OK, this is absolutely horrifying:
The ill effects of ingested lead and other heavy metals had been known since the 1920s, when employees at TEL [tetraethyl lead]-refining plants began hallucinating butterflies and going into convulsions of violent insanity (at least ten died). ‘Smelter nose’, a finger-sized hole in the septum, was an occupational hazard at plants. Horses near the Bunker Hill stack dropped dead; children were hospitalised with kidney damage, forced to undergo excruciating chelation therapy. By the 1970s scientists were beginning to link lead emissions with surging delinquency and crime rates.
The industry’s response was to deny everything or, at best, occasionally raise the height of its smokestacks. Company quacks put out statements asserting that high levels of lead in human bodies were not only harmless but ‘natural’. Thomas Midgley Jr, a General Motors engineer with the diabolic distinction of having invented both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons, washed his hands in a can of TEL at a press conference, claiming he was ‘not taking any chance whatever’. He knew this to be a lie, having already succumbed to a bout of lead poisoning. (Years later, paralysed with what was said to be polio, he strangled himself in the ropes of a contraption designed to hoist him out of bed.)
In the 1970s, my dad worked for the EPA in their mobile source enforcement division: their job was to stop people from illegally selling leaded gasoline and to adjudicate petitions from mom-and-pop refineries that, for various reasons, wanted exemptions from the new rules on unleaded gasoline.
But that story about Thomas Midgley, Jr.: Wow. What an evil guy. The linked article (a review by James Lasdun of a book by Caroline Fraser) is just full of horrible stories.
I guess that the world is full of evil people and always will be. The challenge is to avoid putting them in positions where they can do a lot of harm.
Do you think that the way our political system works (start with campaign financing and then move on) increases the likelihood that evil people will be put in positions where they can do a lot of harm? It seems to me that rather than building in protections against that, our current system facilitates it.
Quote from the blog post: “I guess that the world is full of evil people and always will be. The challenge is to avoid putting them in positions where they can do a lot of harm.”
I must say I think it’s refreshing to hear a bit more of this on this blog in recent months instead of “it’s the incentives” or “the system is wrong” or “everyone is good or bad in some situations” or such sentences and reasoning that I am tired of hearing.
Anyway, it’s possibly quite a challenge avoiding putting bad people, or people with bad personality charecteristics to perhaps phrase things a bit more differently, in positions where they can do a lot of harm because those might be the exact positions that certain people might want to be in. For instance, see Palmen et al. 2021 “The need for domination in psychopathic leadership: A clarification for the estimated high prevalence of psychopathic leaders.”
I have been wondering about this more and more in the last years, and I think it might be very useful and important to educate people more about psychopathy. And make people more aware of the ways in which one can be manipulated, or fooled, or taken advantage of, by people with psychopathic characteristics. I wrote something about psychopathy in academia and psychological science which might be in line with this all, and I have wondered whether I should attempt to write some more about that. Or at first, go and look for relevant papers, and read things, and think about things. For instance, I wondered where I could read about, and write about, the characterstics of academia and psychological science and try and see how and why people with psychopathy might especially be present and prosperous. That would be a sort of a part II of what I already wrote, but a little more detailed and focused. I started with an outline, but stopped. Then I wrote another manuscript about another topic.
Oh geez you’re right, this problem is worth some attention. Maybe we should work on it proactively? Like maybe, implement some kind of screening processes and background checks? And maybe we can set up the compensation and oversight of these positions so they’re not as attractive to bad people. If only there was language to describe a potentially large and complicated set of policies and analyze their effects in practice.
Quote from above: “Like maybe, implement some kind of screening processes and background checks?”
I am not an academic, so I don’t know the exact prodecures for hiring or promoting people in academia. However, it seems something worth pondering, although I am not sure how easy it would be for people to provide desirable answers on such personality tests or questionnaires.
Anyway, here are Tijdink et al. (2016) from their paper titled “Personality Traits Are Associated with Research Misbehavior in Dutch Scientists: A Cross-Sectional Study” to underline that some more attention for personality characteristics in scientists might be useful and important.
