There are two ways to be in bed with an ache: lying and turning. If you had an undiagnosable chronic illness with flareups, would you content yourself with your life being essentially over, or would you keep trying to alter your environment until other people thought you had a weird lifestyle? I think pretty much all of the ambitious professionals on this forum would be wrapping themselves in tin foil like a baked potato long before they gave up on being alert and active enough to self-actualize.
If you thought non-ionizing radiation only coupled to the human body thermally, it could instead be trying gluten-free, or notroopics, or buying a lot of air filters, and if your illness went into remission after starting you wouldn't want to switch back and forth twenty times to build up a statistical sample.
> If you thought non-ionizing radiation only coupled to the human body thermally, it could instead be trying gluten-free, or notroopics, or buying a lot of air filters, and if your illness went into remission after starting you wouldn't want to switch back and forth twenty times to build up a statistical sample.
I think it's underappreciated that superstition is rational is when the cost of experimentation is high.
You don't need a bunch of cycling back and forth. A few times is plenty. I have every-varying food sensitivities (mostly exposure causes sensitivity which will eventually fade if I leave the offender alone for long enough) and I've been around the loop of figuring out what is it now many, many times. (At least to the degree I can figure it out--more than once it's clearly been an impurity in an item. And you often don't know--I know "artificial flavors" is very likely to be a problem--but what exactly? I'm no chemophobe--second on my list of likely to be a problem is "natural flavors".)
Rarely does it take me more than one repeat to be confident of what is bothering me.
You'd need only 3 or 4 times for a very useful sample with basically the same applicability as 20.
If it's a low cost change, sure, you may not even question if it's doing anything. But if it's a major change in lifestyle, I would absolutely try to check if it's working. Even more because if it's only incidentally working, it could stop working at any time and leave you knowing nothing useful right at the point where you are both sick again and paying the cost of that lifestyle change.
Do that again and again and you are sure to destroy your life.
Since time is part of your data, you can often become extremely confident in a treatment with a very quick trial.
I recently tried an allergy medication. Problem cleared up under an hour after I took a pill, re-appeared next day with no treatment, and then once again cleared up under an hour after taking pill.
It's extremely unlikely my body decided to randomly get healthier after taking medication, and unhealthy when I stopped.
A placebo effect is possible of course, but if it was actually eliminating the symptoms, that's still a good result for the individual.
You're dealing with something that can change in an hour, but a sampling of general health issues (hangovers, susceptibility to viral infection, healing of muscles and soft tissues after normal wear and tear) shows that the time constant ranges from days to months.
It's a crazy field. It's quite obvious that *most* of the effects are purely psychosomatic. The effects are related to appearances rather than reality--for example, there is a small correlation between visible high tension power lines and health. But not to the actual EMF strength. Same thing you see elsewhere--people with health issues moving to undesirable but not bad housing because that's what they can afford.
I've also been in multiple online discussions where various people were sensitive to sounds that most people don't hear--typically devices that messed with magnetic fields at frequencies in the ultrasonic range. (Say, many switching power supplies.) Something a little bit loose wiggles in the field and you get an ultrasonic whine. None have struck me as kooks--but consider what happens when someone doesn't pay enough attention to detail. Is it the Wi-Fi radiation or it's power supply? Plenty of people fall for the obvious item in figuring out food reactions, I would expect to see some in other areas.
And what if there actually is something of a basis? We have plenty of examples of inadvertent AM radios, including from dental fillings. Clearly, it's possible to receive radio energy in freaky ways--the AM radio is the obvious case because it carries a signal whose reception manifests in a detectable way. What if the "electrosensitives" are actually people who have some natural resonance in the brain with some common transmitter? It wouldn't take a lot of energy to generate spurious brain activity. Mistaken generalization certainly seems within the realm of possibility.
Note that I'm *not* suggesting any direct harm here, just interference.
I'm open to both harm and interference, but what keeps me skeptical about these people's claims is that the effect level always seems to be hovering at the phantom p-ghost level... that is, exactly the level you'd expect if you keep running low powered experiments and occasionally, whether deliberately or otherwise, you end up with a p-hacked experiment that seems to maybe suggest something is there, until you look again. It's a common pattern and generally means no, there is nothing there, just p-hacked phantoms.
If you claim Wifi gives you a headache within a few minutes, and I put you in a Faraday cage with a Wifi router, and your headache flares up precisely when the wifi router's lights blinks, but not when it is actually on, because for the purposes of the experiment the two indications have been severed, then that's pretty conclusive in my opinion that there's nothing there for that person. And that experiment has been done, and that's exactly the result that came out.
Now, that doesn't therefore prove that no radio waves ever affect any human in any way, and it also doesn't prove that there isn't "something" going on in the person reporting headaches (they could getting headaches and just dead wrong about why; goodness knows I've spent enough of my life in that exact situation myself, I'm in no position to complain! add a bit of trying to get the result they expect and/or want and it's not hard to understand what's going on), but it does seem to leave us with a dearth of evidence to date that radio waves have immediately detectable impacts.
And that sort of test should be done. Just be careful about isolation! (Remember the EM-drive, physics said it shouldn't work but tests showed a small effect with widely varying results. The electric current of the power supply, flowing through a wire in a magnetic field. There's also the contraptions that will rise if sufficient voltage is applied. It works--in atmosphere.)
And remember what I said about ultrasonic sounds from power supplies? Someone who doesn't understand how to test and was sensitive to one device might believe they're sensitive to all.
