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I made this connection a month ago - that a couple of generations of humans grew up breathing exhaust from leaded gasoline and dust from lead paint and had a bit of an epiphany about the state of the world.
I admire your optimism about the human race.
Yeah, I've unfortunately encountered more than a fair share of younger human-shaped excrement that definitely weren't exposed to high levels of lead.
Maybe we'll find out PFAS has similar effects.
You gotta consider a lot of rural areas don't have as strict ordinances for dwellings, so it's entirely possible the 20-year-olds you're talking to ate lead paint chips growing up.
Dude. As a whole the world is stupider by several tens of IQ points solely in specifically due to lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning is the single most detrimental effect ever experienced by humanity so very few people even understand that!
Lead poisoning is the single most detrimental effect experienced by humanity, so far.
Wait til they find out what microplastics do to us, if we last long enough to get the results on that shit.
They've been poisoning people with lead since before Roman times. They used to make drinking glasses from lead
When it comes to lead tainted... drinking glasses are bad, breathing air are worse.
That doesn’t even make sense
IQ test’s haven’t been around that long and they are based on averages. 100 being the standard
If everyone dropped by 5 then 95 would just be 100 so a generation can’t just have a worse IQ across the board
Below 75 means you have a disability so at most you have 25 points to work with meaning several tens is impossible
This statement right here ladies and gentlemen proves my point.
Lay off the paint chips buddy.
Explain
Back in the day paint used to have lead as an ingredient, people would use this to paint the inside of tunnels, over passes and buildings and other such things. As the years passed this lead paint peeled away into small chips that could, if one had the predilection, be eaten thus incurring lead poisoning.
Ingesting lead affects the brain especially the ability to process information efficiently thus making one stupider if they consumed enough lead.
Considering the pedantic nature of your comment I assumed that you may have ingested some of these chips and your thought process has slowed down.
Nothing you said has any relation to the claim that lead paint resulted in IQ scores being lower because as I said before. That is literally impossible when the mean of a test result is equal to 100
Did you think you wouldn’t be called out on a lie or were you just ignorant of the claim you were making?
Maybe you were ignorant of time and thought that a 100 year old test would somehow have a ton of historical data from people not exposed to led
Or you were ignorant of age and test bias thinking it fair to compare a 70 year old high school graduate with someone in college
Dude. Stop.
I was using IQ as a comparative device because most people know what that is and thus would be able to understand what I meant.
On average, according to some online sources most people will have an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115 that's a difference of 30 points, or as I called it tens of points.
If humanity would have used less lead it is possible that average could have been substantially higher by tens of points which is a perfectly valid statement considering the 30 point difference in the average.
If humanity would have used less lead it is possible that average could have been substantially higher
Again, no
You don’t understand how averages work
people will have an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115 that’s a difference of 30 points, or as I called it tens of points.
This also shows you don’t understand averages. If you took 10% off everyone’s test then they would all still have the same IQ score
I was using IQ as a comparative device because most people know what that is and thus would be able to understand what I meant.
But you don’t even know what it means
Doubling down after being shown you were ignorant means you are an idiot
Cool. He doesn’t understand what it “means”. We get that. You clearly do. How is intelligence compared between generations then?
You don’t really compare it between generations because you go by age and averages
So when they were your age the average was 100, when you were your age the average was 100
If you are at 100 your whole life but when you turn 70 you’re at 80 then it should be a red flag that something is going on
I know exactly how averages work.
I also know that IQ tests and the IQ standard is not a realistic way of judging intelligence especially in large demographics.
Again, I was using it as a comparative device.
You are being nothing more than pedantic and erroneous at that.
You have done nothing but contradict yourself in this entire exchange.
But, please keep digging that hole.
Dude, they gave our parents Lithium to sedate manic behaviour...between that, Lead, Asbestos, Teflon and now plastic... couple that with the absolute lack of proper mental health care. America is a melting pot...of mental breakdowns left unchecked and unresolved.
My immediate and grand Family was destroyed by alcoholism.
my wife and I feel like the boy and girl in JH's Horizon, surrounded by indifference and broken adults.
