The Town without Wi-Fi | Hacker News Reader

The Town without Wi-Fi

washingtonian.com

41 pointstanglesome18 comments

Every time "electrosensitivity" comes up, I feel obliged to post this story...

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelat...

...and this related wiki article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

So the proof is she accurately guessed someone, at a skeptics meeting, had a phone on? Do people have no concept of evidence? How about a series of tests, every 2 hours, over a week, double blind?

I can not find the study right now, I am on my phone, but I do remember that there was a double blind study conducted where they had people who self diagnosed them selves with EM sensitivity tested. If I remember correctly, group 1 was placed in a room with no EM emissions, but s router in the corner that would be on and blinking. It was a dummy router, just a box with LEDs. Group 2 was placed in a claimed "isolation" room that was supposed to be EM free, but in fact had several wifi routers hidden and active throughout the room. I think they had a few more controls.

The point is, people in the dummy router room, the LED box room, would immediately develop a migraine headache. People in the room with multiple hidden wifi routers actually emitting radio waves were just fine. But here is the kicker, the symptoms of people in the dummy router room were 100% real. As in, physiologically they did in fact experience a lot of pain.

I think the purpose of the study was about the power of placebo effect, not necessarily to torment and make fun of people with claimed EM sensitivity.

Point is, these people are probably in very real pain, it's just that their pain isn't really caused by EM emissions. The fellow on HealthCare Triage talked about it in his episode on Placebo Effect.

I wonder if people who claim to be EM sensitive are also highly susceptible to placebo effect in other situations, and how it correlates with other things like religiosity.

In the 1970's there was a woman 'allergic to the 20th century'. With her it was the same story but her allergies were to do with credible things like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1338&dat=19810223&id=...

This woman was a regular feature in the news and, if she was alive today, she almost certainly would be allergic to bluetooth/wifi etc.

Reading between the lines of her story it seems she had a doctor who was seeing her as 'allergic to the 20th century' when really she was suffering from just the normal things that affect humans from time to time, e.g. depression. So rather than being depressed everything could be blamed on 'the 20th century'.

There must be others from earlier times that have decided to 'play the dead canary' to devote their lives to distilling our fears of the new into some terrifying allergy condition of a syndrome, providing endless story for journalists to cover.

I'm kind of electrosensitive though only from strong sources of electromagnetic radiation. I'm not affected by WiFi, Bluetooth or fluorescent lights. If travelling under a high voltage electric cable I can feel tingling in my head. If using a mobile phone for more than a few minutes, my head becomes hot and I get a headache. Using data is worse. If I'm tethering my phone I have to connect it to my laptop via Bluetooth and have it on the other side of the room to reduce the chance of getting a headache. Does anybody else experience this?

Blind yourself and test repeatedly. Either setup a script to turn data on and off, or get someone to do it for you. Then have them give you the phone without interacting with you. Repeat several times. If you can reliably determine when a phone is using data, that's probably something to look into.

I used to live in a town that I'm now aware is about 25 miles from the edge of that zone marked in the article. I'd be interested to know what the restrictions were in town, because I certainly never noticed them.

An electrosensitive makes me think of a no-nude from Arrested Development.

This page looks great without running any javascript. I cant remember the last time I visited a news/magazine site that looked so nice without one line of javascript allowed.

On an unrelated note the article is from 2015. They never updated the impressum so the site copyright still says 2014.

Thanks! We updated the title.

More astroturfing from Comcast/time warner, et al?

Lots of the comments here are attacking the idea that "electrosensitivity" is even a real thing.

I think it's not relevant, and actually counterproductive to argue if it's real or not. Instead, let's give these people a place they can live "free" of those things, which makes them happy, and we'll continue to live in a place with electo-stuff, which makes us happy.

Win, win, everyone is happy.

After all, I can choose to purchase renewable energy or not, I can choose to purchase GMO-free foods or not, I can choose to purchase hormone-free meat or not, etc. etc., so why not let these people choose to live "electro free" if they so choose? Their choice in the matter does not impact me in any way.

Read the article. The sensitive people go around demanding everyone acquiesce to their unfounded demands. The article does everything but come out and say they're obnoxious, annoying neighbours. I don't think anyone is stopping people from going out and living by themselves, just that no one else should have to put up with them. If these folks just stayed at home, turned off their WiFi, no one would care. The fact that they need special treatment from everyone else is why this is even a subject.

Edit: In addition, giving into stupid beliefs does the world harm. It promotes further poor thinking and suboptimal choices that hurt other people. (Or even, innocent children, if you want to play that card.) That's why, in as far as we have any responsibility to society, we should fight irrationality.

They've managed to develop a condition which mysteriously ensures they should always be the centre of attention in the modern age while pleading to be victims of everybody else.

If we left them all alone somewhere, then somehow I'd be unsurprised if they kept turning up complaining that some distant thing was also infringing on them.

> Edit: In addition, giving into stupid beliefs does the world harm. It promotes further poor thinking and suboptimal choices that hurt other people. (Or even, innocent children, if you want to play that card.) That's why, in as far as we have any responsibility to society, we should fight irrationality.

I agree with you on that point, though of course you walk a fine line - I understand it hasn't been proven yet, but remember in the 90's you would have been called a crackpot for saying the government was listening to your phone calls, etc.

The existence of government surveillance can't be disproven by a scientist in a lab with some test subjects. EHS has repeatedly been found to be the result of the nocebo effect.

Attempting to discourage views that have been repeatedly invalidated by science is clearly more reasonable than shunning every untestable (or difficult to test) but plausible supposition.

I wouldn't object to somebody creating, from whole cloth, an electric-stuff-free place, but I do object to people co-opting an existing community that they're not part of and insisting that it become such a place for them. That seems to be what's going on here.

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