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Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#261

Post by jbboehr »

artificial wrote: post #149
wpietri wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not generally. It mainly gets complex when the latter side wants to deny the harm. Then it's an ocean of motivated reasoning and endless arguments. We still have people arguing today that American slavery was good for the slaves.

Excellent! Together we can ban fast food and sugar consumption for the greater good. Heart disease and diabetes from the scourge of empty calories finally eliminated. Hundreds of thousands saved each year from poor choices. Up next: sedentary lifestyle enablers :). It’s such a rabbit hole, who should know best?

> Up next: sedentary lifestyle enablers

We can start with the internet! :)

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#262

Post by 8ytecoder »

paulkrush wrote: post #91

I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…

Animal farming

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#263

Post by Spooky23 »

leoc wrote: post #233
wpietri wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has two radically different concepts of freedom that travel under the same name. Both start with "I should be free to do as I want". One ends with "as long as I don't harm others". The other ends with "regardless of harm to others". You were dealing with the latter. It of course sounds insane when you say it baldly like this, which is why it rarely gets stated openly. But a lot of traditional societal structu…

Mind you, leaded gasoline was (AFAIK) approved everywhere else too, so this isn't just a story about US attitudes, specifically.

It was all licensed from GM.

You can’t reap the rewards of invention without the accountability that comes with it.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#264

Post by foerbert »

cwp wrote: post #251
version_five wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a "don't hate the player hate the game" type situation. Influencers or aspiring influencers are doing what they do because they are working inside a construct that's set up to reward them for it. They are not blameless, but they are not conspiring to create that damage that social media had done to society, they are in s sense being put up to it by the platforms and users (who by the way I don't think sho…

I guess I put more of the blame on the influencers because they are the ones making editorial decisions. Sure the platforms are optimizing for engagement too, but it's all content-agnostic. The influencers choose their words carefully, and they choose harmful words because it makes them more money.

I don't think it's quite fair to label it content-agnostic. I mean it sort of technically is, but practically it isn't.

By pushing 'engagement' at all costs, it's essentially inevitable that all the terrible behaviors we see from 'content creators' happen. I agree that they are far from blameless, but when your entire platform is practically globally available to anybody and you only reward unsavory behavior... you're going to get unsavory behavior.

There could be many, many people behaving ethically, and most people may never even see any of them due to the way the platforms are set up.

It's technically content-agnostic in the most technical sense, but practically it's one big system designed to incentivize and surface unethical behavior.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#265

Post by Misdicorl »

afavour wrote: post #140
paulkrush wrote: post #91

I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Maybe an overwrought comparison but I genuinely do feel like we’ll look back on this age of social media and disinformation in the same way we did leaded gas. The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused but they did everything in their power to cover it up in the name of profit. Originally it felt like a social annoyance a…

I disagree. The future doesn't have less social media, it has more. We won't look back with contempt, but amusement much as we do today at early cgi and tabloid efforts.

I don't love the idea with the current iteration, but every mass media invention has the exact same trope play out as we're seeing with social media.

1) first adopters and skeptics

2) major use

3) exploitation of those users

4) combo of regulation and individuals becoming more savvy

We're deep in phase three. It might get worse still, but I don't see much worse until you factor in additional game changers (deep fakes seem most obvious, but my money is on something currently unknown)

A new equilibrium will be found, better for some interests and worse for others.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#266

Post by kongin »

afavour wrote: post #140
paulkrush wrote: post #91

I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? Maybe an overwrought comparison but I genuinely do feel like we’ll look back on this age of social media and disinformation in the same way we did leaded gas. The people making money knew exactly how dangerous it was and the problems it caused but they did everything in their power to cover it up in the name of profit. Originally it felt like a social annoyance a…

>Originally it felt like a social annoyance and not much else but in this era of vaccine denialism, election fraud conspiracy theories, even body image issues from touched up photos, there’s little doubt in my mind that society is suffering and that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better.

I'd go the exact opposite way and say that in this age of free information the self serving lies of the old centers of power were found wanting and ignored. Blaming fakenews for things going wrong is the dying gasp of a failed system trying to stay relevant like the catholic church was after the printing press.

Before I get dogpiled on because of the current pandemic, we should remember the food pyramid, the following fat epidemic and the 200k deaths a year we have been getting every year for the last 30 years: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/957

The past wasn't great, experts got things wrong and a whole lot of people died.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#267

Post by bamboozled »

young_unixer wrote: post #247
paulkrush wrote: post #91

I guess we live on the shoulders of nastiness and things get better. So TEL was part of our boot sequence. What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? BTW: The guy that invented TEL also invented CFCs! See Thomas Midgley Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr . This guy who invents awesome working chemicals that are tragically bad for people on a worldwide scale manages to exit life dues to his…

> What nastiness are we subjecting ourselves to today? We should be ashamed at the number of people that die everyday in car "accidents". Specially pedestrians and cyclists. If you looked at our reaction to Covid, you'd think we value human life very much, but when you look at how our streets works, you realize we actually don't. The problem is even worse in poor countries.

Not to mention getting hit or run over by a car is a pretty brutal, this is from experience.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#268

Post by heresie-dabord »

chx wrote: post #258
heresie-dabord wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is not a toxin of any sort. To call it "toxic" is a metaphor that expresses the revulsion that people feel for the idiocies that social media channels have uncovered. So I do disagree with the liberty of the metaphor in this case. Social media is the business of providing channels of communication to people in exchange for some lucrative data. Other businesses do this too (television, radio, newspapers).…

Failing education is certainly a big problem (and I financed a tiny reform school for five years trying to combat the tiniest of slices of it) but you are missing the power of reach . Not even Edward Murrow could dream of the reach of Facebook.

Television in the US has long had an astonishing reach. Even in 2021, there are media companies in the US that operate on a segmented market with notorious control (e.g. Fox).

Would you say that the difference between television (TV) and social media (SM) is that TV can only push the propaganda from a central server, whereas SM provides the push of propaganda as well as mutual reinforcement through sharing comments?

I find it all quite deplorable, I assure you. But I really think the "toxicity" is a precursor to the expression of the "toxic" opinions. They already existed, but were hushed by the shame of direct attribution in regular public discourse.

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#269

Post by cratermoon »

cwp wrote: post #251
version_five wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a "don't hate the player hate the game" type situation. Influencers or aspiring influencers are doing what they do because they are working inside a construct that's set up to reward them for it. They are not blameless, but they are not conspiring to create that damage that social media had done to society, they are in s sense being put up to it by the platforms and users (who by the way I don't think sho…

I guess I put more of the blame on the influencers because they are the ones making editorial decisions. Sure the platforms are optimizing for engagement too, but it's all content-agnostic. The influencers choose their words carefully, and they choose harmful words because it makes them more money.

> they are the ones making editorial decisions

...

> they choose harmful words because it makes them more money

OK but who is responsible for the fact that choosing harmful words is more profitable?

Re: Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

#270

Post by randomdata »

CharlesW wrote: post #227
cwp wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the analogy between toxic media and toxic chemicals is pretty good. However, I'd put they blame for that somewhere you might find surprising: influencers. Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. They are hyper-attuned to the way people respond to their content, and they'll do…

> Everybody likes to hate on "big tech" these days, but if there's anyone that knows the dangers and all the ill effects but ignores them to make a profit, it's content creators. This is like blaming smokers instead of Philip Morris.

More like blaming the tobacco farmers instead of Phillip Morris, although it falls apart at the point that I’m not sure tobacco was seen as anything more than a commodity.
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