"physics said it shouldn't work but tests showed a small effect with widely varying results"
A valid point, and why I phrased it as I did. If you claim that Wifi gives you a headache in, say, 5 minutes, then that's a strong signal that can be tested for. If it fails, then there's a lot of statistical power there. If you claimed that being in a Wifi field for a few days gave you a headache, then my answer is... actually that you're very unlikely to be correct because carefully testing such a problem requires individual trials that take weeks apiece, which you have almost certainly not done. I know from experience; I've done some of my own personal health optimization that takes similar time frames. Some of my results have required years to determine because of the insensitivity of the testing and how long a single trial takes to get significance, and I still wouldn't be my life I've got all the details correct.
>If... your headache flares up precisely when the wifi router's lights blinks, but not when it is actually on... then that's pretty conclusive...
...of nothing, because that's also how the body will react to known stressors.
A recovering alcoholic can feel sick at the mere smell of alcohol (simultaneous stimuli), but that's not "pretty conclusive" evidence that drinking alcohol has no deleterious effects.
That "experiment" is only evidence of one thing: that you can trick people using Psych 101 combined with bad experimental design. If you wanted to actually prove or disprove the effect, a properly designed experiment would omit the trickery (or at least run a matrix experiment with a trickery/no-trickery variable).
"...of nothing, because that's also how the body will react to known stressors."
You say that like it's some sort of brilliant revelation, but that they are reacting to some other stressor and not actually to Wifi is the point.
Since the question under study is not "do people react to perceptions" but "does this person actually react to Wifi signals, specifically Wifi signals and not anything else", it is quite to the point. If Wifi gives you a headache immediately, which is to say, a strong, relatively quick signal, but you can't detect it reliably in a contained environment, then you're wrong about the cause of your headaches, which, as I said, is not even remotely a shocking result. Headaches do not come with labels attached telling you what caused them, unfortunately.
It would be conclusive if the smell of alcohol consistently made people sick but actually drinking (magically deodorized) alcohol had no apparent effect on the same people.
>typically devices that messed with magnetic fields at frequencies in the ultrasonic range. (Say, many switching power supplies.) Something a little bit loose wiggles in the field and you get an ultrasonic whine.
High-frequency sounds can end up driving nonlinear oscillators that emit lower-frequency sounds, and all magnetics wiggle - solid elasticity is enough looseness. If I had a whining switching power supply that would be my guess. Of course, some switching power supplies are simply designed to switch at 20khz...
There is nothing crazy about that. Some birds are very sensitive to radio, it disturbs their build in compass [1]. So there is some substance to similar claims.
And right now there is no conclusive evidence, radio does not cause headaches in some edge cases.
Plus moving to such place brings many practical benefits. No mobile phones severely limits type of people one will interact with.
RCTs show that patients experience symptoms when told the radio is on, but not when it's actually on. See e.g. the TV programme with Richard Hammond a while back ("should I be worried about..." I think it was called).
I'm pretty proud of the fact that I've never been through an airport scanner. People treat me crazy for it and I probably am. "It is perfectly safe, you get more radiation from the plane ride."
My issue is that I do not trust the operators of the machine. I do not trust the safety protocols in place. We constantly tool on the TSA and its security theater filled with incompetent people. So, why do we trust them to operate these machines? What if it malfunctions or isn't properly serviced?
I was just at an airport, watched someone move a bit, and have to get immediately rescanned again. 2x the radiation, 2x the chances something goes wrong. The odds are against you.
Why are we so complacent in their usage? The only way around this is to suffer humiliation. An invasive pat down where they make you wait an inordinate amount of time for someone to come along, slowly put on gloves, explain to you the same set of rules you've heard a million times, and then literally touch your entire body, including brushing up against your genitals. I have actually noticed some guards enjoying it more than others.
In the end, I feel it is worth the 10 minutes of inconvenience and the humiliation (which I'm pretty immune to at this point in my life). I get to the airport early anyway.
Somehow the people in the article have gotten it into their heads that the only solution to their issues are to move into the middle of nowhere. That said, I can understand their situation too and feel empathy for them.
> Exactly my point. Your safety and exposure risk is held to the highest standard of "not my job."
I mean, not their job in the sense that they cannot meaningfully affect it. They cannot make the scan be any more or less safe. If its safe, they cannot make it unsafe, if its unsafe, they cannot make it safe. They have no control over the safety of the scanner.
Of course you get rescanned if you move--fundamentally the machine is doing a panoramic image. I'm sure you've seen photos on the internet of panoramas gone wildly wrong because something moved.
The original version did use low power x-ray and people quite rightly raised a stink about that. Now it's backscatter in the radio frequencies--should be harmless. (Not that it's going to stop a well-concealed bomb. The machines see metal as "black"--but they also see the background where you aren't as "black". Thus they do not see metal that does not overlay your body. Say, something small attached to your clothes such that it's away from your body when you assume the position.) The machines are a lot better at catching smugglers than terrorists.
> The original version did use low power x-ray and people quite rightly raised a stink about that. Now it's backscatter in the radio frequencies--should be harmless.
"trust me bro" science at its finest.
Do we get to see the service interval on these machines to ensure that they are operating fine and have never had an issue?
"Based on what is known about the scanners, passengers should not fear going through the scans for health reasons, as the risks are truly trivial.
...
it is premature to put a whole population through this with out more due diligence and independent testing"
Even the papers on this stuff can't come to any sort of agreement.
Easy enough to opt-out and just avoid the question entirely. I'm not bothered at all by the pat down.
