4 ms·

This whole nonsense just makes me irrationally angry. It’s a serious education issue we have with the absolute basics of electromagnetism. It’s just magic to mo

This whole nonsense just makes me irrationally angry. It’s a serious education issue we have with the absolute basics of electromagnetism. It’s just magic to most people and so they treat it with pure superstition.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Why so? I checked the link in the petition: https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal There are plenty of scientists asking for more testing and international coordination regarding the guidelines as to what EM levels and frequencies can be considered "safe" for humans. Given he fact that our activity in these areas constantly increases, it is a prudent approach, even if you could call it conservative. If we adopted the same approach in other areas, we could have saved lives. I'm not saying EM radiation is like lead or asbestos, but vehement negation of certain documented risks and aggressive lobbying by the industry makes me wonder what our - as a humanity - priorities should be.
- msla 8y ago
  And the equivalent idea applied to vaccines gets us measles outbreaks. Anyone can "Just Ask Questions" about anything: You don't need to know anything, you don't need to have a coherent theory of your own, you just need to bury the people trying to do something in questions which can be answered by a simple review of what's already known.
  - door5 8y ago
    There's a lot of anti-cell phone radiation cranks, but to compare the research to anti-vaxxers is disingenuous. Mainstream publications have raised legitimate questions about it and the research is far from conclusive: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-think-that-cell-phones-are-safe-a-special-investigation/ https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/cell-phones-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/cell-phones-cancer...
    - msla 8y ago
      When it comes to scientific topics, we should read journals and, if possible, meta-analyses, not the popular press.
      - door5 8y ago
        Both of those articles refer to journal articles if you are so inclined. My point is not that cell phone radiation is unsafe (it probably is safe), but that it's not an obviously resolved issue in the way that vaccine safety is.
      - j16sdiz 8y ago
        How about WHO factsheets? It is a "more long term study needed" https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagnetic-fields-and-public-health-mobile-phones https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagn... > While an increased risk of brain tumors is not established, the increasing use of mobile phones and the lack of data for mobile phone use over time periods longer than 15 years warrant further research of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk. In particular, with the recent popularity of mobile phone use among younger people, and therefore a potentially longer lifetime of exposure, WHO has promoted further research on this group. Several studies investigating potential health effects in children and adolescents are underway.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    The problem is that I haven’t seen safety studies, and the null hypothesis is that a technology is mildly unsafe: most of the neat science technologies have been. The reasoning of “its not ionizing radiation so it can’t possibly impact biological systems at continuous low, structured doses!” wouldn’t pass in an advanced high school class — so it’s deeply concerning that’s what underlies the safety of a widespread technology.
    - detuur 8y ago
      Given the ridiculous complexity of our biological systems, it would be of course very naive to assume that there's no interaction. But nearly everything in our environment interacts with our biology. And for almost all of those interactions it's very hard to specify what exactly the effects are. Depending on which lens you study it through, you can arrive at a nearly random conclusion, if you even manage to get a "statistically significant" result through all the noise a biological system generates. And that last point highlights one of the major gripes I have with research of this kind. "Statistically significant" does not mean what you think it means. A lot of people see it as a license to draw conclusions from a set of numbers, which it isn't. Remember that even the standard p-test has an absurdly high cut-off of 5% chance that the data is pure randomness. And even then, even if some divine oracle rejects your null, you still have to deal with the fact that intrinsic error in research is still pretty much impossible to quantify. There's a reason that in particle physics they don't consider something truly proven unless there's a five-sigma confidence. The fact that so many of these health studies show no hope of ever reaching a five-sigma confidence interval, only confidently proves one thing to me: whatever harmful or benevolent effect it is they're studying, its harm or benefit isn't going to be significant. Biological systems are just too unpredictable to make sweeping statements about the harm or benefit of many, many things. Even ionising radiation, the one thing we can all agree is super harmful in significant doses, becomes equally harmless in background-level doses. So in the absence of reliability of single studies on cell phone radiation harm, I have to fall back on the next best thing: meta studies. And given that the overwhelming majority of research fails to establish a link, and the significance argument I made earlier, makes me very carefree and comfortable about the phone that sleeps right next to my head every day.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    > And the equivalent idea applied to vaccines gets us measles outbreaks. Not at all. Vaccines have been proved to work not even for decades but centuries, and they're extremely efficient. Moreover, as with all drugs, nobody denies there are risks and side effects, and that people from risk groups shouldn't take them. That's very far from a blatant "all non-ionizing EM radiation is 100% safe for humans" that some people believe. I myself am agnostic as I read studies supporting the views of both camps. Therefore I think the scientist who signed the above call have every reason to call for more research and global cooperation as to defining what safe really means.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

