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“We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#271

Post by dekhn »

jonnypotty wrote: post #234
hannob wrote: post #147

I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names. It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories. People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mar…

I find your certainty regarding the reasons we have increasing incidents of cancer to seriously detract from your previous points.

Most people in the cancer field (I worked in a tangential one) believe that incidence of cancer is due to people living longer (cancer rates go up a lot as you age), and not dying of other diseases first. In a sense, cancer is what you get after you solved the other problems.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#272

Post by cesarb »

rvense wrote: post #249
NateEag wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he's implying we don't need to share all that information, period. I agree. Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle is a hierarchy. Reduction is far more effective than the other two.

One of the use cases I saw somewhere for 5G was "smart wine glasses". Like glasses with sensors in them so the waiter at a restaurant would know where he needed to go to refill someone's glass. This was in a context where it definitely was not an ironic jab at the overuse of technology. I don't know if the product actually exists, but honestly. Honestly. Smart wine glasses! I think it's just like... a really, really…

> And if that's the kind of thing that 5G is going to enable, I absolutely do think we should consider it a threat to the environment.

That use case is already enabled by existing 802.15.4 protocols, no need to wait for 5G.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#273

Post by extra88 »

phalangion wrote: post #253
BostonFern wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the article, and I'm not a party to the 5G debate, but what you're describing in your comment is a meta-analysis, which is a practice that has produced some of the most controversial findings in recent times. If anything is needed to clear up an inconclusive body of studies, it's better and more reliable studies and experiments, not meta-analyses.‎

Can you give some examples of the controversial findings of meta-analysis?

Recently, a meta-analysis calling into question a connection between eating red and processed meat and heart failure.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#274

Post by dekhn »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #146
taneq wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant chunk of the rise in life expectancy is driven by a fall in infant mortality, is it not?

Well, if you could point me to a good scientific study that makes a link between higher life expectancy and cancer, I'd be inclined to believe it. Until then, I think the cancer incidence rise is shocking, and can't be explained by rise in life expectancy alone.

Before we go any further, are you a scientist or a doctor? You're arguing on a thread where there are a bunch of scientists who have fairly deep knowledge in this area (it's still an area that a lot of people who come from external areas, like physics, struggle with frequently).

Cancer rates are strongly driven by age- cancer incidence increases exponentially as people age (stochastically, of course).

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#275

Post by smohare »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #90

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves. Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call…

To be fair, there’s also quite a few published studies showing a positive effect for various pseudoscientific medical practices. Those studies just tend to be very poorly designed, executed, controlled, and don’t represent the actual literature trend.

You really do have to spend significant time investigating the literature to actually.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#276

Post by toofy »

notacoward wrote: post #223
toofy wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present. This matters if your expertise are in the subject to which the facts belong, otherwise it means little, particularly in a subject which requires an incredible amount of knowledge of an an incredible array of subjects. I can look a bunch of absolute facts regarding 5g signals and make…

> as if all ideas This isn't about ideas. It's about data . The quality of data is independent of where it came from, so it actually is equal in that sense. > You should track down an expert. Yes, we should refer people to experts more often. Why? Because they have data , not because they have titles or affiliations. Information is what makes them experts, and information can be shared.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, apologies if I assumed it would be inferred.

To use your term data, with complex topics it isn’t simply having data. One must know which data is relevant to consider for which topic at which point. And even more importantly, one must understand which missing sets of information need to be considered.

There is a reason our society has come to place such a high value on experience and expertise. And it isn’t solely because someone had books of data stored on massive bookshelves. While these bookshelves are important, it is their understanding in the nuances of which books to hunt for answers.

Our new ability to store significantly more of these books and retrieve them more efficiently doesn’t remove our need for someone to use and contextualize the information contained in these books. New tech doesn’t change the fact that expertise matters.

Interestingly enough, we now face a sort of reverse of the problems we’ve faced for centuries: While we used to struggle to find enough information to feed to experts, now we face too much data and not enough experts to properly make use of it.

Again, apologies if my first post wasn’t clarifying enough.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#277

Post by dekhn »

eytgsf5et wrote: post #267
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #90

I'm amazed at how many people here actually decline to click on the links in the article, which would guide one to a large list of scientific publications, with links to the original publications themselves. Yet they are very ready to call "more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields" "wackos" or "cranks with a PhD", call…

I find the HN community to be bi-modal with respect to technology: either they are very distrusting (luddites), or blindly in love with it (techno-utopians). 5G gets the techno-utopians in HN all excited about the possibilities of [INSERT THE POINT OF 5G] and they'll get mad at anything that threatens its introduction.

Then there are people like me, who are in love with technology, but work with it and science so closely we have a very good understanding of when and how technology can have risks, and when it can have benefits. And when it's impossible to predict.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#278

Post by jonnypotty »

dekhn wrote: post #271
jonnypotty wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your certainty regarding the reasons we have increasing incidents of cancer to seriously detract from your previous points.

Most people in the cancer field (I worked in a tangential one) believe that incidence of cancer is due to people living longer (cancer rates go up a lot as you age), and not dying of other diseases first. In a sense, cancer is what you get after you solved the other problems.

I agree - and you're probably right but I think we should hold ourselves to the same standards of evidence we expect of others.

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#279

Post by nroets »

hannob wrote: post #147

I clicked on a few links and Googled a few names. It's roughly what I'd expect: People with few publications now working in other fields, people without scientific publications, but university degrees, people who regularly speak at events from radiation critics, people who are invested in other fringe theories. People get fooled by "large lists of peer-reviewed publications". Peer review is a lowest level quality mar…

Furthermore, even if cell phones cause cancer then the risk will in all likelihood be so small that it doesn't justify banning the technology. [1]

For example, eating barbecued meat causes cancer, but it we don't ban it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5XkhUGzBs

Re: “We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”

#280

Post by dekhn »

arpa wrote: post #197
xwdv wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t click the link because they already know better. We are bathed in radiation everyday. So guess what, the people who say 5G is unsafe, are also the same people that will say flying is unsafe, or using a microwave is unsafe, or eating a banana is unsafe, or being in your car is unsafe, or using your phone is unsafe. Because all these things emit radiation. Do people care about that though? No. The effects…

You conflated ionising and non-ionising radiation (flying/banana/chest x-ray vs. radio waves, wifi, light from lightbulbs). Just so you know. Your point still stands though, although i would say we're bathed in more intense radiation than 5G and have been bathing in it for millenias - sunlight is radiation as well! Better live underground, i guess. Oh, oh, but what about skin cancer you say? That's caused by sunlight…

Other points: while excessive radiation is bad, below a certain point it is not harmful, and in fact is beneficial. There's some good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model Most scientists today would say that below a threshold, there is no negative effect to radiation (or rather, you can't predict the effect in a stochastic way as a function of dose) and also that within certain regimes, radiation is beneficial (mutations leading to evolution).
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