often very interesting and even practical stuff, but doesn't have a great impact on my happiness, so I didn't spend too much stuff on it.

I'm curious if any of my fellow UFers are familiar with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

If not, I'd highly recommend him to all of you. I ran across his writing when I was trying to understand Bayes' Theorem:

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

He has written a hell of a lot of material, many of his essays/articles you can find here:

http://lesswrong.com

Anyway. Read and enjoy.

We had very different childhoods. I first heard it from a county waste management engineer during a class field trip.

I think I saw that sketch on The Electric Company.

As recently as the mid-Seventies, the mantra was "Dilution is the solution to pollution".

I'll agree with that. I think it may have actually been the experience with DDT that really got people to realize that. Like I said, I agree that back in the 20's people couldn't have known just how extensive the danger of environmental lead from TEL was. But I still think that they must have known there was some danger. Especially since the combustion products from the engine were dumped straight out the tailpipe in those days.

I think the key missing conceptual element was the notion that the environment could be poisoned. There was nary a conception that emitting something slowly into the air that would end up in the ground and washed away by rainwater would actually end up in humans and poison them. In cramped industrial spaces, cumulative poisons (phosphorus and mercury in matchmaking and hat felting respectively) were well known by then to eventually do damage. But the Earth itself was thought of as so incomprehensibly vast that there was nothing you could do, as a puny human, to substantially effect its course or qualities in a long-term way. There were no cases of a man-made environmentally introduced toxin that had substantial effects prior to the discovery that the lead oxides produced by the combustion of TEL didn't get easily washed away, and environmental encounters with trace amounts were enough to harm humans.

Now, of course, we know better.

@Nope: I'm kind of skeptical of that argument. I'm not sure of the exact timeline of what research was done when, and I'm sure you're right that there were a lot of unanticipated consequences to leaded gas that weren't brought to light until well after they'd started to happen. But it seems to me that there's a huge difference between scientific standards of evidence for the exact effects of a particular agent and moral standards for knowing that something is dangerous, or just really really not a good idea.

It'd been well known since the nineteenth century that lead is very toxic. And like I said, Midgely himself came down with lead poisoning. I think it's safe to assume that wasn't because he was taking a nightcap of TEL each day before bed. It was certainly known in the 20's that chronic exposure to toxins could lead to cumulative effects. As I recall, that was a plot device in several Agatha Christie novels. Midgely was a bright guy, so although I'll accept that he didn't and couldn't know what exactly the effects would be, saying that he didn't know that widespread use of TEL would be dangerous to people's health seems like quite a stretch to me. I'm not trying to paint Midgely as the big villain here, and there were certainly tons of other people involved who also deserve blame. But I don't think Midgely went to his grave with a clear conscious.

It kind of reminds me of a person I ran into a little while ago who insisted that pot smoking has no negative health effects. Now it's certainly true that there's no research showing that it's harmful. But there's no research on the subject at all, largely because of US drug policy. I have no idea what smoking the stuff does to your cancer risk, if it's better or worse then smoking tobacco, or any other specifics. But pretty much anything that involves inhaling smoke is going to be pretty bad for you to some degree - I think trying to say otherwise is just fooling yourself.

My quibble is with the irony, because I think it rather difficult if not impossible to assign responsibility for missing that tetraethyllead is a cumulative environmental poison--quite different from what was then known about acute catastrophic exposure--since doctors hadn't discovered that fact themselves until the mid 1940's. I think the (aided by hidsight) judgment of ours of the decision to use TEL as an anti-knocking compound is not properly characterized as heedless or driven by greed. Later on, when it did become obvious, then the excuses and the foot dragging and so forth become a legitimate part of the analysis, but none of that was the fault of poor Midgely.

@Drax: Yup, Midgely was responsible for both leaded gas and CFC's. I heard a quote somewhere that he had a bigger impact on the atmosphere then any other single organism in the history of the Earth. I almost feel sorry for the guy. Although to be fair, he had absolutely no way to know that CFC's would be harmful.

And television.

My general assessment, not being an historian, nor alive in the 60s, is that many things affect many other things. So it wasn't so much a chain reaction as in one thing caused another, but that things changed because they were changed. I don't think I'm saying that right. If the... zeitgeist (probably not using that word correctly either).. was amenable to change, that's why it changed. I don't think, unless you're saying the 60s were a result of lead poisoning itself, that it could possibly have sparked a tumult. It would be isolated and everyone would be happy with everything else.