“Taking these limitations into account, one should be hesitant in translating the results directly to the practice of, for example, hiring scientific personnel. However, they might have some implications for those who hire biomedical scientists in academia. One should be conscious about the possible influence of character traits on research behavior. Global assessment of the personality of applicants can certainly have some value in determining the right candidate for the job, but it should never play a central role in appointment procedures. It also can help increase awareness of certain personality traits in researchers and research groups. This awareness can help scientists gain more insight into and control over their behavior when they are in the middle of the scientific process. This insight might help individuals to become more aware of their misbehaviors and can ultimately reduce the risk and incidence of research misbehavior.”
My contribution to possibly creating more awareness and giving some more attention concerning these kinds of things can be found on SSRN, where I have posted a manuscript I have written titled “Why psychopathy might be present and prosperous in present-day psychological science”.
Quote from above: “If only there was language to describe a potentially large and complicated set of policies and analyze their effects in practice.”
Terms like “the incentives” and “the system” are often vague to me, the reasoning concerning “the incentives” is strange if not flawed in my view, and I feel it largely leaves out a few important parts of the problem. That’s why I focus on one of those missing parts in my view, which is scientists’ personalities.
Here are some quotes from “Perceived publication pressure and research misconduct: should we be too bothered with a causal relationship?” by Yeo-Teh & Tang (2022) which underline some of this all:
(QRP = Questionable Research Practices, RM = Research Misconduct, PPP = Perceived Publication Pressure if I am not mistaken in the following quotes)
“Notably, there is no objective measure for PPP, and responses to PPP are conceivably influenced by a mul-titude of personal and environmental factors. In the first instance, personality traits could be an important determinant of one’s response to a given level of PPP, or conversely a determinant of the intensity of one’s PPP. Conceivably, the same intensity of PPP may result in varying degrees of tendency to moral transgression
in individuals with differing moral virtues.” (p. 333)
and,
“Perhaps from a haughtily stringent and uncompromising perspective, blaming QRP/RM on PPP is a show of weakness or even an attempt at moral disengagement (Moore 2015). In this regard, instilling essential moral values and virtues in science and research (Pennock 2015) among its practitioners with education and training would be a path forward.” (p. 335)
And here are some quotes from Schneider et al. (2024) “Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? Cross-national evidence for widespread involvement but not systematic use of questionable research practices across all fields of research”:
“Conversely, the institutional factor ‘local culture’ has a negative association with self-reported prevalence, which suggests that stronger local focus on leadership and research cultures that promote quality, rigorous research, and reward integrity, to some extent, seem to counter systematic use of QRPs despite presumed systemic challenges.”
and,
“The perception of being pressured by external forces, for example, may not only serve as a potential cause of questionable behaviour but also as an excuse, as suggested by studies on cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning (Kunda [95]).”
Aaa:
To be fair, I don’t think evil people are evil in everything they do. I guess that a quick definition of an evil person is someone who does evil things when alternative options would be possible.
Mr. Gelman:
To be clear, I also don’t think evil people are evil in everything they do. I guess that a quick definition of an evil person is someone who does evil things that far outweigh the good things they may do, or may have done.
Or, I guess that a quick definition of an evil person is someone who has done certain evil things that make talking about certain good things they may have done irrelevant or inappropriate or non-productive.
I don’t see mention of the concentrations/doses involved and ingested is quite different from transdermal. As a result I’m highly skeptical this source is accurately reporting on what happened.
PS. As someone who is very skeptical of putting synthetic compounds into the body and related safety testing, I’m practically the choir for this kind of content.
Leaded gasoline is very bad for everybody, and it was know to Midgley at the time. By performing his stunt at the press conference, Midgely was promoting the usage of leaded gas. The chemistry trivia is irrelevant.
These “stunts” (actually forcing people to dogfood their own chemicals is a good idea) are a good idea and seems to have been popular at the time.
Eg, a doctor pushing the original polio vaccine killed/paralyzed his grandchildren during such a stunt (despite being warned that it gave test monkeys polio, the authorities denied a problem until this stunt): https://www.nytimes.com/1955/05/05/archives/bulbar-polio-kills-doctors-grandson.html
In the Midgley case, whatever exposure he got from the stunt does appear to have been safe though. The question is how well that simulated the actual exposure the public would be getting.
