Would HN users have known asbestos was bad for us? | Hacker News Reader

Would HN users have known asbestos was bad for us?

4 pointsDavidWanjiru4 comments

I'm curious:

I'm sure you've all read about the speculation regarding the potential carcinogeny of the radio waves emitted (and received?) by mobile phones.

I assume we're right, that mobile phones are harmless.

But suppose they are harmful, would we know?

How would we know that we would know? If, for example, we are able to say, without the benefit of hindsight, that we would have known asbestos were harmful, or any other substance that was found to have been harmful after decades of usage, then we might have a basis to argue that maybe we would know about phones.

So, would we have known about the harmful effects of asbestos? Would HN have been a pocket of protest and warning about asbestos, or would we have been oblivious about it?

If we would have been oblivious about it, how do we know we're not now similarly oblivious about mobile phones? (No, I'm not saying they are harmful. Either they aren't harmful, or I'm oblivious to the fact that they are if at all they are).

How highly do we rate our ability to be correct?

There's a similar subject here with IAQ or indoor air quality. The experts have been saying it's far more serious than the effects of second hand smoke.

Truth: indoor air quality is for shit, and has always been shit, and it is slowly killing us by contributing to stroke, heart disease, cancers and respiratory disease.

People look at the smog in China and are shocked at the state of the air, as they ought to be.

However most people spend most of their time indoors. The concentration of pollutants in proximity to you is what is dangerous.

Indoor air quality in the average home is so bad that it easily exceeds the threshold at which health inspectors would shut down a restaurant.

If you want to live longer there is a few simple things you can do. If you have money, get an actual effective vent for your cooking area and obtain a HRV. If you don't have money acquire a selection of plants and put them into your kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Then ensure you open a window (using a directed fan if possible) when cooking.

If anybody wants more information I'll look up the videos on IAQ and NASA study confirming what I've been saying.

I was actually thinking about this exact topic a few days ago, holding up a phone in hotspot mode to my ear and thinking facetiously "this is gonna kill me someday", but then realizing that there have been many other things in history that were once thought not to be harmful, and only hindsight tells us otherwise.

I then imagined the reactions our societies would have if EM spectrum exposure was suddenly found to be harmful; a vast backlash against wireless devices would follow, communications infrastructure would be litigated against, and there would be a faction of holdouts who just don't care and will continue to do what they want, like it happens with tobacco and other substances widely recognized to be harmful.

In the case of asbestos, it was known in Ancient Greece that those mining or processing asbestos sometimes sickened in ways that the general populace did not [1]. Yet its utility helped it achieve lasting relevance, where by the 19th century it was no longer a curiosity but an important industrial ingredient.

Therefore, I'd say that asbestos is probably a bad example, because its harmful effects in high doses were observed early on, we as societies just didn't find it expedient to combat against it until alternatives were beginning to be available (or we treated miners and workers as more than just expendable). Conversely, I think hydrofluorocarbons are a better example, as it took time for their harmful effects to be observable and in the beginning they were looking miraculously inert and harmless. I don't believe anyone could've known ahead of time that HFCs would cause the environmental damage in the upper atmosphere they ultimately were discovered to have done.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canjclin.34.1.44/...

I'd argue that asbestos is a great example, because it shows that in reality it's not the unknowns that harm us, but willfully ignoring the knowns. It's like smoking--the harms were known for a long time. Smoking was considered unhealthy even in the 19th century. Rather, it was the culture that chose to ignore and discount the evidence.

What's different about EM exposure is that it has been heavily studied, yet from theory to experiment there's scant evidence of significant harms. Certainly not at the scale of asbestos, smoking, or other historic or current risks.

I think lesson is that most real risks are knowable and right in front of us. But the way fear works, we tend to think it's hiding around the corner, hidden. So we obsesses over EM emissions rather than regularly testing for lead in our houses or, as a community, our food supply.

On a slight tangent.. but I have a set of 1920's encyclopaedias which lists all the common forms of cancer associated with asbestos we know today.

So it is clear to me people of influence who have much to gain financially are very good at burying the truth even when scientifically proven.

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