What failure mode could produce harmful energy? The circuit will be designed for the intended power levels and you'll let the smoke out long before you actually put out a dangerous energy level.
Not to mention how could you have the energy levels way off yet the machine "work"--produce an image?
(And, personally, I don't like the pat-down. I'd actually prefer an option to go back a version to the machines that actually displayed the image rather than had a computer process it for anomalies. The stupid computer always flags the pocket I carry my phone in--can't tell the difference between a little bit of sag and something there.)
> What failure mode could produce harmful energy? The circuit will be designed for the intended power levels and you'll let the smoke out long before you actually put out a dangerous energy level.
Hi! Obviously, the specific science of the matter doesn't matter to me. It is an irrational fear. The machine is supposed to be safe and declared as such by people whom it is "not my job."
> I don't like the pat-down....
NOBODY likes the pat-down. What I said is that I'm not bothered by it. I can tolerate it as an alternative of going through the machine.
It is intentionally designed to be something you don't like, in order to encourage compliant people to just go through the machine. They create a relatively high stress situation (not enough flow and long lines) and the easy way out is to have people go through the machine as the fastest way out.
> The stupid computer always flags the pocket I carry my phone in--can't tell the difference between a little bit of sag and something there.
I would suggest changing clothes that you go through the scanner with.
That isn't what I was saying, at all. It is the non-zero potential for a high radiation dose from a defective machine (or being forced through it multiple times), that I don't want to take the risk on.
If your hypothesis is that TSA agents are incompetent or careless or otherwise malign, then every extra moment you spend in their presence puts you at risk of the kind of things that such people might do. TSA agents have been known to assault people. Rare, but more common than injury caused by scanners.
I have that, along with global entry, and even had clear for a while. I didn't renew cause it wasn't in every airport and because it really wasn't any faster than precheck. Oh and on Spirit biz class, you even get to skip the line.
None of that is a guarantee that they don't require you to go through the scanner.
I just flew roundtrip last week, in both airports they were making everyone go through the scanner.
Ah man, don't go in there with a shortwave receiver and scan through the dozens/hundreds of stations you'll pick up anywhere in North America (or really anywhere in the world)... :\
If someone identifies as electrosensitive, and moving to a low-EM zone helps relieve their symptoms, it seems more likely we have something to learn about the nature of psychosomatic illnesses than something to learn about radiation physics.
I don’t know what to make of people in this situation. Some claim it’s obviously psychosomatic. Possibly, but humans are actively evolving genetically and is it possible that some small group is sensitive via an undiscovered genetic quirk? I’m super curious about this.
It reminds me of Todd Haynes _Safe_ [1] where it's never clear what's wrong exactly with the main character, but there's no doubt she has a plenty of toxic social relationships.
I've been reading about folks moving to the Radio Quiet Zone for a long time. I had some fear that the number of e-refugees (for lack of a better term) would grow to a counterproductive level. Thankfully, the article numbers them in the dozens.
If they have more relief in their life + aren't a burden to others, what better outcome could I hope for?
disclosure: married to a chemical hypersensitive for 25y, who fortunately found some peace elsewhere
I have not read article, because it's paywalled, but I was very sad reading the previous comments. Over the last few hundreds of years, the humanity has changed so much in the environment. Implications of things were not fully understood at the time they were introduced. I'm not saying whether these people are right or wrong, but calling them crazy is not really serving anything. Just imagine how people would look at you of you claimed you have serious health problems because of this wonderful new material called asbestos.
I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith. This one of those questions where an experimental design to get to the ground truth is just impossible. Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible, short of raising up a large sample size of humans in a lead lined vault deep under ground. And even then, you can’t control for every latent factor.
"Radio wave" is an engineering term - it just describes photons that we can detect and emit using a certain type of technology. It's a totally arbitrary category in a physical sense. What we're really talking about is photons with an energy up to about 10^-3 electron volts.
My body is constantly radiating about 120 watts worth of photons, with energies up to about 10^-1 eV. I'm constantly glowing with non-ionizing radiation that I emit as a natural side-effect of living, producing vastly more energy than any wireless device you're likely to encounter.
There's just no plausible mechanism by which a small quantity of low-energy photons could be more harmful than the far greater number of higher-energy photons you're exposed to in literally any environment compatible with human life. If you fear WiFi, you should be terrified of heat and light. Radio waves aren't a mysterious force summoned up by man, they're a tiny portion of the cacophony of electromagnetic radiation that we're exposed to by literally every speck of matter in the universe.
What would the effect be? How would it show up? What mechanism can explain radio waves affecting brain structures? What tissue can receive radio waves? What frequency are we even talking about?
Anyway, the way to start with your hypothesis is really simple. Relate the amount of relevant electromagnetic energy in the environment to whatever symptom you think it causes and measure the population for that symptom. Get people who exhibit the symptoms to places where that energy is absent (removed from society, in a Faraday cage, whatever). Check if the symptoms disappear. It doesn't have to disappear completely, just gradually. If you believe that even the slightest amount of EM radiation will still have an effect, so a test free of it is practically impossible, I have a surprise for you.
And note that it doesn't have to be all EM energy--sensitivity to one common frequency plus a lack of understanding of what's happening could explain it.
>I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith.
it's an easy conclusion to get to just from the basis of what the human body does : we breath and exchange air -- that's plain for anyone to see , so we try to avoid breathing particles. We know that looking at the sun injures the eye -- we can see the evidence when looking at a patient. We know that fire burns the skin.
The human body has junctions and functionality that actually interact with energy at those levels.
