You and I understand enough about electromagnetism and biology to understand that those concerns are probably unfounded.

Other people don’t have the time or the inclination or intelligence to learn and so they have to rely on the word of authorities.

And to be honest, people have been lied to repeatedly by authorities and have died or become sick because of it.

It might be the case that being cautious in rolling out new technologies is a prudent political decision, even if it’s not necessarily sound scientifically.

I agree, and if a 5G base stations is really required on every corner... then screw it! You can't get decent coverage of more than one carrier over significant fractions of the country. I sounds like 5G is more likely to emerge as a super WiFi than as a cell phone standard in the US. Transitioning to greater use of MIMO within the 4G standard would significantly increase bandwidth without requiring more stations.

And it might just save us money... we need more 4G with good coverage than ultra-high bandwidth local service. We might get it and better WiFi, if the FCC doesn't sell off all the spectrum to our non-competitive tri-opoly. In China they've already committed build it so they will come, anyway.

The one new thing 5G actually helps with is low latency (less than 10ms rather than less than 100ms) ... which is mostly useful for dumb terminals, twitch games, and perhaps VR.

> When is this going to stop? It feels like we're going backwards in terms of people understanding science.

Who is there that is telling the public what the science says and that the public can trust?

Government agencies and their scientists?

They often have a tendency to make recommendations based on weak science, and if they are regulating an industry with a lot of political influence they may even make recommendations that go against what the science says.

For an example take a look at dietary recommendations in the US. Almost everything that has gone into them has not held up. The public followed them, reduced fats, eggs, and protein, and loaded up on carbs...and became fat and diabetic.

How about non-government advocacy groups?

They botch it too. Continuing with the dietary recommendations example, the American Heart Association, for example, jumped on the unscientific "fat and cholesterol bad" bandwagon, and spent decades giving people harmful advice.

Industry scientists?

Their employers often get to decide what they publish, which means that although the industry scientists might not outright lie about results, they may remain silent about results that would go against their employer's interests.

Academic scientists?

This is probably your best bet. The problem here is that academic research is often not directly on point for the particular issue that regulators or legislators are addressing. Academic researchers are more likely to be doing the basic research that industry, government, and NGO researchers should be building upon.

So, what is your process to disprove wrong assumptions that you or someone else has?

Why should people trust someone else instead of using their own brain to evaluate arguments?

It's impossible to become an expert in everything.

But it is possible to apply Occam's Razor to a scientific hypothesis. Is it too much to ask to require people to read? And draw their own conclusions?

It is, actually. It doesn't scale once you start talking about too many things at once. There's so much time one can spend reading. At some point, you just have to trust the experts (whoever you consider those to be) on many things.

Speak for yourself. I seem to have no problem verifying my beliefs.

Please explain exactly how your current device is displaying this page, and please no handwaving like "a key is pressed" or "a dns record is served", we need this down to the electron level.

That was overly sarcastic for hn, but the point was that there is not a single human alive who can explain everything they do. At some point you are going to hit an assumption that you have not personally verified

I have reasonable models for how my machine works, verified by my knowledge of physics and engineering which I have sought to acquire even though it is not my field of study. More to the point, if someone makes a claim about the electrical engineering in my device, I have some basis for evaluating whether that is true or false.

E.g. if you claim that the NSA is listening into every single thing that is said on everybody's phones and watches, I would know that not to be true from bandwidth and battery arguments. Selectively, sure, but I could tell if it was happening 24/7 to my device in some sort of dragnet surveillance.

I feel like you have drawn a line in the sand and said , "This is the proper amount of knowledge to have, anything more than it is wasteful and anything less is ignorant".

How did you verify your physics and engineering knowledge? Did you run hundreds of thousands of experiments to verify every single law and property of physics? At some point you are reaching a piece of data you learned from someone else and did not verify or that is an assumption because it's currently unknown how to explain or takes too much effort to verify while living your life.

