Hacker News Reader

Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

add this to the possibly permanent degradation of cognitive function, and we may be witnessing an unprecedented species wide debilitation. I wonder how much this might actually slow us down, imagine an Einstein who never got beyond the clerks job because brain fog stopped his discoveries

View on HN

Leaded gasoline has been a former experiment in population-wide reduction of intelligence and increase of aggressiveness. Supposedly that affected that 80's, but I am not aware of systematic studies on that.

Lots of links starting from here:

https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-tragedy-how-the-car...

thx! TIL leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s primarily because it clogged catalytic converters needed to end smog, not because of health reasons!

(smog used to be terrible - I lived through the latter half of that period, am I can't even relate to how awful it used to be... friends and I remember walking in midtown Manhattan, blowing our noses and it being black... I can't even imagine pre-1980 let alone pre-1970... https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d )

> leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s

... In automobiles.

Lead is very much in use for aircraft fuel, just google AVGAS.

It's absolutely bonkers to me that recreational fliers can still rain toxic lead on people below.

And yet the US didn’t seem to crash and burn? HN is preoccupied with intelligence to the point of hysteria.

I enjoyed seeing your other comment[s] in this mess of a thread. Good luck!

that a present-day Von Neumann is probably somewhere working on ad/fintech is in many ways even more depressing.

Yup. Todays best and brightest for the most part are working hard to sell ads and track users of smartphones.

certainly, market system misallocates a ton of resources. We need to recalibrate high value + high status

Reply on news.ycombinator.com