If you take another sense - I grew up in the 70s. My parents grew up in the 40s. I seem to be a little different than people my age whose parents grew up in the 50s; however, I take to heart the 60s more than my parents do, that younger parents than them would have experienced as teens in the 60s rather than getting married at the beginning of the decade (and starting their marriage outside the US). Things like equality and civil rights, although I am white and straight, are something I would have had to learn outside the home, and nobody told me about it. I don't know how I learned to be fair, it wasn't at school, not directly, and it wasn't something I had to re-learn after I left my home. It was just part of the air, things I know came straight out of the generality of being alive at the time.

Another example I like to think of is counting myself as being fairly isolated. Then I turn on some stupid show or the internet, and I see people already thinking things I thought were original to me. Their creative juices are in tune with something outside them. They are taking in stimuli and moving in a direction like starlings or fish do, with me. That is, I think the thing with the gas was not something that put everything else in motion if everyone was not already headed that way. The industrial revolution was a big change that had to be tamed ultimately, and I think of gas (also cigarettes) as belonging to that era and being held over, and tamed later. If we were going to build interstates while ignoring the dangers of leaded gasoline, I think reason won the day eventually. I have to look up when people really started to get cars - my assumption is that cars weren't exactly slow to catch on, but were subject to the same kind of explosion of popularity as televisions at one time and cell phones in our lifetime and electric cars, come to think of it. Once something is in your garage attached to your house, fascinating and convenient and hot-damn as it may be, becoming increasingly aware of the hazards on the other side of the wall from your living room might necessitate another solution ASAP that won't make you have to give up your car.

The proximal cause of the Sixties was without a doubt the fact that we ran out of years in the Fifties to observe. In a sense, they were inevitable.

I think the mind altering drugs played a substanial role, but a lesser one than the Vietnam war. Also didn't that poor bastard Midgely invent CFCs for cooling after he finished poisoning everyone with lead?

If I had to answer that question, I would say: Hitler. Hitler caused the sixties. As well as starting VW and building the Beetle (a sixties icon if ever there was one), he started WWII, which directly caused the Baby Boom, which raised a generation of kids with more money and better quality of life on average than anybody had ever had before, which gave people the freedom in terms of time and resources to A) protest about stuff they didn't like, and B) experiment with mind altering drugs.

No worries. I don't really think you are a "conservative" LOL (whatever that means.

I think the war played a bigger role. Along with a youth culture and media that no longer accepted conventional wisdom so readily.

Interesting thoughts, though.

LOL! Sorry, I wasn't clear - I don't even remotely agree with the conservatives about the 60's. I mean, I'm a bisexual, gender ambiguous witch, so... I wonder if I could make Rick Santorum's head explode just by standing in the same room? Might be worth a try at some point.

What I meant was that I'm wondering if the effects of the lead poisoning could have added enough instability to society to trigger the big changes. I didn't mean to suggest that the lead poisoning lead to the results of those changes. And I'm certainly not suggesting that the lead was the only factor at work.

My decidedly inexpert understanding of lead poisoning makes it seem like one of the effects might be to make people more likely to act out in ways that there are social pressures against. So maybe that turned a general discontent into street protests? Turned unhappiness into action? I don't know, I'm really just speculating.

Hmmm. Interesting thesis.

I guess one response would be that you are accepting the conservative world view that the 60s revolt(s) were on the whole negative. Is this true? Maybe with respect to conformance with "society", sure? But is such conformance automatically "good"?

Much of the social upheavel of the 60s, while certainly disruptive, could even be seen as exhbiting more intelligence, more thought, more skepticism. So I don't know!

I might suggest that another reason/set of reasons for the upheavel (along with the grinder of Vietnam) would be general affluence allowing youth more "room" to experiment.

I was recently watching a documentary about the history of leaded gasoline when a thought occurred to me: could conservative opposition to environmental and safety regulation by the government have been a direct cause of the social upheavals of the 60's and 70's?