Similarly we know what injuries from intense EM radiation look like, and it's not vague chronic fatigue syndrome-like symptoms, and it isn't caused by bombardment by non-interactive low power levels of differing frequencies and sources.
> Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible
it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters.
p.s. lead is a piss-poor 'radiowave vault' material compared to copper/steel/aluminum.
> it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters.
It's actually even easy to "block all radiowaves" until all that remains is background noise of a level not dissimilar to that experienced by humans since forever... see TFA itself for technically an example. And yet we are yet to find any person who can reliable distinguish RF "interference"...
Do you call it immunity when there's simply no mechanism for interaction?
Either way, we evolved on a planet orbiting a giant fusion reactor spitting out EMF. The ones that are close to the limits we call "ionizing" are widely used by life, because evolution was able to take advantage of interactions between chemistry and physics. The frequencies far away from that line simply aren't used by life because there's no viable mechanism for chemistry to interact with them. That's the same reason RF is considered harmless.
Is there a proposed mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation is said to be harmful? I am willing to believe it could be (I would guess at certain wavelengths more than others if so), but absent any statistical evidence of such an effect and without a testable mechanism of action it is just as unreasonable to believe the contrary assertion. I haven't heard of either, so I default to the position of if this was such a significant problem we would be able to prove it by now. Unless or until that happens it's not something we need to worry about. But absolutely keep doing research.
So one thing a person could do would be to identify radio emitters and compare the rates of, say, cancer among people living within a certain radius. Even if the planet is awash in electromagnetic radiation the intensity drops off significantly according to the distance to the emitter. Large emitters are well-documented so it shouldn't be hard to find this information.
It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all.
There are assumptions to that setup as well. There’s the assumtion that this effect is dependent on magnitude that you could measure easily within a certain drop off. Maybe the drop off point is quite far from these emitters or doesn’t even exist, and any such exposure is enough like a binary condition. Then there is the assumption that people living near large emitters today are always around them, and the assumption that people not living around large emitters never go off and spend time around them. I think there are many interesting questions like this where you just can’t ever get a reasonable design that is truly powered enough for all the potential latent variables involved. Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question.
> It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all.
Right. But then you’re talking about something that could happen, or that could not. If you are thinking about something you do not observe, then not having any hypothesis as to how it could work makes the whole endeavour useless, to the level of the Russell teapot.
You could just as validly speculate that the pink colour is harmful because of Venus’ influence resonating with the water memory and justify your point of view with the same “there are things we don’t know” argument.
Two observations specifically on electromagnetic radiation:
- if this were actually a thing, we’d have seen the signal in epidemiological data, considering that WiFi has been around for 25 years and is used by ~billions of people, and cell phones are even older and more used
- we do know quite a lot about the effect of radiation on matter. We might not know everything there is to know, and biology adds a layer on top, but e.g. the energy transfer from some microwave radiation to biological tissue is limited by very well-known Physics.
We know that occasionally an atom gets knocked out of its position, and that even though most of the time it’s fine, it can occasionally cause problems, which is why UV sunlight is bad. We know how X or γ radiation interacts with matter and is more likely to affect molecules. Saying that “there are things we don’t know” is misleading in that the subject is actually very well known, even if we don’t know everything, particularly on the biology side.
It is perfectly valid to be skeptical by default. But in face of evidence and a solid body of knowledge, we should also be skeptical about our own skepticism.
> Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question.
That is quite far from the truth. In reality it’s quite the opposite. Science is incremental, with occasional breakthroughs. But most of its progress is through constant grinding on tiny subjects, very far from low-hanging fruits. You have lots of different people, each one exploring their own ideas and hypotheses. In a field so important and popular as the effect of technology on human biology, there are thousands upon thousands of researchers competing, each one trying to find a better idea than their colleagues. This system is actually very good at exploring weird, goofy-sounding hypotheses because the reward is so important.
To do science, you need to come up with counter-examples. A simple way to get to the truth in this particular case is to come to the town full of electro-sensitive people, and announce that there has been a large EM device secretly installed for a week and see how many of them will suddenly report symptoms, even when there actually wasn't any device installed. Or conversely do install the device and don't announce anything and check if somebody sensed it.
There are two ways to be in bed with an ache: lying and turning. If you had an undiagnosable chronic illness with flareups, would you content yourself with your life being essentially over, or would you keep trying to alter your environment until other people thought you had a weird lifestyle? I think pretty much all of the ambitious professionals on this forum would be wrapping themselves in tin foil like a baked potato long before they gave up on being alert and active enough to self-actualize.
If you thought non-ionizing radiation only coupled to the human body thermally, it could instead be trying gluten-free, or notroopics, or buying a lot of air filters, and if your illness went into remission after starting you wouldn't want to switch back and forth twenty times to build up a statistical sample.
> If you thought non-ionizing radiation only coupled to the human body thermally, it could instead be trying gluten-free, or notroopics, or buying a lot of air filters, and if your illness went into remission after starting you wouldn't want to switch back and forth twenty times to build up a statistical sample.
I think it's underappreciated that superstition is rational is when the cost of experimentation is high.
> I think it's underappreciated that superstition is rational is when the cost of experimentation is high.
I believe your observation is underappreciated.
You don't need a bunch of cycling back and forth. A few times is plenty. I have every-varying food sensitivities (mostly exposure causes sensitivity which will eventually fade if I leave the offender alone for long enough) and I've been around the loop of figuring out what is it now many, many times. (At least to the degree I can figure it out--more than once it's clearly been an impurity in an item. And you often don't know--I know "artificial flavors" is very likely to be a problem--but what exactly? I'm no chemophobe--second on my list of likely to be a problem is "natural flavors".)