If he was exposed to real danger, it makes him a bad person, for harming many others (even if he harmed himself in the process). If he wasn’t exposed to real danger, it makes him a bad person for harming many others (while avoiding harm for himself). I guess the second one is worse because it involves deception? But it hardly seems worth quibbling over.
According to wikipedia
“These “stunts” (actually forcing people to dogfood their own chemicals is a good idea) are a good idea and seems to have been popular at the time.” I mean, it does kind of sound nice. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing though because some people are have a truly insane dedication to increasing shareholder value. What about things that have cumulative long-term effects? I can imagine a scenario like this:
Executive: “Look at me, this chemical is perfectly safe, I will happily eat it every day.”
Some members of the public looks at this stunt and are sufficiently convinced it is safe.
10 years later, the executive dies of complications related to the chemical.
I guess there’s more justice in that than the alternative, where the executive claims the chemical is safe and DOESN’T eat the chemical…Still I wonder if it’s couldn’t just be a vector for sufficiently motivated individuals to more effectively persuade people of things that aren’t true
Yea that wikipedia page is also very weaselly. He performed the stunt then took a leave of absence some unspecified time later. I’d suspect he was getting far higher exposures at work and his theory was concentration was too low in the end product to cause issues.
Like these descriptions of the events should be throwing up red flags everywhere for the readers.
I’m old enough to remember when Cutter Labs made a bad batch of the Salk vaccine, which was made of polio virus inactivated with formaldehyde; the bad batch was not properly inactivated. I also remember that people were scared enough of polio that they continued having their kids vaccinated. It was not a stunt when my physician father vaccinated me and my siblings with it.
Please share anything more you can from that time. Did some people think they could wait for the next vaccine? What was the explanation for why polio cases were rising at the time?
There is one scenario that might explain the hand-washing bit. He was probably aware of the toxicity of lead, and as an adult, that he was unlikely to be over-exposed by washing his hands in it. Lead is not metabolized through the skin at a high rate, and only children are susceptible to the brain damage it causes at relatively low doses. So far so good.
What he may not have realized is that organo-lead compounds are fat soluble and far more easily absorbed through the skin.
It was still stupid and evil, but maybe also a bit ignorant.
Indeed. The high lipophilicity (fat-solubility) of organo-lead compounds facilitates absorption through the skin (whereas metallic lead absorbed very little). Additionally for the same reason, it crosses the blood-brain barrier more easily and rapidly, causing quite severe and rapid neurotoxicity. The original TEL plant in Elizabeth NJ was called the House of Butterflies for the hallucinations (followed by deaths) in its early days manufacturing it. Hushed up to keep the wheels of commerce spinning. See https://web.archive.org/web/20140711220018if_/http://www.radford.edu:80/~wkovarik/ethylwar/IJOEH.pdf
I have him as a “top two” in regrettable people named Thomas — the other contender is Thomas of Monmouth, the (an?) inventor of the blood libel
Thomas:
Wow, that’s a great set of categories I’ve never thought of before: What are the two worst people named X, for various choices of X?
For example, ummm, two worst people named Andrew? Quick answer: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Andrew Tate. But maybe I’m missing some other obvious choices.
It’s surprisingly difficult to play this game. For example, what are the two worst people named Susan? There are lots of Susans out there, but I can’t think of any really horrible people with that name. I guess that it’s tougher with a female name because there are fewer public figures. . . . ok, there was Susan Smith who is famous for drowning her children, but then I’m not sure, I can’t think of any others who are so horrible.
Or, ok, here’s a male name: Phil. There are lots of Philips and Phillips out there, but I can’t offhand think of any really bad Phils, at least nothing on the order of the two Thomases and the two Andrews mentioned above.
Maybe there aren’t as many really evil people as we think. Or, at least, they don’t jump to mind.
There’s also a problem that we don’t index recent famous people by given name as much.
For example, allowing for spelling variations, “Joseph” has Stalin and Mengele, but you might take a while to think of them.
