Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmdli | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, I’m rather tired of every discussion being implicated as some grand conspiracy or coverup. It’s possible that things simply move from “we have almost no evidence that this happened” to “we have some evidence to support that this happened”. That’s not admitting some grand mistake, that’s just the normal progression of the facts.

View on HN

Respectfully, the issue here was not that intelligence agencies were saying "we have no eveidence of this". first few sentences of the article shows the reality, these agencies were vehemently stating that it was not possible that the Havana Syndrome was caused by bad foreign actors, full stop.

Are people really surprised that an intelligence agency's first duty isn't to the truth or accurately informing the public?

ed: sp

Those might be agents too.

The narrative might have started with electric fields from the grid stressing people if not causing cancer. Then moved to radio, wifi, the so called biological radio frequency spectrum. Etc

It was always an engineered argument between one camp advocating absurdly human fragility vs the other camp pretending we are indestructible supper beings and no form of radiation could harm us - ever!

It sets up the perfect climate to prevent a honest objective scientific discussion.

Saying "we have no evidence that directed energy weapons caused this syndrome," is not the same as emphatically saying, "this syndrome was not caused by directed energy weapons," which is what the reporting in this piece indicates was said. The latter is an affirmative statement intended to eliminate doubt and which has the effect of denying the experiences of those affected.

Nailed it! The right stance in most cases is "I don't know, I'll wait until more information is available". Doesn't seem too popular in the social media era, but this should be the default.

"we have almost no evidence" / "we have seen no evidence that" / "there is no evidence that" phrasing, without reference to the extent of investigation incurred or not incurred to ascertain the evidence base, I treat by default as go-to institutional gaslighting until verified otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com