Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.

View on HN

While I agree there is not evidence of a weapon, I am not buying hypochondria. The amount of reports and the peculiarity of the hearing symptoms don't add up to hypochondria. Local environmental pathogens or chemicals could be a cause. Also, our ability to detect such pathogens or brain abnormalities is still very limited, so finding no abnormalities is not surprising.

Lots of reports and peculiar symptoms don't rule out psychogenic causes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

We had a case of it near us in upstate New York a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-tw... (https://archive.is/EoY7e)

Neither do they particularly support it.

https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8 -Benn Jordan video

Lot's of people hear low pitched sounds, for decades, and it's been in the news. It must be psychosomatic... oops, we can measure it (~60dB), because we bothered to check. Where's it coming from? Don't know, but maybe NatGas pumping stations?

Now, the reason I doubted that RF was causing this is that enough radio wave power to penetrate skulls at a distance would have been easily detected with some LEDs and short pieces of wire. The idea that there aren't wide band RF detectors in embassies strains credulity. You could put them in glasses trivially. I think it would take me 5 minutes with a soldering iron and parts on hand, and be almost indetectable without examining the glasses.

This study isn't evidence against it.

> The NIH study, which began in 2018 and included more than 80 Havana syndrome patients, wasn't designed to examine the likelihood of some weapon or other trigger for Havana syndrome symptoms.

I know. I wrote "no evidence for".

I think they're just establishing a scope for the "no evidence for," because "no evidence for" doesn't necessarily imply "evidence against" but it's often interpreted that way.

I mean the fact that they did this before, I think should go in the evidence column

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Signal

After they got caught they put extra cladding up on the building, and the soviets in turn responded by just making their signal transmission stronger.

That is far, far most likely an RF signal used to power espionage devices. Both the US and the USSR played with putting passively powered espionage devices. The idea it was done to injure embassy staff at this point is a conspiracy theory.

It's not meaningful to call a hypothesis a "conspiracy theory" in this everyday sense when the world of espionage is concerned. Many things that people would intuitively put into conspiracy theory territory have occurred or are even common in clandestine service scenarios. Bugs have been put into buildings during construction years before they were used, radioactive substances were used to track people, one-time pads written by secretaries on typewriters were broken in deciphering efforts that took many years, hardware devices were intercepted and modified during ordinary mail order process, Swiss companies specialized in encryption were entirely compromised and run by the CIA, people have been murdered with poison pellets from a gun looking like an umbrella, etc.

It is a conspiracy theory because the CIA spent 20 years trying to find any effects on health and failed, because medical research spent 50 years trying to find a way how non-heating, non-ionizing radiation could have ill effects on health, and because RF fields to power passive spy devices has been demonstrated many times. Anyone believing at this point that a microwave signal weaker than the leakage of a microwave oven was design to hurt people at the embassy is at the level of a conspiracy theory.

There is no scientific basis for the theory, there are decades of research failing to find either a theoretical or empirical basis, while there are other plausible and precedented hypotheses. Every single example you provided however, was immediately technically plausible at the very least. So yes, the theory it was somehow detrimental to the health of the embassy staff is essentially a conspiracy theory. There is nothing behind it beyond motivated reasoning.

Chronic stress affects your brain though. It's common to find hippocampus abnormalities in burnout patients.

This was another hysteria that was constantly government-fueled, and discussion of it completely disappeared once the people who met every morning to whiteboard how best to push it were assigned to other projects.

It's very strange that the serious position is to pretend like this was an organic social phenomenon, an incident of mass psychology, and ignore the fact that it was always, as far as any science goes, a physically impossible proposition, entirely fueled by successive administrations advocating for it in every mainstream media outlet. This was another reason why Russia was a nation of comic book style evil geniuses that have to be stopped: a bond-style brain scrambling sound ray.

Any sort of lesson learned that doesn't focus on the fact that this was a fraud, not a mistake, was not a good lesson to learn. But instead of learning any lesson, people are going to just forget about it, and when reminded, still think that it really happened.

That all the comments on this page are people saying that this syndrome - that has never been any definitive trace of, caused by a mystery sound weapon which we have no physical theory of how it would operate (only that at night it sounds just like crickets) - is actually still real and really happened, is shocking.

why not both?

covid is now proven both as lab leak and a convenient emergency for multiple ends /s?

It makes you think about the implications of this. A stressed workforce is not an efficient one at all. Say you want to get an advantage against your competitor without directly attacking their labor. How might you increase stress levels? What levers can you pull to make these diplomats to pull all nighters at the embassy for weeks at a time? I imagine its very cheap to pull such levers if you are an enemy intelligence agency who is read up on american standard operating procedure.

i wonder if there's legal precedent for management induced mental illness as other physical workplace hazards have

What about the physical evidence from Gary Nolan?

This is the most foolish and most uneducated response I've read. You're saying nonsense.

Just because we don't have the weapon that causes the issue the issue doesn't exist and is all in their heads?

Get educated about what you're talking about. Watch some interviews of people that have it.

We even know the exact sound the weapon makes.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

The hysteria wouldn't even have started if it wasn't for the "top men" hypothesis. If women had experienced similar symptoms absolutely no one would have suggested sonic weapons over stress from overwork or other psychogenic factors. The underlying idea is that male diplomats with prestigious careers are highly-trained professionals or something and thus immune to outbreaks of mass hysteria. That clearly is not the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com