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Leaded Gas, CFCs, and the Dark Side of Progress (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Leaded Gas did a great job of keeping engines from knocking thanks to tetra-ethyl lead. Unfortunately the fumes from the chemical are highly poisonous. R-12 is a refrigerant that revolutionized the cold storage of vaccines. It turned out to be the first of the chlorofluorocarbons which are well known (and now banned) for damaging the environment. Both are the creations of one inventor: Thomas Migley, Jr. Two deadly inventions seem like more than enough for one person, but his story ends with a third. Stricken with Polio, he invented a system to help him get in and out of bed on his own. A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
This article sparked the memory of wondering why we had to pay more for unleaded gas... Apparently it was expensive to remove the naturally occurring lead from the refined gasoline.
Oh, wait . . .
You should remember that Thomas Migley was foremost a scientist, and quite representative of the hubris and single-mindedness of scientists. When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
So, when scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you, just remember how this guy died: A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
The vast majority of high quality correlations are also causations. Sometimes a common cause for both can confuse matters, but in the vast majority of cases you can trust a correlation to be a causation. This is not true if the correlation was either falsified or just not there in the first place, obviously. The causation can also go in the opposite direction of what you expect, but it seems unlikely that falling crime leads to the banning of leaded petrol.
The correlation between phasing out leaded petrol and falling crime holds in many countries which banned lead at different times. It is highly unlikely that some other cause happened at the right time in all the countries.
The causality itself is also quite uncontroversial: It is known that exposure to lead means lower average IQ, and lower average IQ means more violence.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Sounds like Karma to me.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I wouldn't exactly call it justice when the organism arguably responsible for the most environmental damage ever seen on the planet died because he screwed up and accidentally strangled himself.
Yea, but the question is, did he know any of that at the time those inventions were made?
Did he have reason to know?
If not, then you can't blame him for them, plenty of things were invented that way and then changed in the future. Lead paint is another example off the top of my head.
Where is the evidence that he was trying to make dangerous products?
The common wisdom of the time, was the atmosphere was large enough and the biosphere diverse enough to clear up any toxins, and what men can do would only be a small effect.
This idea was wrong, but it took a lot of science to show this effect.
But if you want to vilify people for being part of their time... How much carbon are we polluting as part of these trivial posts?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From TFA:
In 1924, General Motors was headed for a scandal. Although reports of sickness had been coming out of all three tetraethyl refineries, the story was concealed from the newspapers. But things came to a head at the TEL refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. Dozens of workers contracted lead poisoning from breathing the toxic vapors and became violently insane. Five men died within a short time and news coverage was unavoidable.
Midgley stopped at nothing in trying to convince the public that his antiknock additive was safe. He would pour TEL additive onto his own hands and take deep breaths from the bottle in front of large audiences, all the while insisting that it was harmless and that repeated daily exposure was nothing to worry about. What the public didn’t know was that Midgley had recently spent six weeks in Florida, golfing in the sunshine in an attempt to clear his own lungs of lead particles.
So, he might not have known from the very beginning, but he certainly knew early on and did his best to keep it quiet. That strikes me as knowing and willful.