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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Funny this should come up today, I just met somebody that claimed that this was the case and used a very sensitive (< 1 uW/m^2) field strength meter to verify their claims and even if I could not disprove it they could not prove it either.

As far as I'm concerned the jury is out on this one, but one important thing to remember is that the nervous system is essentially an electrical aparatus using very low powerlevels so interference would be expected by default rather than the opposite.

We're sensitive to exposure by sunlight, we're sensitive to hard radiation, it is not too much a stretch of the imagination that we're sensitive to HF too.

For much interesting reading about one positive sensitivity:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=367925

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With science, the jury is always out, but with the total failure of anyone to demonstrate "sensitivity" in double-blind studies, it's not a hard provisional call to make with very high probability.

There are all kinds of wonderfully and terribly potent effects that mysteriously disappear in the harsh light of double-blind testing. That's because they are chimeras in the dark. The fault lies with the darkness, not the light.

If more evidence comes along in the future, I'll change my mind, but right now the evidence is of a kind with water dowsing.

I'm of the same persuasion, but I'm also not going to say it's nonsense.

If 1 out of 100,000 people would really suffer from this it would take a major test to figure out who those people are, especially if - like almost every other radiation sensitivity - the effect is cumulative rather than instantaneous.

Let's make an analogy with sunshine:

A person is asked to determine whether sunlight is on a small section of their arm or not. After several guesses we determine that they can't determine this with a probability higher than what you'd arrive at if you guessed.

We can then conclude that 'light sensitivity' is nonsense. But absense of light over longer periods of presense of too much light will definitely have an effect.

If being sensitive to HF is cumulative then we need a completely different test regime than to simply ask people if they can sense a wifi transmitter is on or off.

You'd have to test over periods of days or even weeks.

If being sensitive to HF is cumulative, then it has nothing to do with the phenomenon being reported. It just so happens that people are using the term "elecrosensitivity" to refer to the specific and fairly well debunked phenomenon that they claim to experience. It doesn't seem fair to ask science, after debunking the phenomenon that was reported, to continue on to debunk every other phenomenon that could go by the same name.

You are showing a significant bias by laying the burden of proof on those saying this has an effect on people. 'Innocent till proven guilty' is a principle of the justice system, not science. You could have made these same comments about the health problems associated with smoking in the 60s and you would have been wrong. The original poster laid out a reasonable argument for why the default position should not be to assume there is no effect.

A less biased and more useful statement would have been "there have been enough studies done on this to show that wifi 'sensitivity' is unlikely to exist". If that was the case I'd like to know.

When I said referenced "double-blind studies", I was referring to the ones that were done. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivit... . The burden of proof is indeed on those who continue to claim it exists in the face of strong, peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary. Science has done its bit.

A scientist goes into the experiment with an open mind, and is ever mindful of the possibility of future evidence causing the most likely hypothesis to change, but is not obligated to keep their mind so open that they never decide anything, even after the evidence is gathered and the peer review is done.

I think you are criticizing me based on the belief that there were no experiments done, and since that is not true, you would agree your criticism is invalid. If that is not true and you still think these experiments are not adequate, and "science" still has some sort of obligation to continue investigation, I would say, what would discharge that obligation? By which I mean, give me a concrete, immobile standard for what it would take to convince you before the fact that the investigation has been done, regardless of the outcome, not after the experiments. As I referenced in another message, you can always move the goalposts, but this is a sign of weakness in a position, not the strength some people seem to take it to be.

OK. firstly I don't have any particular belief in EM-sensitivity. I am just as much a believer is science as you. What I objected to was the clear bias you demonstrated in your post. The readiness to declare the 'total failure of anyone to demonstrate "sensitivity"' rather than to provide any references suggested an extreme partisanship on one side of the argument.

The link that you finally provided has some useful information. To me it reads that suggest mixed results but mostly favouring no effect. If I where a betting person I'd say maybe there is a 10% chance that the effect does exist in some form based on my reading of that information. Maybe your interpretation of the probabilities implied by the studies is different to mine. But it leads me to agree with the conclusions of the authors of the meta study that "more research into this phenomenon is required".

The burden of proof is always on those who make extraordinary claims.

Yes but why are you defining this as an extraordinary claim? The thread starter post of makes a good case (in my view) that EM interference would be expected by default. If you disagree with this you should address it instead of assuming that everyone shares your assumptions. This is what I mean about bias.

Someone else in the thread provides an excellent reasoning why such a low amount of energy is unlikely to make a difference.

I say it's an extraordinary claim because if it were true, it would imply fundamental changes in our understanding of how our bodies work, most people suffer no ill-effects, and I previously knew that double-blind studies could not corroborate the claims.

By definition, any claim that changes our understanding of anything is extraordinary, and it requires supporting evidence.

"the nervous system is essentially an electrical aparatus using very low powerlevels"

Signal propagation in neurons is not by electrical conduction, in the wire sense, i believe that this would actually be incredibly slow for the conductivities / currents involved. Rather signals are transmitted by an active chemical process where potassium ions are pulled into and out of the axon in serquence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential.

I'm not sure that this has a direct implication for any kind of interference effect, but just wanted to point out that nerves don't really work like metal wires so how external fields effect the internal currents is not trivial. Also skin-depth/screening is going to play a big role in stopping most of the external radiation.

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