"Despite no concrete evidence to support the concept, belief in fan death persists to this day in Korea,[further explanation needed] and also to a lesser extent in Japan.[1][2][3]"
Don't Use a portable electric fan in a closed room without windows or doors open to the outside. ... Don't Use a portable electric fan to blow extremely hot air on yourself. This can accelerate the risk of heat exhaustion. ... Don't direct the flow of portable electric fans toward yourself when room temperature is hotter than 90 °F."
Looking at climate data for the country, I was struck by how similar it is to upper Missouri. Saint Louis is about as humid, but a bit hotter on average. Which would make me suspect that if "fan death" was a thing, we'd be seeing it in a band of US States that're similarly hot and humid.
Speculative difference would be if air conditioning is really uncommon in South Korea, but presumably we could even that out by comparing to poorer people in the US.
I grew up believing in it (because my parents), and it took me a while to shake. At some point it became more of a superstition, but was still nervous to leave it on overnight...
There is, of course, the possibility that wincy's comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, though. I personally can't quite tell which way it was meant.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I will note that people make arguments via questions pretty often in normal conversation, so that's not necessarily an accusation of significant bad faith. It could be more of a complaint about rhetorical technique.
But let's treat it as an accusation of bad faith. In that case, we have a deeper issue. Assuming that it's a real question asked in good faith is actually the weakest plausible interpretation, because the link makes it a self-disproving theory. Honestly the tongue-in-cheek interpretation is probably the strongest one.
There's no way to treat it as a strong argument and as a real question asked in good faith.
Also it can be okay to downvote misinformation even when the commenter didn't do anything wrong.
Saying "But what about x?" when you yourself provide a link that says that X is a non-issue doesn't make for an engaging discussion. "But what about x? This link suggests it's not a problem but I think it is because of y" does make for an engaging discussion, even if y is seemingly nonsense.
Maybe this person could even use the downvotes as a signal that there is something seriously wrong with their belief and learn something new.
I’m not Korean, but used to work at a company with quite a few second generation Korean Americans and we’d have Korean students studying in the US we hired as interns. They were very bright and very polite, but if we brought up fan death they’d say “oh haha yeah it’s funny... but it might be true”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death