Does lead exposure cause autism?
Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#62I'm from a family that has been in real estate since the 80s. Lead remediation was a mandatory requirement in the late 70s. There is almost no lead anywhere in the country except for cities where there were old industrial manufacturing plants or places where there was illegal dumping of materials. You literally can't sell a home or purchase a home with lead issues because no one will purchase the property. There are…
I can tell you that lots of houses weren't remediated like you'd expect. An extra layer of paint, and now 50 years on since the 70s both are chipping sort of thing.
Yeah OP is completely wrong. There is tons of lead paint on the walls in just about every city in the US. Remediation has been completely ad hoc and the restrictions on selling a house with lead paint are almost always a single sheet o paper that says “Sign here to acknowledge that there may be lead paint.”
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#63> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980 That is interesting, but what I really wonder about is more subtle cognitive effects. Did it make people meaner? More easily led? Less collaborative? And as previously discussed here, lead was a known toxin when leaded gas was invented: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-..…
There is the hypothesis of lead causing increased crime rates: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
If you're looking for a sports analogy, I think it's sort of like "change in total seconds it takes the players to run the 100-yard dash". Not directly tied to success, and in some sense a pretty arbitrary measure, but a number that's nonetheless concerning to see get worse. I agree IQ is a pretty bad measure. And if you would like to go back and redo this study with a better one, I'm sure we (and this study's author…
Actually an amazing sports analogy. IQ is basically a metric same as any other startup metric. You can’t expect it to tell the whole story but it’s one useful thing that can be measured.
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#65I'm from a family that has been in real estate since the 80s. Lead remediation was a mandatory requirement in the late 70s. There is almost no lead anywhere in the country except for cities where there were old industrial manufacturing plants or places where there was illegal dumping of materials. You literally can't sell a home or purchase a home with lead issues because no one will purchase the property. There are…
According to the EPA
>Many homes, including private, federally-assisted, federally- owned housing, and childcare facilities built before 1978 have lead-based paint
https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-lead-your-home-...
Do you think they are lying?
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
If you're looking for a sports analogy, I think it's sort of like "change in total seconds it takes the players to run the 100-yard dash". Not directly tied to success, and in some sense a pretty arbitrary measure, but a number that's nonetheless concerning to see get worse. I agree IQ is a pretty bad measure. And if you would like to go back and redo this study with a better one, I'm sure we (and this study's author…
I think they're talking about measures in the mathematical sense. It measures something real, but a difference of one IQ point doesn't mean the same thing across the entire scale, so you can't just sum IQ point differences.
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#67> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980 That is interesting, but what I really wonder about is more subtle cognitive effects. Did it make people meaner? More easily led? Less collaborative? And as previously discussed here, lead was a known toxin when leaded gas was invented: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-..…
At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
>> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980
> At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
This is how I read it when I saw this number based on the title (I didn't read the article):
There are about 300 million people in total. Half of that is 150 million. A loss of 824,097,690 IQ points over 150 million people is over five point per person.
https://www.google.com/search?q=824%2C097%2C690+%2F+150+mill...
This is, of course, extremely misleading because someone born in the late eighties didn't suffer the same as someone born in the sixties. Similarly, someone born on or after January 1, 1996 didn't suffer as much as someone born in the eighties. Therefore, "five points per person" would be more misleading.
At the end, the actual number doesn't matter much. What matters is that the number conveys a sense of magnitude. We collectively lost almost a billion IQ points!
It doesn't matter what it exactly means. We just need to know that "they" robbed us. When I say us, it isn't just those of us in the US, I mean the whole world as the baby boomers voted and continue to vote (older people are more likely to vote compared to younger people). Who knows maybe if we had higher IQ, we wouldn't have fallen for nonsense like "starve the beast". If you stop to think for two seconds, reducing income because you think you are spending too much is asinine. It doesn't matter whether it is the federal government or a small family, it makes no sense to say well I am spending too much but if I had less income maybe my expenses would suddenly come under control.
Maybe with a slightly higher IQ, the people who voted in the eighties would have demanded this nonsense be nipped in the bud. I can't even imagine how much of a better place the world could be if we took a different path instead of following Ronald Reagan's shenanigans.
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amount of "IQ points lost" could easily correspond to more damage to cognitive intelligence caused by lead exposure.
>> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980 > At the risk of stating the obvious, IQ points aren't a measure and adding them up doesn't yield a meaningful number. It's like adding up the numbers on football player's jerseys; if the total of a team's numbers goes up, that doesn't make the team better. Similarly, a reduction in the total amou…
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Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#69Is there anything that can even be done to treat lead exposure long ago?
Chelating treatments, although I have no idea how they can be administered or used it if there are constraints to their use. I think it's unavailable at the pharmacy.
I remember because the molecule is quite funny it has some kind of slot to capture the lead atom.
Re: Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood
#70> This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980 That is interesting, but what I really wonder about is more subtle cognitive effects. Did it make people meaner? More easily led? Less collaborative? And as previously discussed here, lead was a known toxin when leaded gas was invented: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-..…
IQ has a interesting property in which it is multiplicative at the individual level, but not additive at the individual or collective level.
A 140+ IQ person is not 40% smarter than a 100 IQ person, but much smarter. Someone with an IQ of 100 may struggle at college math but someone with an IQ of 140 can do cutting edge research.
Likewise, adding two 120 IQ people does not equal a 140 IQ person. So even a dozen 100 IQ people working together will not be able to solve a math problem that a single person who has an IQ of 140 can solve.