When tetraethyl lead (TEL) was first developed as a gasoline additive in the 1920's, it was well known just how toxic lead is. In fact, shortly after mass production began there were several cases of factory workers dieing and going insane from lead poisoning. Several states banned TEL and the US Surgeon General conducted an investigation into the safety of leaded gasoline. However, the investigation concluded that there was no reason to ban TEL, the state bans were overturned, and TEL became nearly universally used. The conservative laissez-faire philosophy of the time carried the day, along with a significant boost from a massive PR campaign by the companies involved.

A sad epithet to this tale concerns Thomas Midgely, one the primary engineers responsible for the development of TEL. In 1940, Midgely developed polio and became bed ridden. He built a rope and pulley contraption for himself to help him move in bed. In 1944, he was found dead, strangled by his own device. Although Midgely was highly acclaimed in his lifetime, he almost certainly knew just how dangerous TEL was. For one thing, he himself had been one of the people who suffered from lead poisoning before safe handling procedures had been implemented. There has been some speculation that his death may have actually been a suicide, motivated by guilt over the dangers of leaded gasoline.

Now, lead poisoning causes (among other things) a variety of neurological problems, including lowered IQ, problems concentrating, and anti-social, bizarre, and even violent behavior. Children are especially susceptible. There's also a strong correlation between the usage of leaded gasoline and violent crime, taking into account a 22 year time lag. So here's the question. Leaded gas became ubiquitous in the Us by the 1940's. Is the timing of the social upheaval of the 1960's and 70's a coincidence? Or could lead poisoning have been a catalyst? I think it would be beyond ironic if the social changes that so many conservatives today decry as a massive catastrophe had been directly caused by conservative opposition to regulation.

@Brian K:
Obligatory Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-int,1778/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/who-runs-the-world/

It's interactive - mouse over!

You feel that way Custador, because, Big Pharma and Big Fluoride have already sapped your vital essences! LOL

Still...Flat Earth and Heliocentrism denial....that is just amazing. I can almost understand the 911 Truthers, but Heliocentrism?

I have to admit, the crazies that have me particularly riled at the moment tend to all tout the same four conspiracy theories:

1) Vaccination is a con by Big Pharma,
2) Fluoride in water is Killing You, and
3) Contrails? You mean CHEMTRAILS,
4) 9/11 was an Inside Job.

Seriously, these people are idiots, barely capable of grasping the pseudo-science they spout. Number 4) in particular grinds my gears, because I think there are unanswered questions about 9/11 that need to be addressed, but that doesn't mean "Bush Did It", and while the loonies fling their shit like chimpanzees, it obscures the relevant questions.

Really, I think it's a combination of a particular cognitive deficit (being unable to process certain information certain ways), and a form of gnosticism (the need to feel one is party to secret knowledge that lesser mortals do not have).

Why is it all of a sudden that all the crazies are coming out of the woodwork the last few years? The climate change deniers are starting to look like the sane ones. I mean, the whole premise behind Tea-o-nomics is that everything we've learned about economics since 1929 is completely wrong. "Legitimate rape..." I ran into one person on a political forum who wants to replace the income tax with a per capita tax. No joke. I'm expecting to hear someone seriously suggest bringing back slavery any day now...

It's like someone set off a bug bomb in the dark underbelly of American culture and all sorts of nasties are scurrying out into the light...

Meanwhile, here in Georgia, a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives (1997-2008), Benjamin Bridges, was criticized for circulating a memo condemning evolution and heliocentrism in the Georgia legislature. The memo's author was Marshall Hall- the president of the Fair Education Foundation. (fixedearth.com)

Marshall Hall's wife, Bonnie Hall, who also works on the website, was Bridges' longtime campaign manager.

According to Bonnie, on the site, Marshall would have been dead by now had it not been for prayers.

WTF!

Did you know there is no force of gravity? It is JESUS holding us down.

I don't believe in tape or glue.

Welcome to Planet Earth, Brian. Here, there is no concept so patently ludicrous that it has no adherents.

There are actually people out there who deny heliocentrism, who believe in the Fixed Earth metaphor/myth. I had no idea.

http://www.fixedearth.com/

I always thought the Flat Earth Society was a joke. Wikipedia has no wiff of humor in its description thereof.

Wierd. Just wierd.

That is really cool :-) Thanks Kodie.

Well, this reminds me of an italian saying "tira più un pelo di figa che un carro di buoi".

the meaning is more or less "sex is the most powerful drive to do something".