Rarely does it take me more than one repeat to be confident of what is bothering me.
You'd need only 3 or 4 times for a very useful sample with basically the same applicability as 20.
If it's a low cost change, sure, you may not even question if it's doing anything. But if it's a major change in lifestyle, I would absolutely try to check if it's working. Even more because if it's only incidentally working, it could stop working at any time and leave you knowing nothing useful right at the point where you are both sick again and paying the cost of that lifestyle change.
Do that again and again and you are sure to destroy your life.
Since time is part of your data, you can often become extremely confident in a treatment with a very quick trial.
I recently tried an allergy medication. Problem cleared up under an hour after I took a pill, re-appeared next day with no treatment, and then once again cleared up under an hour after taking pill.
It's extremely unlikely my body decided to randomly get healthier after taking medication, and unhealthy when I stopped.
A placebo effect is possible of course, but if it was actually eliminating the symptoms, that's still a good result for the individual.
You're dealing with something that can change in an hour, but a sampling of general health issues (hangovers, susceptibility to viral infection, healing of muscles and soft tissues after normal wear and tear) shows that the time constant ranges from days to months.
The same principle applies, but you need more time for the trials, rather than 20 trials.
It's a crazy field. It's quite obvious that *most* of the effects are purely psychosomatic. The effects are related to appearances rather than reality--for example, there is a small correlation between visible high tension power lines and health. But not to the actual EMF strength. Same thing you see elsewhere--people with health issues moving to undesirable but not bad housing because that's what they can afford.
I've also been in multiple online discussions where various people were sensitive to sounds that most people don't hear--typically devices that messed with magnetic fields at frequencies in the ultrasonic range. (Say, many switching power supplies.) Something a little bit loose wiggles in the field and you get an ultrasonic whine. None have struck me as kooks--but consider what happens when someone doesn't pay enough attention to detail. Is it the Wi-Fi radiation or it's power supply? Plenty of people fall for the obvious item in figuring out food reactions, I would expect to see some in other areas.
And what if there actually is something of a basis? We have plenty of examples of inadvertent AM radios, including from dental fillings. Clearly, it's possible to receive radio energy in freaky ways--the AM radio is the obvious case because it carries a signal whose reception manifests in a detectable way. What if the "electrosensitives" are actually people who have some natural resonance in the brain with some common transmitter? It wouldn't take a lot of energy to generate spurious brain activity. Mistaken generalization certainly seems within the realm of possibility.
Note that I'm *not* suggesting any direct harm here, just interference.
I'm open to both harm and interference, but what keeps me skeptical about these people's claims is that the effect level always seems to be hovering at the phantom p-ghost level... that is, exactly the level you'd expect if you keep running low powered experiments and occasionally, whether deliberately or otherwise, you end up with a p-hacked experiment that seems to maybe suggest something is there, until you look again. It's a common pattern and generally means no, there is nothing there, just p-hacked phantoms.
If you claim Wifi gives you a headache within a few minutes, and I put you in a Faraday cage with a Wifi router, and your headache flares up precisely when the wifi router's lights blinks, but not when it is actually on, because for the purposes of the experiment the two indications have been severed, then that's pretty conclusive in my opinion that there's nothing there for that person. And that experiment has been done, and that's exactly the result that came out.
Now, that doesn't therefore prove that no radio waves ever affect any human in any way, and it also doesn't prove that there isn't "something" going on in the person reporting headaches (they could getting headaches and just dead wrong about why; goodness knows I've spent enough of my life in that exact situation myself, I'm in no position to complain! add a bit of trying to get the result they expect and/or want and it's not hard to understand what's going on), but it does seem to leave us with a dearth of evidence to date that radio waves have immediately detectable impacts.
And that sort of test should be done. Just be careful about isolation! (Remember the EM-drive, physics said it shouldn't work but tests showed a small effect with widely varying results. The electric current of the power supply, flowing through a wire in a magnetic field. There's also the contraptions that will rise if sufficient voltage is applied. It works--in atmosphere.)
And remember what I said about ultrasonic sounds from power supplies? Someone who doesn't understand how to test and was sensitive to one device might believe they're sensitive to all.
"physics said it shouldn't work but tests showed a small effect with widely varying results"
A valid point, and why I phrased it as I did. If you claim that Wifi gives you a headache in, say, 5 minutes, then that's a strong signal that can be tested for. If it fails, then there's a lot of statistical power there. If you claimed that being in a Wifi field for a few days gave you a headache, then my answer is... actually that you're very unlikely to be correct because carefully testing such a problem requires individual trials that take weeks apiece, which you have almost certainly not done. I know from experience; I've done some of my own personal health optimization that takes similar time frames. Some of my results have required years to determine because of the insensitivity of the testing and how long a single trial takes to get significance, and I still wouldn't be my life I've got all the details correct.
A recovering alcoholic can feel sick at the mere smell of alcohol (simultaneous stimuli), but that's not "pretty conclusive" evidence that drinking alcohol has no deleterious effects.
That "experiment" is only evidence of one thing: that you can trick people using Psych 101 combined with bad experimental design. If you wanted to actually prove or disprove the effect, a properly designed experiment would omit the trickery (or at least run a matrix experiment with a trickery/no-trickery variable).
"...of nothing, because that's also how the body will react to known stressors."
You say that like it's some sort of brilliant revelation, but that they are reacting to some other stressor and not actually to Wifi is the point.
