Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to try and understand what the "anti-5G" crowd's concerns actually are so I checked out some of the "Why are people afraid of 5G" posts on Quora.

Honestly, the top responses almost read like neural network generated proto-english [1] Some range from level headed [2] to pseudo-scientific babble [3].

[3] is interesting to dissect. It seems to be based on a misinterpretation of how electron spin spectroscopy works along with a healthy dose of hocus-pocus involving "EMF meters".

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-afraid-of-5g

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-people-are-scared-of-5G...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-so-scared-of-5G-and-mak...

Edit: I've been trying to find a more balanced look at the issue, I liked this one by Larry Desjardin on EDN: https://www.edn.com/does-5g-pose-health-risks-part-2/

The TLDR is that recent IEEE research indicates that the traditional model of sub-THz radiation absorption (1-2mm deep at most in human skin) may not be the whole picture. Whether this indicates harm to humans is still unknown.

> Honestly, the top responses almost read like neural network generated proto-english

That’s not specific to questions about 5G. Most of what I read on Quora would fit that description.

It seems like with Quora you either get very bad or very good answers. The good ones tend to be significantly older, i.e. before it got big and people started to gamify the system.

I recall finding this on HN some while back, prior to retraction, for a good laugh: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32668870/.

Supposedly a few more far out papers have been published by the authors as well. Kinda makes you wonder what the motive is here. Seems a bit high effort to be simple trolling.

omg, someone could not have designed a better conspiracy machine than this publication's standard retraction process. Missing abstract. no way to find rejected article. People will go absolutely loopy with that

Yeah it’s a shame they don’t link the original text. You can find copies pretty easily with a google search of the title, albeit with a big, opaque redacted watermark on the pages. I’m sure if you really want it you could find it with a bit more effort though.

It's actually quite easy to find. Just click on the DOI link for the full paper (https://doi.org/10.23812/20-269-e-4).

Thanks. But wow, so it's that easy to be accidentally complicit...

Outside of the concerns of 5G's effect on the human body, I have seen issues brought up about possible interference with other RF devices that operate close in frequency to the 5G bands. These are things that the FCC is supposed to manage but some of the critiques have been that the FCC is not doing enough. The ones below are about 5G potentially causing interference with GPS devices [1] and about the 5G band interfering with weather predictions because the 5G band covers the passive water vapor emittance bands. [2]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/millions-of-gps-...

[2] https://geog.umd.edu/sites/geog.umd.edu/files/pubs/Benish%20...

A year or so ago I was looking into a bunch of FB bot accounts that were used for commercial spam purposes, and at the time many of those fake sockpuppets were also systematically forwarding 5G conspiracy theories among multiple other things - these things seemed so unrelated that my best guess was that this particular network of accounts was just used to boost whoever was paying with many unrelated paying customers.

So at least some part of the visible "anti-5G crowd" is not actual people but just paid astroturfed propaganda, though I struggle to imagine who would be paying for that and why.

I've wondered about this too. 5G is a marketing and umbrella term. Is it the new radio protocol, MIMO enhancements, new bands, or something else these people are actually afraid of?

Most likely it’s simply a new technology people can point at and complain about, amplified by this age of disinformation.

People have been complaining about wireless technologies since Marconi.

That said, yes, it’s got higher frequencies, beam forming, and orders of magnitude higher density of cells.

> Is it the new radio protocol, MIMO enhancements, new bands, or something else these people are actually afraid of?

People who are afraid of "5G" don't know either, they cannot distinguish them. The main talking point is mmWave and more base stations with their alleged serious health issues that didn't previously exist. I'm not sure what's the justification here. To me, mmWave sounds "better" since it cannot penetrate the skin, unlike lower frequencies. And the additional power from more base stations will be balanced out by high attenuation.

Privacy and mass surveillance is another talking point. I saw one conspiracy theorist described it as a major threat from 5G and how the government is going to use 5G to "enslave the population". It's a legitimate concern, but the existing cellular network, the Internet, and facial recognition already enabled it. Ubiquitous connectivity and more base stations will enable additional tracking, but it isn't 5G that makes a fundamental difference here.

Tear ducts and sweat glands acting as EM waveguides is a novel idea. And indeed quite worrying if true. What would be a feasible of testing that?

Interesting. It's the first argument I've heard against mmWave that has some merits.

Just found a paper: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1210030663890/The%20human%20ski...

> The results obtained from the simulation work were verified in series of in vivo experiments conducted on a number of subjects in the W-band (75–110 GHz). It was shown that the reflection coefficient of their skin strongly depends on the physiological stress of the subject (Feldman et al., 2009, 2008). In the experiments, the palm was held steady by a stand that was placed at fixed distance from the horn antenna connected to the input of the Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). The measurements were carried out using 13 subjects, both male and female, all were in the age group 20–30 and had given their informed consent.

Wow, you can use a VNA to measure that?

“ reflection coefficient of their skin strongly depends on the physiological stress of the subject” Yeah that alone deserves further research. How could that be the case?

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