Makes me wonder if we're not undergoing something similar. I imagine that a lot of people didn't know the effects it'd have on them when those things were first introduced
Plastics are the modern lead.
Having made that connection, how does it feel about the criticisms we have toward our previous generation? I say this being born in the late 80s, so my folks are from this generation, although I can say at least 50% of them somehow escaped the associated issues, which to me I wonder if there's some genetic predispotion, and widespread, to exposure to lead causing essentially cognitive disabilities.
Anyway, if you buy into this (and I do), were essentially chastising this generation for fucking our shit up, knowing full well they have intellectual disabilities. And I have no idea what their OG knew about lead exposure, or when we learned about its effects on the majority of the population, so I'm not trying to point fingers at the moment.
But we essentially have a generation of mentally handicapped people, who because of their handicap have terrible reasoning skills, and me and you and our generation point our fingers at them and say you're fucking our shit up. It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke, Dammit Otto, you're an alcoholic: dammit Otto, you have lupus.
Just rambling. Perhaps I had a little exposure myself. I just don't want to assume the worst in people, that they're knowingly fucking our shit up. They just don't know better.
You say you don't want to assume the worst in people, and so do I, but at some point we have to be realistic.
Yeah, and I'm being purely philosophical, I think we are able, as humans, to say hey, you may have been dealt a bad hand insofar as being raised around Stupid Smoke, but your personal responsibility skills are shit, and there's no two ways around it.
Your philosophical dilemma is valid, but I would point out that pointing fingers is the best choice we have in this matter. Say, indeed, the ones fucking shit up do have intellectual disabilities, they still continue doing it. Reprimanding them for it is perhaps society's way of trying to get them to stop. Sort of like in the case of a child I guess - children being considered in this argument as having not enough understanding of the consequences of their actions. Equate, if you will, 'goddamn it Billy, stop running in the street' to 'goddamnit grandma, stop voting for idiots'.
The problem then is that Billy may listen, but grandma is set in her ways and has the notion that age brings wisdom regardless, so she's less inclined to listen to what the equivalent of Billy for her has to say.
I see no alternatives for this (that is to say, an attempt to correct erroneous behaviour) in the context of the aspirations of modern society.
As a thought experiment, in the most extreme case, what would we do? Test everyone for lead and remove, for example, the right to vote across a certain threshold? That doesn't take into account the baseline intellectual ability of individual (which can vary across a population) and the degree to which said discovered lead levels would affect them. It's entirely possible that a lead-laden 'smart' brain still has more capability than a pure but idiotic one. Not sure how we'd ever assess that. Not to mention the system would be exploited as soon as possible to channel power.
We could of course, stop pointing fingers and forgive them, for they know not what they do, and it'd probably have about the same effect.
The only answer I keep coming to is this country will tear itself apart. We've got groups of people who refuse to accept empirical evidence for things that don't affect them personally; imagine when you say hey, we scienced you and you're dumb because of your exposures to A, B, and C.
So yeah, I have so little hope, and I try to look at things on a more micro scale. I can't inherit the problems of thousands of miles away, especially when there are some problems here that I can deal with, and hopefully make my and my family's lives better. And then I can just hope everyone else everywhere is thinking the same way. And maybe we are. Maybe my generation will pull ourselves up by our proverbial bootstraps as soon as the generation before us is done stepping on our heads. But then I think that's too hopeful of me.
I think you're on the right track with focusing on the local things you can change. And keeping hope alive is important! I mean, I may not have a choice in being fucked and miserable later, so if I can avoid that now, then that's great.
I liked Spider's point about means testing for voting. It wouldn't work, although it does seem like it would be a step forward. We can't even means test our politicians which has seemed necessary more and more recently... those pesky legalities, lol.
I saw that Mr. Roger's quote "look to the helpers" recently on here and that keeps bouncing back in my head when I get negative thoughts. I know it's not completely sustainable, but I keep seeing the impact of positivity on my life and the people around me, which is a nice change from the norm.
I imagine the next generation will involve Zoomers corrupted by microplastics and mercury.