Comment by saulrh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saulrh | Hacker News Reader

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Part of the problem with this idea is that your cell phone exposes your brain to trivial quantities of EM radiation in both absolute and relative terms. If EM in that spectrum had any kind of effect, we'd have seen it long since in people that live near radio masts, people that work with radar units and radio transmitters (military, mostly), people that sleep next to their wifi modems, people working in electrical generator rooms and physics labs, and people with old microwave ovens. Ever had a house where the WiFi would cut out when someone nuked a pizza? Standing near that is way worse than your cell phone. You can't even claim long-term effects, because we've been working with radios and microwaves of this strength in these frequencies for 70+ years. There's nothing there. Please stop with the fear mongering, or at least pick something more likely to be a problem. Maybe the effect of switching from memorization to Google assisted indexization, or long-term psychological effects of social networks in relation to Dunbar's number, or sugar substitutes and gut flora. All of those are reasonable "whoops" sites. Cell phones giving you cancer isn't a potential whoops.

Again, you miss the point.

The certainty with which you make these statements is the exact same certainty that scientists 50 or 100 years ago used to justify doing all kinds of shit we now know caused unforeseen harm.

Don't focus on the one example I gave, focus on that fact that we continually mess with stuff we don't understand, with consequences we can't comprehend. Then 50 years later we just say "we know better now" and proceed to mess it all up in different ways. Repeat.

Maybe in 2060 we'll discover that NOT radiating our brains was killing us. You can't just arbitrarily guess which things are dangerous -- you have to raise legitimate scientific questions.

It's amazing we're not all dead yet, isn't it? messing with everything like we have, vastly extending expected lifespan and years of health...

> It's amazing we're not all dead yet, isn't it?

Tens of thousands of living things that used to call this planet home are extinct thanks to our meddling. I'd say that's proof enough we're badly f'ing things up.

> Tens of thousands ... are extinct thanks to our meddling.

Probably much more:

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

"the present rate of extinction may be up to 140,000 species per year,[2] making it the greatest loss of biodiversity since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event."

I agree with you.

But you will provoke people by saying things like this. I have been heavily down voted else in this thread for saying something like this

I guess it is because people have great difficulty in looking from outside their current time frame. For example, people always thing that they are living in "modern times".

We were living in modern times in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, just like we are living in modern times now. People find it hard to comprehend that their times will once be old, and their beliefs and assumptions about the world obsolete, and their scientists proved wrong. It just does not occur to them.

This might be giving some kind of false belief that we know nearly all there is to know, which lead to fallacies like the parent comment. He implies we know all there is to know about the exposure to radiation.

A quote from Mark twain comes to mind.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so"

Human beings should learn to be modest. How small we are, and how little we know. Then may be we will proceed with more caution and be less reckless with imposing our will upon the other living things on this planet...

The problem with your "point" isn't the point itself, it's that you demonstrate illiteracy in the science of the last 100 years or more while making your point. There were always the limits of what we know, but we also got better in knowing where the limits are, and they aren't in the infrared and radio area effects.

We (as humanity) do "mess with the stuff" and we (as in scientists) even know exactly where and how much we (as in "political and economic forces") do that. The amount of fossil fuels use is one good example. And having huge nuclear stockpiles ready for launch is another. And we "know better" (as in knowing that the effects won't be desirable for "us") even now, but look how many forces pretend we don't.

Having basic scientific literacy actually matters, otherwise you'll fall worrying for pure distractions, like "you should worry that mobile phones emit radio waves to your brain." No, either forget it, that's pure distraction, or at least, learn a little of physics, you'll benefit from that.

And we don't have to wait 50 years. We already know the exact problems that will be much bigger in 50 years if we don't act.

So what do you want to do instead? Do you intend to only do things that we know are safe? If so, how do you intend to prove anything to be absolutely safe? Or, if not, do you intend to do things that we're "pretty sure" are safe, or things that seem to be the least dangerous? Because, the way you're thinking, absolutely anything could have catastrophic results, and you don't give us any useful way to differentiate between stuff we should be doing and stuff we shouldn't be doing.

Of course, I doubt that any of that went through your head. You just pointed at something that caught your attention, completely failing to consider all of the other things that are likely similarly dangerous like aluminum cans, pickled vegetables, soap, clothing, light bulbs, the English language, and so on and so forth. All of those are just as potentially dangerous as cell phones.

I think that you would be well served by studying epistemology, philosophy of science, and rational utilitarianism. I believe that you will find some ideas that will be useful to to you in the future.

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