There was the guy who came up with the idea of putting lead into petrol, only to see the environmental devastation. He pledged to make something good to compensate and came up with using freons in refrigeration.
He didn’t live ling enough to learn of how this blew a huge hole in the ozone layer, because he died tangled in wires of a special bed he designed.
Man really did try to fix the world. More than others could say.
Maybe he did try, but he didn’t understand his hidden desire to kill himself and everyone. It’s in all of us, but we should always strive to suppress it.
According to Bryson’s account, he deliberately mislead us about the dangers of tetraethyl lead by making a public demonstration of washing his hands in the chemical. As a chemical engineer he knew a single exposure was not sufficient to cause the lead poisoning that was evident in the workforce at his factory and was counting on a scientifically illiterate public not understanding how toxicity operates in organisms. He was correct on both counts and we can never let the profit motive enter these type of calculations e.g. money in healthcare, oil companies publishing climate science, etc, and expect healthy outcomes.
Fun fact (because there’s nothing more fun than technicality!): Technically it wasn’t his life’s work. Well before his work on nuclear fission, Oppenheimer was actually responsible for originally theorizing the existence of both antimatter and black holes. He was a more intuitive physicist than a technical one, so he didn’t follow through on these ideas, instead letting others carry the work forward.
Here’s a listicle of other inventors who grew to hate or regret their inventions. The creator of Comic Sans is on there, lolz
What’s wrong with labradoodles?
What about that bloke who started all this stuff about alpha and beta wolves?
Wait, that isn’t true? I never heard about beta wolves, but i learned about alpha wolves in a public school.
Are we talking about the same thing?
Yeah. It turns out that the “Alpha” and “Omega” wolves are just… The parents of the pack. It’s got nothing to do with the Alpha being macho or assertive or anything like how it’s been portrayed for decades.
The researcher who first published his faulty observations has been trying to correct the public consciousness for years, but it’s really hard to undo something that was taught so widely
Well he made bad research, then disproved it, but couldn’t bottle back all the incels who ran with that shit
Part of the irony being that even if it were true, there is no reason to make assumptions about human behavior and social structure based on other animals, especially… wild canines? Wtf? There’s a lot of different pack/grouping types throughout the animal kingdom—if anything it would make sense to compare humans to other apes, but at the end of the day it’s still a totally different species that also lacks the social complexity as well as culture and lifestyles humans are capable of because of our higher intelligence. We have some really fucking stupid cultural hang-ups
Inside you there are two wolves, my friend. One is society and the other is society. We live in a society.
More like:
"Inside of you, there are 2 apes:
One is a Chimpanzee, who wants to throw its shit at everything, and kill and dismembered anyone that has mildly inconvenienced you.
The other one is a Bonobo, who just wants to chill out, and maybe fuck to let all those frustrations out (and maybe kill and dismember the ape that’s hoarding all the food and resources for itself)."
This guy 98.7% gets it
