The scientists' appeal, including a list of signatories and their affiliations, isn't hard to find by following links.

https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal

Likewise for a list of relevant papers:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CbWmdGTnnW1iZ9pxlxq1ssAdYl...

Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill? Can we dispense with the tired ad hominems and talk about science? A self-proclaimed guess from a self-proclaimed non-expert seems ill placed in a credentialist diatribe.

When the list of people also includes folks who claim to "customize clinical trials to support marketing claims"[0] it is hard to take even experts with solid credentials seriously.

0: http://energymedicineri.com/

Five out of five signers from my country are well-known EHS proponents, and at least three have financial ties to the illness. Having a Ph.D. degree from a well-known university does little to prevent later involvement in quackery.

... I found them, and that's exactly what raised flags.

If a faculty at HMS signed on, that'd be okay. If a ransom person with a degree from HMS does, that doesn't carry the same weight. I was pretty clear about "at" versus "from."

Science isn't a democracy.

"Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust?"

After their primary university admissions scandal? Absolutely not, not that I ever trusted them in the first place (Memphis has a far better medical program.)

Harvard Medical School is good institution but people on the list are not experts in the subject. Autism researchers etc.

The autism researcher from Harvard has studied the plausibility of a link between autism and radiofrequency radiation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24095003/.

Goalposts notwithstanding you have to admit the list is kind of hit or miss. Whenever their job isn't listed they're either retired or were never in a related field. For example you listed Harvard, Columbia, Monash, and McGill above. Half the people from those institutions are either unqualified, retired, or both.

Plus there's places like "ElectroSensitivity UK" which aren't scientific institutions.

PS - I fully admit that there are subject experts from trusted institutions included too. But you're being far too defensive for quite legitimate questions/criticisms.

> the list is kind of hit or miss.

It seemed that way to me as well, but the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present.

> you're being far too defensive

Defensive of what? I haven't even expressed a position yet, other than "logical fallacies are bad" and I'm pretty willing to stand by that one. Are you here to argue the converse? To the extent that people or motivations matter at all, why condemn me but not the one who created the digression?

> ...the real point is that it's irrelevant how well or poorly we judge those people. What matters is the facts they or others present.

This matters if your expertise are in the subject to which the facts belong, otherwise it means little, particularly in a subject which requires an incredible amount of knowledge of an an incredible array of subjects.

I can look a bunch of absolute facts regarding 5g signals and make an assumption, however, because my expertise lie far outside the realm of 5g, an expert can easily come along afterwards and show me why these facts–while accurate–mean nothing to the subject at hand and why a completely different set of facts are what one should be looking at.

Expertise absolutely matters. And this is coming from a person who is confident that a greater than zero amount of companies would happily pay people to add noise to a topic in order to poison us for a fraction of a percentage boost in their quarterly growth.

Expertise matters on complex subjects and attempting to pretend as if all ideas are equal no matter who they come from or who receives them is a recipe for disaster.

The collective We really need to get back to a place where we freely and happily say “It’s really outside my realm of expertise. You should track down an expert.” and way more often daily and regularly “I don’t know.”

> as if all ideas

This isn't about ideas. It's about data. The quality of data is independent of where it came from, so it actually is equal in that sense.

> You should track down an expert.

Yes, we should refer people to experts more often. Why? Because they have data, not because they have titles or affiliations. Information is what makes them experts, and information can be shared.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, apologies if I assumed it would be inferred.

To use your term data, with complex topics it isn’t simply having data. One must know which data is relevant to consider for which topic at which point. And even more importantly, one must understand which missing sets of information need to be considered.

There is a reason our society has come to place such a high value on experience and expertise. And it isn’t solely because someone had books of data stored on massive bookshelves. While these bookshelves are important, it is their understanding in the nuances of which books to hunt for answers.

Our new ability to store significantly more of these books and retrieve them more efficiently doesn’t remove our need for someone to use and contextualize the information contained in these books. New tech doesn’t change the fact that expertise matters.

Interestingly enough, we now face a sort of reverse of the problems we’ve faced for centuries: While we used to struggle to find enough information to feed to experts, now we face too much data and not enough experts to properly make use of it.

Again, apologies if my first post wasn’t clarifying enough.

Data doesn't speak for itself. It has to be properly contextualized and positioned for an intended audience and message. It's for that reason that you don't ever see scientific papers that are just tables of numbers alone.

If you're outside a particular area of expertise, the intellectually honest thing to do is to say "I'm not knowledgeable enough to assess these findings" and defer to someone who is. At that point, you're assessing credibility, and affiliation and track record absolutely matter.

> It has to be properly contextualized and positioned

Contextualization and positioning are themselves information that an expert can pass on.

I can think of very few science cranks I've ever seen who didn't have some kind of data. That means nothing. Data isn't a magical, pure, and perfect substance that emerges from the aether.

