[stouset]

Evidence-based decisions matter, but so does extreme caution when considering the scale and widespread impact. There was no evidence against leaded gasoline… right up until there was, and by then everyone had been breathing exponentially-increasing amounts of lead.

So maybe let's be conservative when considering compounds that live permanently in the environment, are damn near impossible to remove, and are spreading widely to every part of the ecosystem yeah?

[kragen]

there was excellent evidence against leaded gasoline even before it was commercialized. lead had been known to be toxic for two thousand years, many of the workers in the pilot tetraethyl lead plant died, and midgley (the inventor) gradually became paralyzed, probably as a result of his exposure. people used leaded gasoline to kill insects, and accidental human deaths from ingestion were fairly common

there are in fact cases where people used something harmful for a long time before there was good evidence that it was harmful (examples include kohl, sassafras, trans fats, maybe asbestos, radium, twitter, and facebook) but leaded gasoline is not one of them

there are very many more cases where people used something for a long time before there was good evidence about whether it was harmful, and it wasn't. almost everything ever invented falls under this rubric

conservatism like yours was the default stance for thousands of years, which is why human life was impoverished and short during that time. during the 19th and 20th centuries, we took a break from it, and the result was a leap in human prosperity to previously unimaginable heights. now people want to bring it back. i'm not a fan

[mightyham]

>conservatism like yours was the default stance for thousands of years, which is why human life was impoverished and short during that time.

The ridiculousness of this claim is basically self-evident. The obvious reason for impoverished and short life spans was a low level of technological development, not conversative social attitudes. It begs the question, how exactly could modern liberal attitudes even exist in an era that lacked the technology required to have a modern liberal society?

[kragen]

that's like saying 'the obvious reason she died was that my hammer hit her in the head, not that i swung my hammer at her head'

i'm not sure what you mean by 'modern liberal attitudes' but in any case i think it's irrelevant

[mightyham]

By "modern liberal attitudes", I mean exactly that. Liberal beliefs held by the general public that came about in the modern era (post enlightenment), which is simply a more rigorous description for what you seem to be referring to when you say that the world took a break from conservatism "during the 19th and 20th centuries". All that to say, it's extremely relevant to the discussion.

If, as you claim, conservatism was the main reason for low life expectancy, then at any point in time people could have just stopped being conversative (I don't even really know what you mean by this, but according to you it happened in the 19th century), and their standard of living would have gone up as a result. I'll say it again, this is ridiculous on its face. The industrial revolution, which lead to today's human prosperity was driven almost entirely by SPECIFIC environmental, economic, and cultural conditions. It was not driven by some shift in public attitude about being generally more accepting of change.

[kragen]

i wasn't talking about conservatism in general. i was talking specifically about stouset's form of conservatism: 'extreme caution when considering the scale and widespread impact ... let's be conservative when considering compounds that live permanently in the environment, are damn near impossible to remove, and are spreading widely to every part of the ecosystem'

such extreme caution is entirely compatible with liberal post-enlightenment beliefs, but not with technological progress, which was indeed largely driven by shifts in public attitudes about technical innovations, including but not limited to novel materials. when newton was inventing modern physics he had to keep his chemistry experiments secret because chemistry was illegal, and the catholic church specifically prosecuted people (via the inquisition) for practicing chemistry: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30134775/

this problem continues to the present day, where it continues to retard technical progress in many places; and, of course, hatred and even legal prosecution of chemists in particular has returned in places like the usa. but the problem is much broader than this; for example, william kamkwamba relates in his autobiography how his neighbors believed the windmill he had built in malawi was causing a drought through witchcraft, after having ridiculed him as a lunatic for years when he was hanging out in the junkyard to salvage the parts to build it

[jdietrich]

>There was no evidence against leaded gasoline

Everyone involved knew that tetraethyllead was horrendously toxic, they just didn't particularly care.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140711220018/http://www.radfor...