'Also, the tests administered which disproved the so-called "wifi allergy" failed to account for the possibility that the effects take time to develop.'
They used the self-reported time for symptoms to develop from the sufferers themselves. It's not actually science's job to exhaustively test the state space here, since that's not possible. Consequently, there's always another goalpost that science didn't hit (no, wait, it's only 64-bit WEP encryption!)... but it's not logical to thus conclude that the problem is the science. When the goalposts are getting shuffled around the field, the logical conclusion is that the problem most likely lies on the side moving the goalposts, not the side that keeps hitting the goals.
Maybe there's a real problem that is actually something else, though at the moment, "psychosomatic symptoms", Luddite-ism, and superstition seems to cover the observed phenomena pretty well. Like I said in another message, if more data comes in I'll examine it, but right now there is no reason to believe there's any reason to believe that such data will be forthcoming.
(Following up on my first paragraph: This is why "more study is needed" is an information-free statement. There's always more state space to examine; the question is, is there any reason to believe there's anything interesting there? There's so many interesting things that studying things extremely likely to be uninteresting is a waste of time. The exceptions that you might think are leaping to mind, like "Well how will we ever discover anything new if we never try new things?", are not exceptions. Things we have no idea about are interesting. Things that we have a very good idea are going to be uninteresting are what I'm talking about.)
This is a pretty good summation of the issue. Well said.
From a strictly scientific standpoint, designing the tests around the claims of the participants is only useful so far. The anecdotal claims of people who claim to suffer from this condition would be suspect at best.
What is know is that electromagnetic energy can and does effect the human body, it is just a question of what thresholds we are talking about. It would stand to reason that some people are effected at different levels than others for various reasons. (Hydration, PH balance, even height could be a factor when talking about specific wavelengths).
All that is to say, the wifi thing may very well be bollocks, but I still would love to see more rigorous research done.
Why don't you just do that math? E=hf -- you know the frequency of the radiation, so you know the energy. Go ahead and assume that people are all water, you will be mostly correct.
(simple glycolysis reaction and synthesis of NADH and ATP).
Hint: The amount of ionizing energy of a 5GHz signal is noise in the amount of energy created by normal biological processes. Ars is careful not to say "it can't happen," but I'm going to come out and say -- it can't happen.
I haven't done the math but I'm prepared to bet that when it actually comes to the crunch you aren't as confident as you say. 'it can't happen' implies 0% probability. Well I'll go you one better as I'm prepared to bet on it at 0.01% for $1. I'll even send you the dollar as long as you agree to the bet. So that's my $1 vs your $10K. Talk is cheap.
What I'm trying to demonstrate is how certainty can vanish when faced with actual consequences.
When someone says "it can't happen" in a scientific context, I don't take it to mean "I believe it is impossible to happen." I take it to mean "according to our current understanding, it's not possible."
The implication being that while it's possible, if it were true it would require fundamental changes in our understanding. This is so unlikely to be incalculable.
Well according to the constructs of the English language and logic, "it can't happen" does actually mean "I believe it is impossible to happen.". (Can't == can not == impossible). Your statement implies the 'scientific context' is bullshit which I certainly do not agree with.
So in your alternative world of logical meaning what does "it can't happen" equate to anyway? Does it simply mean less than 50% probability or what? If you aren't prepared to put an actual mathematical meaning to probabilistic statements then they are worthless. I certainly am and I am prepared to back them up with cash. What about you? Do your statements mean anything or are they just worthless oratory?
The intended meaning always depends on context. People are rarely precise with their words; it's takes too much time and doesn't improve communication if all parties have a shared understanding.
At the start of my thermal physics class, my professor spent a lecture to define what a thermal physicist means when they say "never." We spent time calculating things like the likelihood of Hamlet emerging from 6 billion monkeys banging on keyboards for 13 billions years. This sort of understanding is important when talking about entropy and the laws of thermal dynamics.
For example, a thermal physicist would be comfortable saying all of the molecules in a room will never spontaneously exist on only one side of that room. With simplifying assumptions, we can calculate the probability of that happening. While it's non-zero, it's so infinitesimal that physicists are comfortable saying "never", and we have the second law of thermodynamics.
Your insistence on putting a dollar number on my confidence is strange, since even in your case it's rhetorical. No one is asking you to put money up, nor does the infrastructure or even rules exist for how to handle it. Further, my entire point was to demonstrate that certainty in science is impossible. All we have is confidence in something.
