Comments by "Faithless Hound" (@faithlesshound5621) on "Veritasium" channel.

At Cambridge, Newton was subjected to institutional humiliation for being poor. His mother was the widow of a clergyman (his stepfather) and he was admitted to Trinity College as a subsizar, which meant his fees were paid by the Fellows and wealthier students ("fellow commoners") and in return he worked as a valet until he obtained a scholarship after three years.
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It wasn't just Midgley who knew there was a problem, but also the Ethyl Corporation, Standard Oil and the public health authorities around the tetra-ethyl lead factory. Did industry in capitalist countries have the power to suppress public health information? Were things better or worse at that time in Russia and China?
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@Tom S The idea that mathematicians were ever "rich socialites who had chicks"! You are right that mathematics was a competitive sport, especially at Cambridge, long before there were similar competitions in other subjects, and that the "Senior Wrangler" was expected to go far in his career. But Newton was streets ahead, doing this stuff on his own and did not rush into print. How rich was he? His mother was a clergyman's widow, who had servants as all middle class people did in the 17th century. She took him out of school to try to make him into a farmer, which he hated, but was persuaded by the headmaster to let him return: so they could afford to let him stay on at school. His uncle, another clergyman, arranged for him to go to Trinity College at Cambridge without paying fees in exchange for acting as a servant: so he "worked his way through college" and it was obvious to everyone that he was doing so. He was hardly one of the idle rich.
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@andrewmontague9682 The "don't ask, don't tell" aspect extended to Newton's religion. He was allowed to have and express heretical views, because by then Englishmen had tired of nearly two centuries of religious bloodshed and wars. It was still possible to be executed for atheism or heresy for another century, but everyone from the King downwards left him alone. The rule was that Fellows of Trinity College had to become ordained priests, but that was ignored during the restoration and it was enough to subscribe publicly to the doctrines of the Church of England. Newton could not, so he had special permission from King Charles II, the Head of that church, who probably did not agree with all of them either.
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People were blaming horror comics and later violent cartoons also: but neither had the penetration of lead fumes in the air.
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@forgottenfamily The "government" may not have known about the hazards of the tetra-ethyl lead additive, but technical and safety experts at the factories did, along with their clerks and secretaries, and their counterparts at General Motors and Standard Oil (forebear of Esso and Exxon): people from the bottom to the very top of those organisations. Did they all follow the Nuremberg defence of "I'm only following orders?" Chemical works had been under public surveillance since the 19th century since they were known to present a hazard to workers and local residents, who were individually powerless. Surely local doctors and hospitals noticed what was happening, along with the unions? In the UK, the government squashed plans to reduce lead in petrol because the failing British Motor Corporation, which had had to be taken into public ownership, was about to release a new engine which needed leaded petrol. So the profit versus health balance tilted for them towards profit. That was a few years after the UK Treasury had managed to delay an anti-smoking campaign for one year after the discovery that smoking was the main cause of the great post-war spike in lung cancer. Their argument was that this was a rapidly fatal disease that came on towards the end of a working (and thus tax-paying) life which saved them from paying out years of state pension. For them, workers were disposable once they stopped being useful. This was just a few years after WWII. In the case of tobacco, corporations and their hired scientists and politicians managed to water down and delay anti-smoking measures for several decades on the pretence that "the jury's still out." This happened with almost every hazardous chemical or natural substance. It took almost a century for asbestos.
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@jimwerther It's not claimed that lead is the sole cause of violence, merely that lead poisoning of children increased rates of violent crime when they were older, and the link between lead levels in children and violence later on has been shown in several countries with differing penal policies. That's not negated by individual examples of riding in a car using leaded fuel, nor does exposure to lead nullify the effects of class and parental income.
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@jimwerther It's a statistical argument based on population figures rather than on measuring lead levels in offenders: but even that would not be enough, if the claim is that historic exposure was the cause of violence years later.
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@jimwerther Nobody was measuring lead levels in children and in the same individuals years later, to find out whether those with higher levels became violent offenders. Instead we have studies of groups and reasoning by Sir Francis Bacon's method of looking into statistics for "agreement, difference and concomitant variation." John Stuart Mill lays out the method of concomitant variations more clearly in his System of Logic as one of five forms of logical induction.
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@jimwerther We have direct proof of causation for very little in medicine. Most of it is statistical.
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@jimwerther That's usually the case: new evidence supplements or reverses old theories, or takes us back to one from before. "Science" is not static. We thought for centuries that marshland was unhealthy due to "bad air" - now we blame parasites carried by mosquitoes breeding there.
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@jimwerther That's the level of evidence at which public health decisions have to be made. Only extremely rich pressure groups like the tobacco and asbestos industries have managed to insist on cast-iron proof: how many millions have died needlessly while that was obtained?
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@jimwerther Smoking was heavily promoted, both overtly and covertly by means of product placement in films and TV shows for adults and children. Tobacco is highly addictive, so no one needs to be forced to smoke. Cognitive dissonance took care of the "everyone knew," aided by a few scientists paid handsomely by the industry.
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@jimwerther Government shouldn't protect people from businesses poisoning them? What kind of 18th century mumbo-jumbo supports that position?
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I wonder if a similar story could be made about arsenic, which too was known by the Romans to be toxic, was widely used by the Victorians, caused a lot of harm, and was phased out because of that. Then there's tobacco: lambasted by King James VI, shown to cause lung cancer in 1950, and only slowly going out of use due to a prolonged rearguard action by wealthy corporations. Maybe also some of the new synthetic chemicals, whose dangers their manufacturers dispute?
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Our calendar is not very different from what the Romans had, except with AD and BC. It uses "natural" numbers: nothing imaginary, nothing negative (hence AD and BC) and no zero. It's the most archaic system of measurement left.
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