Comment by danielst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielst | Hacker News Reader

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Regarding your comment "Yeah, "we" do; folks much brighter than I have spent a really long time studying this stuff and their findings are available for consumption by anyone interested to learn more."

Firstly, 5G has never been tested with regard to its possible health effects.

Secondly, the previous, related technologies have, and the majority of independent studies show harmful health effects from these technologies.

Cf. this article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/14/mobile-ph...

To quote from the article: "When Henry Lai, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, analysed 326 safety-related studies completed between 1990 and 2006, he discovered that 44% of them found no biological effect from mobile phone radiation and 56% did; scientists apparently were split. But when Lai recategorised the studies according to their funding sources, a different picture emerged: 67% of the independently funded studies found a biological effect, while a mere 28% of the industry-funded studies did. Lai’s findings were replicated by a 2007 analysis in Environmental Health Perspectives, which concluded that industry-funded studies were two and a half times less likely than independent studies to find health effects."

>Firstly, 5G has never been tested with regard to its possible health effects.

Well, duh. It's not even deployed except in a few handful of countries. Should we have waited half a decade or so before using 5ghz wifi?

>Lai’s findings were replicated by a 2007 analysis in Environmental Health Perspectives, which concluded that industry-funded studies were two and a half times less likely than independent studies to find health effects."

non charitable explanation: the industry is paying off scientists[1] so they can say their technology is safe!

charitable explanation: industry funded studies have more $$$, thus can perform better controls than poorly funded studies. also, studies on both sides can be subject to publication bias.

[1] not well enough it seems, because I'd expect a rate lower than 28% if I was paying a bribe

Thank you gruez for your answer.

>Firstly, 5G has never been tested with regard to its possible health effects. Well, duh. It's not even deployed except in a few handful of countries. Should we have waited half a decade or so before using 5ghz wifi?

Wouldn't it be sensible to do controlled studies of 5G in some form or other prior to deploying the technology on a large scale and immersing the population in 5G 24/7? Otherwise, as many have pointed out, we become the "guinea pigs."

>Lai’s findings were replicated by a 2007 analysis in Environmental Health Perspectives, which concluded that industry-funded studies were two and a half times less likely than independent studies to find health effects."

non charitable explanation: the industry is paying off scientists[1] so they can say their technology is safe!

I don't expect they would be directly paying off scientists. This article is worth reading:

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t....

From the article: “Everyone knows that if your research results show that radiation has effects, the funding flow dries up.” —Dariusz Leszczynski, adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki

charitable explanation: industry funded studies have more $$$, thus can perform better controls than poorly funded studies. also, studies on both sides can be subject to publication bias.

This is an interesting point I had not thought of, thank you for bringing it up. It would be interesting to know if the independently-funded studies were less well-funded than the industry-funded studies.

[1] not well enough it seems, because I'd expect a rate lower than 28% if I was paying a bribe

I don't expect there has been paying of bribes. The 28% in spite of the industry pressure may reflect a degree of resilience of science itself, and/or some level of integrity of the scientists despite the pressure.

So, on the one hand we need to "prove safety" of $NEW_TECH before deployment and on the other hand the $NEW_TECH industry is not allowed to fund the investigation (because suspicious!!)?

How does anything new get invented in that world?

Also, your linked article is extremely long but ends with this sentence that is just ... well I don't know... ridiculous:

"No scientist can say with certainty how many wireless-technology users are likely to contract cancer, but that is precisely the point: We simply don’t know."

> How does anything new get invented in that world?

I agree with you that the linked article reeks of FUD, but I'd urge you to consider that less caution and oversight wrt to new inventions is not free. Every time we pull a new ball out of the "urn" of possible inventions we're gambling that the pros will outweigh the cons. I can't agree with being too pro-industry and derisive of caution (see: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf).

I agree with that!

Thanks for the linked dissertation. I will take some time to read it soon.

I am not sure it is necessary to prove a negative, as you spoke of in a previous post. New drugs are subject to very rigorous testing before being released onto the market. While such drugs, when approved, are not proven definitively and with utter certainty to be 100% safe in all regards, the rigorous prior testing serves to show that they are very likely safe enough to be used. Drugs are not simply released onto the market without any testing, with the idea that we simply wait and see what happens when millions of people take the drugs. This would be regarded as highly unethical, and I do not see why the deployment of 5G technology without prior testing is any less unethical.

I think it makes sense for a reasonable assumption of safety to be demonstrated before deploying new technology that could plausibly be unsafe, and for it to be demonstrated by independently-funded studies.

Given that 67% of independently-funded studies show that the prior, related technologies have adverse health effects, I think it is completely reasonable to hypothesize that 5G could also possibly have negative health effects.

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