Since the question under study is not "do people react to perceptions" but "does this person actually react to Wifi signals, specifically Wifi signals and not anything else", it is quite to the point. If Wifi gives you a headache immediately, which is to say, a strong, relatively quick signal, but you can't detect it reliably in a contained environment, then you're wrong about the cause of your headaches, which, as I said, is not even remotely a shocking result. Headaches do not come with labels attached telling you what caused them, unfortunately.
It would be conclusive if the smell of alcohol consistently made people sick but actually drinking (magically deodorized) alcohol had no apparent effect on the same people.
>typically devices that messed with magnetic fields at frequencies in the ultrasonic range. (Say, many switching power supplies.) Something a little bit loose wiggles in the field and you get an ultrasonic whine.
High-frequency sounds can end up driving nonlinear oscillators that emit lower-frequency sounds, and all magnetics wiggle - solid elasticity is enough looseness. If I had a whining switching power supply that would be my guess. Of course, some switching power supplies are simply designed to switch at 20khz...
There is nothing crazy about that. Some birds are very sensitive to radio, it disturbs their build in compass [1]. So there is some substance to similar claims.
And right now there is no conclusive evidence, radio does not cause headaches in some edge cases.
Plus moving to such place brings many practical benefits. No mobile phones severely limits type of people one will interact with.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2014.110...
RCTs show that patients experience symptoms when told the radio is on, but not when it's actually on. See e.g. the TV programme with Richard Hammond a while back ("should I be worried about..." I think it was called).
I'm sure most are wrong. I'm just not sure all are wrong. And I believe that if there's an effect it's not actually lasting harm.
Some polarised TV documentary is not a proof... Scientific study would be nice.
Also read the study on birds I linked. They are only sensitive to specific frequencies. We still have no idea how it works.
And science around antennas is super complex, calculating something like dipole sensitivity and angles for human body....
I'm pretty proud of the fact that I've never been through an airport scanner. People treat me crazy for it and I probably am. "It is perfectly safe, you get more radiation from the plane ride."
My issue is that I do not trust the operators of the machine. I do not trust the safety protocols in place. We constantly tool on the TSA and its security theater filled with incompetent people. So, why do we trust them to operate these machines? What if it malfunctions or isn't properly serviced?
I was just at an airport, watched someone move a bit, and have to get immediately rescanned again. 2x the radiation, 2x the chances something goes wrong. The odds are against you.
Why are we so complacent in their usage? The only way around this is to suffer humiliation. An invasive pat down where they make you wait an inordinate amount of time for someone to come along, slowly put on gloves, explain to you the same set of rules you've heard a million times, and then literally touch your entire body, including brushing up against your genitals. I have actually noticed some guards enjoying it more than others.
In the end, I feel it is worth the 10 minutes of inconvenience and the humiliation (which I'm pretty immune to at this point in my life). I get to the airport early anyway.
Somehow the people in the article have gotten it into their heads that the only solution to their issues are to move into the middle of nowhere. That said, I can understand their situation too and feel empathy for them.
> So, why do we trust them to operate these machines
Because their operation is just pushing a button. They are not responsible for the safety protocols, etc. That is somebody elses job.
Like if you dont like the machines fine, but their safety (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with the TSA agent.
> That is somebody elses job.
Exactly my point. Your safety and exposure risk is held to the highest standard of "not my job."
> "I was just at an airport, watched someone move a bit, and have to get immediately rescanned again."
Do you blame the individual for moving or the agent for not being clear enough in the instructions?
> Exactly my point. Your safety and exposure risk is held to the highest standard of "not my job."
I mean, not their job in the sense that they cannot meaningfully affect it. They cannot make the scan be any more or less safe. If its safe, they cannot make it unsafe, if its unsafe, they cannot make it safe. They have no control over the safety of the scanner.
Of course you get rescanned if you move--fundamentally the machine is doing a panoramic image. I'm sure you've seen photos on the internet of panoramas gone wildly wrong because something moved.
The original version did use low power x-ray and people quite rightly raised a stink about that. Now it's backscatter in the radio frequencies--should be harmless. (Not that it's going to stop a well-concealed bomb. The machines see metal as "black"--but they also see the background where you aren't as "black". Thus they do not see metal that does not overlay your body. Say, something small attached to your clothes such that it's away from your body when you assume the position.) The machines are a lot better at catching smugglers than terrorists.
> The original version did use low power x-ray and people quite rightly raised a stink about that. Now it's backscatter in the radio frequencies--should be harmless.
"trust me bro" science at its finest.
Do we get to see the service interval on these machines to ensure that they are operating fine and have never had an issue?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3936792/
"Based on what is known about the scanners, passengers should not fear going through the scans for health reasons, as the risks are truly trivial. ... it is premature to put a whole population through this with out more due diligence and independent testing"
Even the papers on this stuff can't come to any sort of agreement.
Easy enough to opt-out and just avoid the question entirely. I'm not bothered at all by the pat down.
What failure mode could produce harmful energy? The circuit will be designed for the intended power levels and you'll let the smoke out long before you actually put out a dangerous energy level.
Not to mention how could you have the energy levels way off yet the machine "work"--produce an image?
(And, personally, I don't like the pat-down. I'd actually prefer an option to go back a version to the machines that actually displayed the image rather than had a computer process it for anomalies. The stupid computer always flags the pocket I carry my phone in--can't tell the difference between a little bit of sag and something there.)
> What failure mode could produce harmful energy? The circuit will be designed for the intended power levels and you'll let the smoke out long before you actually put out a dangerous energy level.