"I haven't even expressed a position yet, other than "logical fallacies are bad" and I'm pretty willing to stand by that one."

Your fallacy is the "Fallacy Fallacy." If you can actually stand by your words (nobody in my nearly 40 years of life has been able to) you'd explode from the sheer paradox.

> but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field

Wait, did the goalposts actually move at all? The original post said:

> There are a lot of people with degrees FROM credible institutions, but very little in terms of currently being researchers in the field AT credible institutions.

You responded literally saying that the institutions are credible:

> Is Harvard Medical School an institution you recognize and trust? Columbia? Monash? McGill?

That wasn't the original objection; they even said in their objection that the institutions are credible. I don't understand how the goalposts moved.

Is criticizing an expert's qualifications an ad hominem? Particularly when they're using their expertise to argue for an idea as here.

Seems like a double standard. They can use their expertise/reputation to endorse an idea but using that same expertise/reputation to qualify that endorsement is an "ad hominem."

To me discussing their expertise is core to their position, since their whole position is: "I'm an expert, I sign a letter based on my expertise for a specific course of action." If they aren't an expert it cuts right to the core of their position.

Is it though? Is it ad hominem to identify and separate people who know something about a thing from those who don’t?

You raise a good point. When an appeal to authority has already made credentials etc. the issue, challenging that appeal becomes valid. The problem is that OP wasn't just an appeal to authority. It did not open that door. It did make arguments other than identity, and linked to fuller expositions of those arguments. Thus, addressing only identity and ignoring any arguments in either direction remains ad hominem.

It's not ad hominem to separate between experts and non-experts.

Ad hominem is a fair counter-argument to appeal to authority.

I would like to add to this that many academics who study wireless research, specifically MIMO beam forming - aren't particularly incentivized to find issue with 5G. I've spoken to a few who have dismissed health concerns whilst waving their hands about the actual Science. To them this is worth anything up to 10 years of funding and research opportunities in what can be a very competitive research area.

They receive A LOT of funding from cellular companies in particular, any research that throws doubt on 5G could lead to their funding being pulled. Not only this, but most of the interesting 5G hardware is coming from the cellular companies on loan.

My point is: You have a perfect storm for a rushed technology with potential for health risks. Almost every Country on the planet is investing lots of money into 5G and the technology itself requires a significant number more cellular towers to be built in closer proximity to people.

If there is any genuine question about 5G's safety, I would rather stay on the side of caution. It's not as if people will kill over if they don't have 5G immediately. Not only this, the technology will be more mature and the price will likely come down for infrastructure development.

It is impossible to find a control group that hasn't been previously exposed to some form of 2/3/4g radiation .

This is often repeated, but I wonder if it's completely true. I'd completely understand if it was harder, and more expensive, to find such a control group, but it surprises me that it would be "impossible".

I can think of a few people I know that are much less exposed to 2/3/4g radiation, by living in the forest and not having a phone on them all the time. Isn't a control group that has been exposed to significantly less radiation still useful ?

The Sentinelese, but they shoot visitors.

There are large cellular areas not exposed to significant (read: detectable) levels of radiation if you're willing to travel. Third world Countries would be a good place to start.

The article explicitly calls the 200 participants the world's leading experts in non-ionizing radiation. I haven't researched their credentials or examined their research. But if all existing research points in one direction, that constitutes empirical evidence. Of course methodological and statistical problems abound across all academia. The article makes existing research seem unequivocal and argues we need to conduct further research for 4G as well as 5G health effects

Fortunately the article is wrong because the signers are almost all either: 1) long-retired and out of the game entirely, 2) not trained in the field or qualified at all, or 3) known quacks who have peddled this kind of thing for years, or some combination of the three, and the articles cited are all written by that same population (and often published in no-name journals that I could probably get published in) or don't say what the author claims they do (many of the articles explicitly state that they found no connection whatsoever).

So I guess the moral of the story is "don't believe everything you see in pop science magazines," although I would have hoped nobody did to begin with(?)

Not a true Scotsman among them, huh?

If you don't want to be called a quack, don't associate with quacks.

>Now, there's obviously some frequency band where we get into health risks. 5G jumps us from single-digit GHz to double-digit -- I'd guess you'd have to go at least past visible light before you run into safety issues, at least barring extremely high levels of exposure. Intuitively, it seems to me like that ought to still be safe, but I'm no expert.

I highly doubt that 26+ GHz will receive much attention. You have no range, you need line of sight otherwise it won't work. At least 3.4GHz (and the other LTE bands) don't have that issue.

Why is being below visible light a factor? Different wavelengths have different properties that don't necessarily map linearly with frequency, such as the ability to pass through your body.

E=h.nu;frequencies under UV have insuffient energy/photon to ionize anything.