Hacker News Reader

Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

Given how broad this effect, it seems like an amazingly good mechanism to attribute to a pet peeve of your choice: screen time, chemicals, lack of good old-fashioned memorization, boring playgrounds/toys, lousy education, lack of exercise, the decline and fall of practically everything, etc. Couple that to a golden opportunity for older people to self-praise ("In my day we weren't as dumb/sheltered/poisoned as you folks") and you have the perfect storm.

Making these fond arguments slightly more awkward is the fact that this effect doesn't seem to be happening in America, but I suppose all you youngsters lacked the attention span to read all the way to the end of the article. Now get the hell off my lawn.

View on HN

One day, in the far future, it will be discovered that ubiquitious plastic has profound but subtle effects on intelligence, fertility and general health. Amending that will be like moving out of the slow zone.

The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.

Despite the harmful effects of lead, the Roman civilisation might well have been better off for it anyway. Did they have access to a more suitable material that wasn't prohibitively expensive?

(I legitimately don't know; maybe clay pipes would work?)

Clay pipes did work. Lots of places in the empire had clay, even over long distances.

> Scarborough wrote that Nriagu's basic premise couldn't be trusted because of sloppy work. He also concluded that the Romans were aware of the harm lead could cause, that lead poisoning wasn't endemic in their society and that Rome did not fall because of it.

> Yet French researcher Hugo Delile and his team, reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, concluded that such concentrations were "unlikely to have been truly harmful." The group also claimed that enough criticism of Nriagu's theory had been amassed over three decades to largely debunk it.

> "Lead is no longer seen as the prime culprit of Rome’s demise," Delile wrote.

It wasn’t the pipes, it was the wine, which they sweetened with lead acetate. Delile’s paper only touches on water supply, rather than lead as a deliberate addition to diet.

The Romans used lead acetate to sweeten their wine. In comparison I don't think the lead pipes were a problem.

I suppose we could blame high fructose corn syrup, then.

> The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.

True, but the theory that this affected public health is a myth.

Do you have any supporting statements? I'm just curious.

Well, one potential way that one could determine if this could yet be down to environmental contaminants would be to look at diet.

Nordic and Northern European states have far more seafood, particularly bottom feeding seafood like plaice and sole, which are fantastic bioaccumulators of nastiness, in their diet than the average American [1] - and marine environments ultimately accumulate a large proportion of fun things like micro plastics, and therefore BPA and phthalates, which have been shown to have a negative impact on gestatory brain development. [2]

It would be illuminating to see what correlation exists, as it may well be causative.

[1] https://www.greenfacts.org/en/fisheries/figtableboxes/figure... [2] https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/common-plastic-chemicals-aff...

Your link only shows total fish protein, not bottom feeders. Fish such as plaice and sole form a miniscule portion of the Nordic cuisine, and is mostly favored by older people anyway (anecdotal, don't have numbers).

Excellent point. I'm just going to get out in front of it and claim that nostalgia is the cause.

And ignoring how we have access to several orders of magnitude more knowledge, and not just 'we' as in 'we westerners' but all around the world, billions of people are getting connected to the internet and the vast array of knowledge (and cat pictures) that's available there.

I don't know about people getting dumber, I'd argue people are getting broader in terms of knowledge (and inane knowledge, and cat pictures). However, overall as humanity we're growing in knowledge at an enormous rate, with financial measures like GDP to follow (see e.g. China whose GDP multiplied several times over in the past 30 years).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com