What you see is all there is

Or Night of the Radio Frequency Dead

Remember the Alar scare from the 80's?  Feed mice enough of the stuff they used to spray on apples to choke a hippo  (about 5000 gallons a day scaled up to human proportions,)  and they sometimes might get sick -- and so therefore according to what passes for logic in America, it's TOXIC and so much so, there were instances of people calling up toxic waste facilities to ask whether apple juice was too dangerous to dump along with the paint remover and the used motor oil.  Flush it down the toilet and the world might just end.

Of course in the real world, nobody really could demonstrate any ill effects from Alar or most of the other fertilizer, pesticide and hormone horrors du jour.  There are after all enough people who don't feel well at one time or another to keep the Chicken Littles clucking about toxins and selling us things to make it go away, from duct tape for your feet to jewelry made of resistors and capacitors and diodes "tuned to natural frequencies."  People still believe Alar is deadly, but then people still believe lead foil on the outside of a wine bottle will make the wine poisonous and that degradation of  someone's DNA would turn it into OJ Simpson's and WiFi at Starbucks will lower your sperm count. Of course there are also enough people that begin to feel better after a while to keep the sales of snake oil brisk, but that's another matter.

Did silicone breast implants really cause cancer and lupus, etc?  Billions in settlements were paid because ad hoc 'studies' and anecdotes seemed like enough data for a jury to believe the story but  large, independent studies have subsequently found that silicone breast implants do not appear to cause breast cancers or any identifiable systemic disease.  Are we disposed to fear anything new and so much that we refuse to look at evidence and grasp at fragments?

Does eating Gluten give you "grain brain" and make you fat like that e-mail doctor says?  No reason to think so but that some entrepreneur wrote a book and advertises on the internet, but all it takes is a handful of people who say they feel good after eating Doctor Bonkers' gluten free breakfast cereal to provide "clinical results" and don't bother to teach them about statistical regression or the Placebo effect or deprive them of that holier than thou status one gets from a gluten free, 'organic' and free range 'unprocessed' diet.  I mean there's a "study" of mummies that proves wheat killed off the Egyptian aristocracy even though it's total fact-free bunkum. What you see is all there is. It's all I know, so that's all anybody knows.

Think we've learned anything?  No, we haven't and with statistical and clinical support or without it - especially without it -we're still willing to fear that something is making us sick even if we're not sick - something other than the double bacon chili cheeseburgers with special sauce or the cigarettes or all that TV and video game couch time. Besides it doesn't matter if you buy the magic berries of the week from the TV doctor and it must be true if it's on Oprah.  I'm tempted to say there is no truth, no science, no knowledge any more, only marketing.

An article in the local paper the other day told us about the "environmental activist group" that was suing to opt out of the "Smart Meter" program that eliminated meter readers and that can tell the electric company if your power is out and what your peak usage time is.  They use "radio frequencies" insist the activists and although not one of them can cite any evidence that the microscopic amounts of RF these meters use will in any way affect anything living or dead and despite the many years of research and the 100 years of experience users of high power radio equipment have logged, they're convinced that these meters will, like any technology the public doesn't understand, produce immense ecological damage. Will the meter emit less RF than the cell phone the meter reader carries with him?  Of course. It will emit less than your TV or even the 455 KHz IF oscillator in your 1947 radio as well or your cordless phone or your Bluetooth earphone. Of course in this town there's a contingent that is sure the meters are only there to let Obama listen to your thoughts.  I wish I were joking.

These are the same kind of people that will become hysterical about "cell phone frequencies" without any idea what those frequencies are, how they behave, what other equipment uses those bands at much higher power levels and are likely to mumble something about roulette when asked about the inverse square law.  Are they the same people who talk about 'going green' and  'saving the planet' when they unplug their cell phone charger to save a milliwatt hour per year? You tell me.

I remember when TV would make you blind and color TV would give you cancer and you would get melanoma  even on a cloudy day in Yellow Knife wearing a shirt and ski mask if you didn't wear that special clothing soaked in SPF 960. Nuclear testing would produce giant ants and medical advance would piss off God as much as building a ziggurat over 70 feet high once did. None of us are old enough to remember the scares about how taking a train that went over 20mph would make your blood boil and the Telegraph would leach away the electricity from your brain and give you neurasthenia if you didn't buy doctor Feelgood's electric shock machine --  and of course there were dire predictions about electric light and the Telephone - and Ohmagawd, now there's radio and there are "activist groups" to make sure we're properly misinformed and hysterical.

Absence of evidence always seems to trump evidence of absence.  That cell phones after extensive research don't really seem to cause cancer or kill bees, has little effect on belief nor does the fact that 800 MHz police radios put out far, far more power and the police aren't keeling over from neuresthenia - nor the ham radio operators with their 1500 watt transmitters for that matter. Let's not even get into commercial radio stations with a 100 thousand Watts, or high power radar.

That Fluoride in the water doesn't melt your bones and that the Measles vaccine really does prevent measles and condoms really do work for prevention of disease is as demonstrable and more so than than the hard fact that Neill Armstrong didn't take one great leap for mankind in some studio in Pasadena.  It doesn't matter. As Barnum said, there's one born every minute and not one of them has a clue about what a 'study' is, what statistics teach us or what scientists are doing these days.  Daniel Kahneman's brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow discusses the problem of statisticians who should know much better giving no care at all to sample size and confidently producing meaningless conclusions from "studies" like the now much discredited French Monsanto study showing genetically modified corn producing tumors in rats.  But the public reacts to studies without knowing enough to judge them when it feeds the fear of the new and there's an industry dedicated to keeping things just that way. Just turn on your TV (keeping in mind how dangerous TVs are, of course.)  Data doesn't matter and that study will be referenced by activists and pundits and "save the planet" bloggers ad infinitum. What matters is producing a coherent story that we can grasp at and limiting the data we reveal to that which buttresses the story.

Who knows?  So anxious is the human mind to find causal relationships in chaos.  When one unrelated thing follows another, it's enough and as the columnist from the paper says, "maybe these meters are the reason we have so much more autism."  Maybe indeed and the less information he has about radio frequency emissions or human developmental problems the more speculation seems justified by random events. One always prefers a plausible story to a discussion of mathematical probability and the more so when the plausibility is based on ignorance.  As Daniel Kahneman calls it:  WYSIATI, or What You See Is All There Is. Fragmentary evidence, Gerrymandered evidence -- If I don't know the science, there is no science. If I don't know all the years of research that's been done, then no research has been done and who's going to take the trouble to refute me?
I've always called it the "I don't know, therefore. . ." fallacy or the Argument from Ignorance, but either way if I don't know exactly how the pyramids were built, even if someone else does, it must be space aliens and by the way, my front porch light burned out yesterday and my knee hurts this morning -- those compact fluorescents emit radio frequencies after all.  Scary stuff kids.  Scary stuff.