Hi! Obviously, the specific science of the matter doesn't matter to me. It is an irrational fear. The machine is supposed to be safe and declared as such by people whom it is "not my job."
> I don't like the pat-down....
NOBODY likes the pat-down. What I said is that I'm not bothered by it. I can tolerate it as an alternative of going through the machine.
It is intentionally designed to be something you don't like, in order to encourage compliant people to just go through the machine. They create a relatively high stress situation (not enough flow and long lines) and the easy way out is to have people go through the machine as the fastest way out.
> The stupid computer always flags the pocket I carry my phone in--can't tell the difference between a little bit of sag and something there.
I would suggest changing clothes that you go through the scanner with.
You’re worried about the radiation dose from the scanners and not from the flight itself?
That isn't what I was saying, at all. It is the non-zero potential for a high radiation dose from a defective machine (or being forced through it multiple times), that I don't want to take the risk on.
You are probably more at risk due to spending extra time with TSA people than from the machine.
Risk of what?
Again, the point here is that I'm being thoughtful about the measure of risk I'm taking in a particular situation as an example.
In the same way that people choose to move to the middle of nowhere to avoid "signals."
If your hypothesis is that TSA agents are incompetent or careless or otherwise malign, then every extra moment you spend in their presence puts you at risk of the kind of things that such people might do. TSA agents have been known to assault people. Rare, but more common than injury caused by scanners.
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My "irrational" fear is the scanner, not the TSA agent.
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Why not just get TSA Precheck at this point?
I have that, along with global entry, and even had clear for a while. I didn't renew cause it wasn't in every airport and because it really wasn't any faster than precheck. Oh and on Spirit biz class, you even get to skip the line.
None of that is a guarantee that they don't require you to go through the scanner.
I just flew roundtrip last week, in both airports they were making everyone go through the scanner.
Ah man, don't go in there with a shortwave receiver and scan through the dozens/hundreds of stations you'll pick up anywhere in North America (or really anywhere in the world)... :\
Gift link: https://wapo.st/4eLUEmn
https://archive.ph/hXwpw (gift link didn't open article for me [2 devices]. thnx for trying tho).
If someone identifies as electrosensitive, and moving to a low-EM zone helps relieve their symptoms, it seems more likely we have something to learn about the nature of psychosomatic illnesses than something to learn about radiation physics.
I don’t know what to make of people in this situation. Some claim it’s obviously psychosomatic. Possibly, but humans are actively evolving genetically and is it possible that some small group is sensitive via an undiscovered genetic quirk? I’m super curious about this.
It reminds me of Todd Haynes _Safe_ [1] where it's never clear what's wrong exactly with the main character, but there's no doubt she has a plenty of toxic social relationships.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_(1995_film)
If enough of these crazies move to Greenbank it will at least help keep the area a radio quiet zone, so good for the observatory!
Previous discussion (11 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41881527
I've been reading about folks moving to the Radio Quiet Zone for a long time. I had some fear that the number of e-refugees (for lack of a better term) would grow to a counterproductive level. Thankfully, the article numbers them in the dozens.
If they have more relief in their life + aren't a burden to others, what better outcome could I hope for?
disclosure: married to a chemical hypersensitive for 25y, who fortunately found some peace elsewhere
I have not read article, because it's paywalled, but I was very sad reading the previous comments. Over the last few hundreds of years, the humanity has changed so much in the environment. Implications of things were not fully understood at the time they were introduced. I'm not saying whether these people are right or wrong, but calling them crazy is not really serving anything. Just imagine how people would look at you of you claimed you have serious health problems because of this wonderful new material called asbestos.
https://wapo.st/4eLUEmn
I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith. This one of those questions where an experimental design to get to the ground truth is just impossible. Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible, short of raising up a large sample size of humans in a lead lined vault deep under ground. And even then, you can’t control for every latent factor.
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"Radio wave" is an engineering term - it just describes photons that we can detect and emit using a certain type of technology. It's a totally arbitrary category in a physical sense. What we're really talking about is photons with an energy up to about 10^-3 electron volts.
My body is constantly radiating about 120 watts worth of photons, with energies up to about 10^-1 eV. I'm constantly glowing with non-ionizing radiation that I emit as a natural side-effect of living, producing vastly more energy than any wireless device you're likely to encounter.
There's just no plausible mechanism by which a small quantity of low-energy photons could be more harmful than the far greater number of higher-energy photons you're exposed to in literally any environment compatible with human life. If you fear WiFi, you should be terrified of heat and light. Radio waves aren't a mysterious force summoned up by man, they're a tiny portion of the cacophony of electromagnetic radiation that we're exposed to by literally every speck of matter in the universe.
What would the effect be? How would it show up? What mechanism can explain radio waves affecting brain structures? What tissue can receive radio waves? What frequency are we even talking about?
Anyway, the way to start with your hypothesis is really simple. Relate the amount of relevant electromagnetic energy in the environment to whatever symptom you think it causes and measure the population for that symptom. Get people who exhibit the symptoms to places where that energy is absent (removed from society, in a Faraday cage, whatever). Check if the symptoms disappear. It doesn't have to disappear completely, just gradually. If you believe that even the slightest amount of EM radiation will still have an effect, so a test free of it is practically impossible, I have a surprise for you.
Also add some tests to check whether it's psychosomatic. For example, a device that appears to be on but is actually off, and vice versa.
If symptoms vanish just because you disabled the power LED, then that tells you something else is going on.
basically all living tissue absorbs RF because it's full of water. This also affects brain electrical activity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208983/
You've got the right test procedure.