On top of that, the OP was talking about how it was impossible to verify _everything_ in our lives nowadays. You mentioned nothing about biology or chemistry. How do you know your diet is the proper one? Are you sure about every chemical you interact with and how it affects you? Do you properly understand copyright and other IP law when you make a YouTube video using someone else's work? Did you get the right permits to put up that shed on your land that complies with the regulations from the 7 different layers of polity that cover you? Life is far too complicated to understand every facet and it only gets worse as we realize things are more complicated than we previously thought

> At some point, you just have to trust the experts (whoever you consider those to be) on many things.

That's extremely dangerous IMO. If you have a populace that is not literate or engaged, you end up with a slave society. Just see the rise of the concept of a "thought leader" [1]. It's quite scary when you see the implications such a concept will have for society.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-h...

To repeat, it's not physically possible to judge every single thing. It doesn't matter if you're literate and engaged - there's just not enough time, even if you were to spend every hour you have on this. And most people have jobs etc.

This is simply not true. Once literate it often takes a minimal amount of effort — back of the envelope calculation or google search— to do a first pass test of the veracity of a source.

You're still relying on another party when you do a Google search, hell if you want to get crazy about it, you are relying that you were correctly taught literacy and that when you read a word, the meaning it has for you is the same meaning the author attributed to that word. It's not guaranteed

It is possible, but I wouldn't put too much confidence in conclusions I've arrived at through application of the Razor on the field I know little about.

An interesting concept to that effect is that of "epistemic learned helplessness"

http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

Basically, if you're not an expert in some field, then for any given argument, arguments of either side can be made to sound equally convincing to you, so - unless you have time to become an expert in every domain you encounter - your best bet is to accept the general scientific consensus on the topic.

(If anything, Occam's Razor is very useful to determine who is arguing for the generic scientific consensus, and who is arguing out of political reasons, or fear driven by ignorance.)

Because not everyone wants to be some super nerd who reads studies 24/7.

I agree with you. I think part of the problem is that the public perpetually feels like major corporations do things that prioritize profits over general consumer best interests. This leads to a knee-jerk opposition to anything not fully understood.

I agree with what you said, but I want to point out that feel shouldn't be the word used here. Feel is used for something that's unproven, a gut instinct or emotion.

In terms of major corporations prioritizing profits over consumer best interests it's not a feeling anymore. The multitude of documented cases of corporations explicitly deciding to prioritize profits over everything has gone on long enough that at this point a company would have to prove exactly what profits they were leaving on the table before anyone should resonably believe they are acting in the interest of consumers.

Its going to cause more and more situations like this fear of antennas and radiation, or vaccinnes causing autism, or any other crazy sort of idea because there is no trust anymore and the public has to assume they are going to get fucked if they aren't cautious

More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15523102

What lack of understanding is there though? We already know that doctors are unable to preform reproducible science, so we cannot trust them to prove that cell-phones are safe. Physics tells us that cell-phone radiation enters the body and interacts with cells. Of course, the panic that often accompanies such uncertainty is irrational and unscientific, but the steadfast belief that the radiation can do no harm is equally so.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph250/lu1/

There is some science we aren't still worried about reproducing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

The focus on micro towers is misguided because the possible health threat is from the handset, and more micro towers means phones can operate at lower power, which would be a good thing for the worriers.

Doen't the inverse square law show that more towers closer to the ground, even transmitting at a lower wattage, could be worse than a few towers high up and far away?

Just think about your handset, not the towers. The handset has to broadcast to those towers, at a power they can receive. As you hold that handset, to you want it to be broadcasting at low power to a nearby tower, or higher power to a tower further away? And who says that old tower is further away? It is going to be close to someone, even if it isn't you.

> We already know that doctors are unable to preform reproducible science

We've done pretty well so far with doctors doing good research. This is the basis of all modern medicine. Sure, there are going to be issues in some cases. There are going to bring failed experiments.

But we're winning massively since science really got into medicine. Your assumption is not really valid.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil. We ban accounts that do this, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all, from now on?