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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

I wont fault people for lacking a basic understanding of science but at least using basic fact checking should be doable.

Like maybe google "microwave attacks snopes" or something: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-sonic-weapons-explain-t... (Written in 2017(!) but hey just lets just warm up the story again and again).

I am sorry for being snarky but between having to explain grown ass adults why they should wear masks during a pandemic I am tired for arguing against all the misinformation.

The average person has no idea how microwaves work so they are basically magic and easily to make some scary story up. Why change the time tested cold war approach of just throwing ridiculous lies against any perceived enemy of the US of A and see what sticks. If it doesn't stick the first time, just repeat and repeat it. The more often people hear it the more believable it seems.

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That article doesn't disprove a microwave attack at all, it just says there is no known public evidence that matches up with what is described.

Fact is that if this is real, it is the work of a sophisticated adversary that may have found a novel way to attack people. Even going back to the 60's there was stuff done in spycraft that would seem implausible to most people even today.

A relevant example is the use of microwaves to activate a passive antenna through walls to eaves drop on conversations (look up "The Thing Listening Device). Again this was done many decades ago. Not too far fetched to consider that maybe Russia intelligence services found a way to weaponized microwaves.

It isn't real.

> That article doesn't disprove a microwave attack at all, it just says there is no known public evidence that matches up with what is described.

I can not disprove that there is a magic man in the sky. Or a teapot revolving around the sun. [1]

The burden of proof is on the person making the claim not the other way round. Yes, lack of evidence is enough to reject it. Not to mention that the claim goes against established scientific knowledge and therefore would need some serious evidence for it to be taken serious.

> Even going back to the 60's there was stuff done in spycraft that would seem implausible to most people even today.

There is lot's of things we do not know but that does not make a good argument for the existence of something.

> A relevant example is the use of microwaves to activate a passive antenna through walls to eaves drop on conversations (look up "The Thing Listening Device). Again this was done many decades ago. Not too far fetched to consider that maybe Russia intelligence services found a way to weaponized microwaves.

Not really, there is no clear quantitative development patch from The Thing Listening Device to the Havana style microwave attack.

Now we know the hypotheses requiring the fewest assumptions to be more likely true. [2] So what is more likely?

The whole Havana Syndrome is fabricated propaganda that is typical and in line of many similar cases of proven lies?

Or that Cuba has some advanced secret technology that even the US has no access to and that they are using on US diplomatic personal without any good motivation. In fact it will hurt their reputation. So we need to also claim that they are irrationally evil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

> lack of evidence is enough to reject it

This is a pseudo-skeptical[1] finger in the ear reaction.

There's nothing in your posts here that tells me that you've reviewed the evidence that's been put forth[2] and rejected it, and it seems Snopes hasn't either.

All I see is a total a priori dismissal which is not good practice for either a skeptic or a scientist.

Here's what would've told me that this is a good faith exercise (by either you or Snopes): You show that you understand what the claimed evidence is, you present it in the most generous and strong terms, then you explain why it's wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK566408/#sec0017

There's little in the Snopes article which opposes the microwave theory, as opposed to the sound theory. It quotes two US experts in favour of the idea, and the strongest evidence it gives against microwaves is a dismissive reaction from an expert who, as the article makes clear, was acting as a spokesman for the Cuban government.

> There's nothing in your posts here that tells me that you've reviewed the evidence that's been put forth[2] and rejected it, and it seems Snopes hasn't either.

I have debated that topic multiple times during different years. Yes, I am not fully up to date with the newest version

I you were a police man and some guy came up and claimed to be a victim of a crime and you find out the details don't add up, well that happens. Now if he came back next year with a slightly different story about the same crime, yeah that is fishy. If he constantly keeps changing his implausible story you would at some tell him to get lost for wasting police time.

> if he came back next year with a slightly different story

So the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine keeps changing their story? Do you have evidence for this?

This is just ad hominem.

But the problem with this sort of attitudes is that governments constantly lie. In a number of cases this is explainable. For instance, one way we do nuclear weapon containment is by lying about certain properties of Uranium (and of course mostly lie about lying, and of course, most researchers don't think it's particularly effective. While you need uranium to find the correct values, uranium + an old tv can tell you exactly what's being lied about and what the correct values are. Any experimental physicist leans how to do this).

But we are now in the situation that media in Europe are lying every day about the constant violence used by the police in Paris (and Brussels, and Madrid, and ...) against COVID-protestors. For example, just from today:

https://twitter.com/KevinTONON_/status/1388575836387880965

(Paris is usually much worse btw)

So you cannot trust these messages. Your argument is essentially an appeal to an authority. It is critically dependent on the authority not lying, and not leaving out critical information, and since you have no ability to figure out what they would lie about (and the State Dept has lied about their own people getting hurt and the causes many times).