Thomas:
I thought of Joseph Stalin right away. Indeed, it’s easy to think of evildoers and assign them to names; it’s the other way that’s harder.
Also . . . Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson: both of them were pretty damn horrible. Or, I don’t know, “products of their time”?
a) If your name is Joseph, can you really be sure that boy is yours?
b) The one book by Mary Midgley (no relation) I have read is titled “Wickedness”
c) if your name is Thomas, just make sure your king isn’t called Henry
d) Beware of people called William standing on the shores of Normandy or the Netherlands
e) I can make it longer if you like the style …
My first name alone brings up to people, one a rather iffy person, the other one a saint – and all that around 1000 AD.
How about Phil Anderer? He ran around a lot.
This guy was clearly wrapped up in how great his invention was and the money he was making. I’d guess he couldn’t fathom a taint on his golden boy genius aura.
The book “People of the Lie” is a good read about those whose self is wrapped up in lies they feel the need the perpetuate. Midgley Jr.s narrative about his self and his unwillingness to face the inconvenient facts to the contrary are a specific trait of, what the book categorizes, as evil.
One issue I had with the book is a chapter on exorcism at the end, I stopped reading there. I took the earlier chapters as metaphorical evil but the hard turn toward the supernatural unfortunately belies my initial reading of his intention. Anyway, I personally found the earlier chapters thought provoking and interesting, if one can divorce themselves of the overt religiousity.
Quote from above: “The book “People of the Lie” is a good read about those whose self is wrapped up in lies they feel the need the perpetuate. Midgley Jr.s narrative about his self and his unwillingness to face the inconvenient facts to the contrary are a specific trait of, what the book categorizes, as evil.”
When writing my manuscript mentioned in the comments here, I came across the classic book about psychopathy by Cleckley (original edition 1941, 5th edition 1988) titled “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarfify Some Issues About the So-called Psychopathic Personality”.
“The psychopath apparently cannot accept substantial blame for the various misfortunes which befall him and which he brings down upon others, usually he denies emphatically all responsibility and directly accuses others as responsible, but often he will go through an idle ritual of saying that much of his trouble is his own fault. When the latter course is adopted, subsequent events indicate that it is empty of sincerity-a hollow and casual form as little felt as the literal implications of “your humble and obedient servant” are actually felt by a person who closes a letter with such a phrase.” (p. 343).
This might be something to be mindful of in scientists as well. Perhaps it might be noteworthy when a scientist does not (optimally) take responsibility for wrong actions or behavior. And when they do, it might be important to keep in mind that this might be an act, or that it might mean nothing really because the scientist doesn’t really learn anything or do anything different a next time. It might be an act, it might be fake, it might be another way to manipulate perhaps. Looking at behavior over a longer period of time, or looking at multiple events, might show something useful as well as this might show whether a scientist has learned from their earlier mistakes. This could provide some more information, besides an excuse or explanation from the scientist, that might indicate a true willingness and capability to learn from a mistake and do the right thing. When a scientist makes the same, or even different mistakes over and over, and says sorry a bunch of times, it might be indicative of something.
Isn’t the received wisdom of WWII (see, for example, Jack El-Hai’s book on Douglas Kelley that was the basis for the movie Nuremberg) that everyone behaves evilly in the right circumstances? Whether you take that point (if it’s true) to mean that everyone is evil or the no one is evil is really just a matter of perspective. But we’re definitely not supposed to take away the theory that *some* people are evil.
The great thing about the phrase “in the right circumstances” is that it makes the proposition unfalsifiable.
Quote from above: “But we’re definitely not supposed to take away the theory that *some* people are evil.”
This reminded me of another section in Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-called Psychopathic Personality”:
“While preparing the first edition of this volume, many years ago, I was impressed and sometimes astonished by the dearth of pertinent material about the psychopath in most psychiatric textbooks. It seemed not only surprising but almost incredible to find how little space was devoted to this disorder. With psychopaths making up so large a proportion of the patients who must be dealt with, and their problems being so serious, it was indeed difficult to understand why they were almost ignored.” (p. 225)