And note that it doesn't have to be all EM energy--sensitivity to one common frequency plus a lack of understanding of what's happening could explain it.
>I think the idea that the human body and brain is somehow inherently immune to any effect from radio waves, with no such mechanism even proposed as to why this might even be the case, is just as much a belief in faith.
it's an easy conclusion to get to just from the basis of what the human body does : we breath and exchange air -- that's plain for anyone to see , so we try to avoid breathing particles. We know that looking at the sun injures the eye -- we can see the evidence when looking at a patient. We know that fire burns the skin.
The human body has junctions and functionality that actually interact with energy at those levels.
Similarly we know what injuries from intense EM radiation look like, and it's not vague chronic fatigue syndrome-like symptoms, and it isn't caused by bombardment by non-interactive low power levels of differing frequencies and sources.
> Everyone on earth is exposed to radiowaves, so to establish a demographically matched control population to a radio wave laden case population is simply impossible
it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters.
p.s. lead is a piss-poor 'radiowave vault' material compared to copper/steel/aluminum.
> it's not impossible whatsoever to block all 'radiowaves' ; it's impractical and needless, so the study isn't being conducted by anyone that matters.
It's actually even easy to "block all radiowaves" until all that remains is background noise of a level not dissimilar to that experienced by humans since forever... see TFA itself for technically an example. And yet we are yet to find any person who can reliable distinguish RF "interference"...
Do you call it immunity when there's simply no mechanism for interaction?
Either way, we evolved on a planet orbiting a giant fusion reactor spitting out EMF. The ones that are close to the limits we call "ionizing" are widely used by life, because evolution was able to take advantage of interactions between chemistry and physics. The frequencies far away from that line simply aren't used by life because there's no viable mechanism for chemistry to interact with them. That's the same reason RF is considered harmless.
Is there a proposed mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation is said to be harmful? I am willing to believe it could be (I would guess at certain wavelengths more than others if so), but absent any statistical evidence of such an effect and without a testable mechanism of action it is just as unreasonable to believe the contrary assertion. I haven't heard of either, so I default to the position of if this was such a significant problem we would be able to prove it by now. Unless or until that happens it's not something we need to worry about. But absolutely keep doing research.
So one thing a person could do would be to identify radio emitters and compare the rates of, say, cancer among people living within a certain radius. Even if the planet is awash in electromagnetic radiation the intensity drops off significantly according to the distance to the emitter. Large emitters are well-documented so it shouldn't be hard to find this information.
That will identify if EM energy in general is harmful--and I think it's pretty clear that it is not.
But what happens if 1 person in a million responds to Wi-Fi frequencies like nails on a chalkboard? It wouldn't need to actually be directly harmful.
It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all.
There are assumptions to that setup as well. There’s the assumtion that this effect is dependent on magnitude that you could measure easily within a certain drop off. Maybe the drop off point is quite far from these emitters or doesn’t even exist, and any such exposure is enough like a binary condition. Then there is the assumption that people living near large emitters today are always around them, and the assumption that people not living around large emitters never go off and spend time around them. I think there are many interesting questions like this where you just can’t ever get a reasonable design that is truly powered enough for all the potential latent variables involved. Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question.
> It doesn’t really matter to me if there is a proposed mechanism already or not. Phenomena exist before we are able to describe it mechanistically after all.
Right. But then you’re talking about something that could happen, or that could not. If you are thinking about something you do not observe, then not having any hypothesis as to how it could work makes the whole endeavour useless, to the level of the Russell teapot.
You could just as validly speculate that the pink colour is harmful because of Venus’ influence resonating with the water memory and justify your point of view with the same “there are things we don’t know” argument.
Two observations specifically on electromagnetic radiation:
- if this were actually a thing, we’d have seen the signal in epidemiological data, considering that WiFi has been around for 25 years and is used by ~billions of people, and cell phones are even older and more used
- we do know quite a lot about the effect of radiation on matter. We might not know everything there is to know, and biology adds a layer on top, but e.g. the energy transfer from some microwave radiation to biological tissue is limited by very well-known Physics.
We know that occasionally an atom gets knocked out of its position, and that even though most of the time it’s fine, it can occasionally cause problems, which is why UV sunlight is bad. We know how X or γ radiation interacts with matter and is more likely to affect molecules. Saying that “there are things we don’t know” is misleading in that the subject is actually very well known, even if we don’t know everything, particularly on the biology side.
It is perfectly valid to be skeptical by default. But in face of evidence and a solid body of knowledge, we should also be skeptical about our own skepticism.
> Modern science works well when the fruit is low hanging statistically, but thats not always the case for every question.
That is quite far from the truth. In reality it’s quite the opposite. Science is incremental, with occasional breakthroughs. But most of its progress is through constant grinding on tiny subjects, very far from low-hanging fruits. You have lots of different people, each one exploring their own ideas and hypotheses. In a field so important and popular as the effect of technology on human biology, there are thousands upon thousands of researchers competing, each one trying to find a better idea than their colleagues. This system is actually very good at exploring weird, goofy-sounding hypotheses because the reward is so important.
To do science, you need to come up with counter-examples. A simple way to get to the truth in this particular case is to come to the town full of electro-sensitive people, and announce that there has been a large EM device secretly installed for a week and see how many of them will suddenly report symptoms, even when there actually wasn't any device installed. Or conversely do install the device and don't announce anything and check if somebody sensed it.
check out Bypass Paywalls Clean for firefox. I did not even know there was apaywall.