That doesn't mean other sources are believable or not. The sources of these conspiracies do mean

1) people who were here were hurt.

2) the state department is not helping them.

3) the purpose of these denial messages is, at least in part, to justify 2).

I'm willing to bet that you at the very least think 2) is not true. So your careful fact checking has in fact lead you astray as well, because authorities, just like anyone else, serve their own interests.

> For example, just from today:

> https://twitter.com/KevinTONON_/status/1388575836387880965

I don't know if it was correct for the police to get those people away, but from the video the police

1. didn't use force until someone started kicking against them etc

2. when people continued moving away police immediately left them alone

I was expecting police to run after someone who hadn't done anything or something but this looks like a quite ordinary example of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".

You don't kick after a police officer (or anyone else for that matter) and act surprised when you get a beating.

That said I agree with much of the rest.

> But the problem with this sort of attitudes is that governments constantly lie.

Governments do lie and there have been many real conspiracies. I don't exactly see how that is a problem with what I wrote. Sure sometimes you have to more research than just look up snopes but the real conspiracies mostly have some realistic motivations and reasons behind them to explain them. Critical thinking can get you far.

> While you need uranium to find the correct values, uranium + an old tv can tell you exactly what's being lied about and what the correct values are. Any experimental physicist leans how to do this).

Exactly, applying the scientific method to find out the truth works.

> But we are now in the situation that media in Europe are lying every day about the constant violence used by the police in Paris (and Brussels, and Madrid, and ...) against COVID-protestors. For example, just from today:

Any measures fighting a pandemic are by nature authoritarian. That can not be helped and doesn't invalidate the measures.

Covid-19 is just the beginning. The more our world is globalized the more often will we have to deal with new viruses and the like. If we don't find a way to effectively contain these challenges we are looking at a world that I don't find particular worth living in. So you are barking up the wrong tree here.

> 1) people who were here were hurt.

Even this is not proven. The symptoms are very unspecific and might not be related to their work.

> 2) the state department is not helping them.

Maybe because of my answer to 1.

> 3) the purpose of these denial messages is, at least in part, to justify 2).

Again the whole arguments fails apart of as the 1st point is not proven.

> Governments do lie and there have been many real conspiracies. I don't exactly see how that is a problem with what I wrote.

Your central thesis is an appeal to authority ... and the authority you pick is one that never really tells the truth, has interests at stake here, and has historically lied with rather large consequences. Nor have they ever even apologised or even admitted wrongdoing. What I'm saying is: pick another authority.

> Exactly, applying the scientific method to find out the truth works.

That seems like an excellent proposal for another authority to go to. A well-cited academic that would at least lose credibility if they lied, for example.

> Any measures fighting a pandemic are by nature authoritarian. That can not be helped and doesn't invalidate the measures.

The measures are authoritarian wild guesses. With, of course, a healthy dose of denying there was anything wrong with past measures and complete refusal to help with the massive damage they are causing or accepting anything remotely resembling responsibility. And half the measures are pandering to special interest groups of course.

None of it justifies feeding people wrong information. And let's not joke here. The government is feeding information, and hiding other information, just like all the other groups are. For instance, they are massively downplaying that the big source of infections was hospitals. We all know why: they're afraid of being called to account for ancient ventilation systems in particularly infectious hospitals. They're afraid of the current systems (of having all publicly insured patients share rooms, EVEN when caring for infectious patients) might be in need of redesign. And the second source of infections is restaurants. That is being downplayed everywhere they reopen them.

And of course, they're especially afraid of the knowledge that we don't know all that much about how it spreads coming out. That it will become public knowledge that most measures are just wild guesses. I understand that, it won't make negotiation about measures easier. It's still wrong.

Here is some real info: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/transmissi...

> one way we do nuclear weapon containment is by lying about certain properties of Uranium (and of course mostly lie about lying, and of course, most researchers don't think it's particularly effective.

What is being lied about, and what is its truth?

It sounds to me like GP is hinting that the rate of particle emission for a given mass of uranium (maybe just the more fissile U-235?) is deliberately misreported in the literature. The way people originally determined that value experimentally was to count the light flashes produced over a period of time by a source of ionizing radiation placed at one end of a vacuum tube. I'm not a physicist, so hopefully someone can correct me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here.

Is your claim that the US EE professor and the US professor of neurosurgery quoted in the Snopes article are lying for their government, or that they are grossly incompetent?

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