Hacker News Reader

Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

> Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US?

I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.

View on HN

I am assuming bad faith for a good reason, which is that the parent comment failed to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the listed pollutants keep accumulating in the environment, proportional to the number of people that exist. In fact, the parent comment even rejected this established knowledge, thereby proving its bad faith.

You are assuming bad faith because you are reading things into my words that are not there.

I do not deny that (some) pollutants accumulate. I also do not deny that pollution is quite bad in some places.

I am specifically questioning your claim that doubling pollution would specifically halve the rate of innovation. I was pointing out that you have not supported that statement. You claimed it twice, you still haven't supported it, and I'm pretty sure that you can't support it.

Stop trying to read into my statement wild claims that aren't there. Can you support your claim?

Yes, microplastics accumulate in the brain over the years [PMID: 38765967]. They cause anxiety [PMID: 37269995] and brain inflammation [DOI: 10.3390/ijms241512308]. There is a lot more research on them than I am quoting here.

When someone is suffering from crippling anxiety, if you have ever suffered from it, the last thing on their mind will be to develop anything cool.

Moreover, microplastics accumulate and harm various organs, not only the brain. They also cause generational infertility due to the pervasive co-presence of toxins like phthalate in them [PMID: 39446714].

Similarly, higher CO2 levels are detrimental to cognition. This has been known for years and is established knowledge.

First, these studies merely suggest that microplastics have these effects in humans, yet you state them as fact. However, I don't want to argue that microplastics are harmless or that pollution is not an issue. Neither do I want to defend the point that doubling the population doubles the "speed of discovery". But even if all of your points are accurate, you would still have to show that these negative effects outweigh the benefit of a priori doubling productivity. In fact, you make the even stronger claim that doubling the population will actually cut the "speed of discovery" in half. None of this is substantiated by your argument.

How is it that despite the vast population, we no longer have geniuses like Newton, Leibnitz, Gauss, Maxwell, Einstein, etc.? If they existed today, they would just be selling ads and stocks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com