Yes but if you can't define what confidence is what does it mean? When I studied physics we learned to provide confidence intervals for each measurement and subsequent calculation so every variable was of the form X +/- Y. From memory the confidence was a specific number of deviations from the mean. That meant something. Saying 'roughly X' doesn't.
All the examples you provided are so improbable that 'never' is of course appropriate in most contexts. But what do you think 'it can't happen' means in a case like the existence of a phenomena like EM-sensitivity?
10% probability, 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%, 0.001%?
None of these are at all appropriate to describe as 'it can't happen' in this context. I think that in your heart of hearts you know that chances of EM-sensitivity existing could well be better than 1%.
> No one is asking you to put money up, nor does the infrastructure or even rules exist for how to handle it.
Check out http://longbets.org . Otherwise I'd settle for a proof of ID from whomever wants to take the bet and a public and signed statement to the effect that they'll pay up if the conditions are met within a certain time period. I'm pretty sure this type of bet is legal in most jurisdictions.
A confidence interval is a different beast than saying that you are confident that current understanding is correct. One can be quantified, the other cannot.
I've just described a method for quantifying probability. How hard is this to understand? Neither really exist. The measure of X is some exact amount just as a clearly defined proposition is either true or false.
You can actually simplify the confidence interval case to a boolean proposition (e.g. is X greater than 7).
I must not have been clear in my previous post: there is a difference between an objective confidence (such as from experimental measurements) and subjective confidence (such as my own personal confidence that something is correct). Objective confidences can be meaningfully quantified. Subjective confidences cannot.
For example, I am confident that special relativity is correct and that the speed of light is the unreachable-ceiling for the speed of matter with mass. A century's worth of observations and experiments support this. However, trying to quantify that subjective confidence is meaningless.
I don't believe the your notions of objective and subjective confidence really stand up too well. I think you'll find that the more you try to define the exact difference between them the more it will fade away. Perhaps it is a philosophical question. Similarly the only reason to look at measuring the length of a rope as 'objective' versus the combination of the many measurements that make up the supporting evidence for special relativity is because the former is subjectively (intuitively) simpler. .
However the main point is that probabilities are required for decision making. Whether you like it or not, any statement must be interpreted probabilistically to be incorporated into decision making. You need to multiply the probability by the risk/reward differential to have basis to work things out. You do this internally without realising it. 'What are the chances that this movie will be good versus the cost of going to see it'. Exaggerated statements can hurt people's decision making capabilities. That is why I oppose them.
You need to replace the Booleans in some of your mental constructs with fractions.
Let's say I measure a rope many times, and come up with a mean value and a 95% confidence interval for the length of the rope. That is, assuming my "experiment" is constructed correctly, I say that the true length of the rope lies within that range, with a 95% confidence. That's an objective confidence.
But in order to come up with that number, I had to assume my experiment was correct. I very well could have had a systematic error in the experiment such as misusing my ruler, accidentally holding the rope such as to artificially shorten it, or completely misunderstood the concept of length. My confidence that my experiment is correct is both independent of the confidence interval I reported, and not quantifiable.
What about measuring the speed of light? or measuring the distance from the earth to sun? Where do these fall in your neat divisions between subject and objective?
Is there a certain class of proposition that is too complicated to be called objectively true? Are all medical theories, for example, simply subjective and have no real meaning in terms of predicting likely future outcomes?
Any statement or theory that does not have predictive power is meaningless. Predictive implies probability. Probability implies odds. Put up or shut up up.
They used the self-reported time for symptoms to develop from the sufferers themselves. It's not actually science's job to exhaustively test the state space here, since that's not possible. Consequently, there's always another goalpost that science didn't hit (no, wait, it's only 64-bit WEP encryption!)... but it's not logical to thus conclude that the problem is the science. When the goalposts are getting shuffled around the field, the logical conclusion is that the problem most likely lies on the side moving the goalposts, not the side that keeps hitting the goals.
Maybe there's a real problem that is actually something else, though at the moment, "psychosomatic symptoms", Luddite-ism, and superstition seems to cover the observed phenomena pretty well. Like I said in another message, if more data comes in I'll examine it, but right now there is no reason to believe there's any reason to believe that such data will be forthcoming.
(Following up on my first paragraph: This is why "more study is needed" is an information-free statement. There's always more state space to examine; the question is, is there any reason to believe there's anything interesting there? There's so many interesting things that studying things extremely likely to be uninteresting is a waste of time. The exceptions that you might think are leaping to mind, like "Well how will we ever discover anything new if we never try new things?", are not exceptions. Things we have no idea about are interesting. Things that we have a very good idea are going to be uninteresting are what I'm talking about.)