We rack up quite a lot of awfulness with eugenics, phrenology, the "science" that influenced Stalin's disastrous agriculture policies in the early USSR, overpopulation scares leading to China's one-child policy, etc. Although one could argue these were back-justifications for the awfulness that people wanted to do anyway.

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systemstops 2 days ago | parent [-]

Those things were not done by awful people though - they all thought they were serving the public good. We only judge it as awful now because of the results. Nearly of these ideas (Lysenkoism I think was always fringe) were embraced by the educated elites of the time.

	▲	daoboy 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You are absolutely right. Another interesting example: The man who invented the lobotomy won a Nobel Prize for it.
	▲	feoren 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Lysenkoism! That's the one. Thank you for reminding me of the name (and for knowing what I was grasping at). I think some "bad people" used eugenics and phrenology to justify prior hate, but they were also effective tools at convincing otherwise "good people" to join them.