Why so? I checked the link in the petition: https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal There are plenty of scientists asking for more testing and international coordination regarding the guidelines as to what EM levels and frequencies can be considered "safe" for humans. Given he fact that our activity in these areas constantly increases, it is a prudent approach, even if you could call it conservative. If we adopted the same approach in other areas, we could have saved lives. I'm not saying EM radiation is like lead or asbestos, but vehement negation of certain documented risks and aggressive lobbying by the industry makes me wonder what our - as a humanity - priorities should be.

msla 8y ago
And the equivalent idea applied to vaccines gets us measles outbreaks. Anyone can "Just Ask Questions" about anything: You don't need to know anything, you don't need to have a coherent theory of your own, you just need to bury the people trying to do something in questions which can be answered by a simple review of what's already known.
- door5 8y ago
  There's a lot of anti-cell phone radiation cranks, but to compare the research to anti-vaxxers is disingenuous. Mainstream publications have raised legitimate questions about it and the research is far from conclusive: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-think-that-cell-phones-are-safe-a-special-investigation/ https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/cell-phones-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/cell-phones-cancer...
  - msla 8y ago
    When it comes to scientific topics, we should read journals and, if possible, meta-analyses, not the popular press.
    - door5 8y ago
      Both of those articles refer to journal articles if you are so inclined. My point is not that cell phone radiation is unsafe (it probably is safe), but that it's not an obviously resolved issue in the way that vaccine safety is.
    - j16sdiz 8y ago
      How about WHO factsheets? It is a "more long term study needed" https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagnetic-fields-and-public-health-mobile-phones https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagn... > While an increased risk of brain tumors is not established, the increasing use of mobile phones and the lack of data for mobile phone use over time periods longer than 15 years warrant further research of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk. In particular, with the recent popularity of mobile phone use among younger people, and therefore a potentially longer lifetime of exposure, WHO has promoted further research on this group. Several studies investigating potential health effects in children and adolescents are underway.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  The problem is that I haven’t seen safety studies, and the null hypothesis is that a technology is mildly unsafe: most of the neat science technologies have been. The reasoning of “its not ionizing radiation so it can’t possibly impact biological systems at continuous low, structured doses!” wouldn’t pass in an advanced high school class — so it’s deeply concerning that’s what underlies the safety of a widespread technology.
  - detuur 8y ago
    Given the ridiculous complexity of our biological systems, it would be of course very naive to assume that there's no interaction. But nearly everything in our environment interacts with our biology. And for almost all of those interactions it's very hard to specify what exactly the effects are. Depending on which lens you study it through, you can arrive at a nearly random conclusion, if you even manage to get a "statistically significant" result through all the noise a biological system generates. And that last point highlights one of the major gripes I have with research of this kind. "Statistically significant" does not mean what you think it means. A lot of people see it as a license to draw conclusions from a set of numbers, which it isn't. Remember that even the standard p-test has an absurdly high cut-off of 5% chance that the data is pure randomness. And even then, even if some divine oracle rejects your null, you still have to deal with the fact that intrinsic error in research is still pretty much impossible to quantify. There's a reason that in particle physics they don't consider something truly proven unless there's a five-sigma confidence. The fact that so many of these health studies show no hope of ever reaching a five-sigma confidence interval, only confidently proves one thing to me: whatever harmful or benevolent effect it is they're studying, its harm or benefit isn't going to be significant. Biological systems are just too unpredictable to make sweeping statements about the harm or benefit of many, many things. Even ionising radiation, the one thing we can all agree is super harmful in significant doses, becomes equally harmless in background-level doses. So in the absence of reliability of single studies on cell phone radiation harm, I have to fall back on the next best thing: meta studies. And given that the overwhelming majority of research fails to establish a link, and the significance argument I made earlier, makes me very carefree and comfortable about the phone that sleeps right next to my head every day.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  > And the equivalent idea applied to vaccines gets us measles outbreaks. Not at all. Vaccines have been proved to work not even for decades but centuries, and they're extremely efficient. Moreover, as with all drugs, nobody denies there are risks and side effects, and that people from risk groups shouldn't take them. That's very far from a blatant "all non-ionizing EM radiation is 100% safe for humans" that some people believe. I myself am agnostic as I read studies supporting the views of both camps. Therefore I think the scientist who signed the above call have every reason to call for more research and global cooperation as to defining what safe really means.