The Blotch knows! The Blotch knows!
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I think Rumsfeld was a fan of the Johari window
Edit to add:
[quote]He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a foolâŚshun him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is willingâŚteach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleepâŚawaken him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wiseâŚfollow him.[/quote]
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As that article goes on to say, âevidence of absenceâ is inductive reasoning, which has limitations, but is pretty much indispensable for science or any other sort of reasoning about the real world.
The problem with the use of âabsence of evidence is not evidence of absenceâ argument was the context. Rumsfeld had previously argued that there was positive evidence of the existence of WMDs in Iran. So Rumsfeldâs argument was not to the point, and suggests he was willfully lying.
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If you are really serious about homeopathy you just duck into that section of the health store and take one quick breath and are cured of everything. 
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Free electron!!! Drop the charges!
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Not true. Everything has side effects, the dose makes the poison, and as the dose declines to zero, obviously the side effects are dynamited to ⌠better stock up on homeopathic LD50 data, I donât have any yet.
The local school has some âelectrosensitiveâ people so everyone is asked to turn off their cell phones etc. at the school as if it were a friggin peanut allergy. Iâve left my cell on in my pocket when sitting right next to them and theyâve never noticed a thing. One of them freaked out once and acted sick for a week when someone turned on an FM radio, I didnât feel it was my place to tell them the radio waves were already there the entire time.
The World Health Organization categorizes âelectrosensitivityâ as a psychosomatic illness, and Iâm inclined to agree. Every study ever done has shown that sensitive people react to faked exposure with the same symptoms and donât react at all to unknown exposure. That is pretty good proof it is all in their heads. Not a single person has been able to determine actual exposure, not one, ever.
The only side effect Iâve ever seen from homeopathic medicine use is a bad case of the Woooos. i think the lactose and sugar are the most dangerous component, because well they are the only component.
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yes, definitely. @colinInSpace mistakenly thought i was quoting rumsfeld, but i wasnât. and, they ignored the content of what i was saying because of it.
they, @shaddack, and a few others seem to feel that failing an A/B test in a lab environment is enough proof to dismiss electro sensitive claims.
i know im repeating only myself at this point, but i really think those kinds of studies only make electro sensitive claims less likely, not impossible.
proposing a single kind of mechanism, and disproving that using self reported responses in a lab setting is not deep analysis.
as i mentioned earlier: we know em fields affect navigation in birds, and other species. ( and some sort of reproductive correlations there too, i think. ) and, there are theories why, but itâs not perfectly understood.
until we can do that with some confidence, how can we assume electrosensitivity is just woo?
i like my science more rigorous.
Even if you didnât use Rumsfeldâs words verbatim, you really do seem to be channeling his same false incredulity.
We donât have to assume anything. The burden of proof belongs to those that wish to demonstrate human sensitivity to wifi, ceullular, etc. I promise Iâll give this topic another look when there is better reason to than: âYou havenât definitively 100% proven itâs not the case.â
The scientifically rigorous thing to do would be to assume the effect does not exist until there is some evidence (not inductive reasoning) to suggest otherwise.
Or perhaps you want to argue that Luminiferous aether was dismissed prematurely? After all the same basic inductive argument could be applied to that.
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Actually, Iâm more or less with @shaddack on electrosensitivity â at least, it seems to me that the weight of evidence is that people who claim theyâre immediately affected by electromagnetic fields are reacting to their beliefs about the presence of the fields, not to actual electromagnetic fields.
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Slavoj Zizek even took this quote up, and made the point that there is a fourth category, the âunknown knownsâ - the beliefs and values and etc. that we act upon as if they are truth without being aware that they exist. Or as he put it, âthe disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, although they form the background of our public values.â
Frankly, the whole set of constructs has been tremendously helpful to me in teaching therapists and counselors; I find myself quoting Rumsfeld rather often in fact.
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aether was abandoned prematurely!!! hopefully weâll get more interplanetary sailing ships, and not so much steampunk distopia. because, weâre apparently not talking about scientific inquiry as i know it, and have moved on to sci-fi.
look, itâs not anyoneâs job to prove or disprove except by interest in the subject, or sympathy to people who feel they are affected.*
and, personally, im glad people are interested in the effects on health due to the progress of the modern world. im sympathetic to this, because we do so often introduce illness for the sake of novelty. ( glow in the dark dinnerware made the 50s? thanks uranium. )
*( there is also the responsibility of manufacturers for their products, tho in this case, due to the ubiquity of the tech, public funded research continues to be the right approach.)
oh, i know. no worries. 
Glow-in-the-dark stuff in that age was either based on radium (chiefly radium-226), or on zinc sulfide.
The self-luminous stuff is grossly radioactive because of the radium. The shining part is a silver-doped zinc sulfide phosphor, which degrades over time so the things lose their shine. But its use was waning even then and is confined mostly to small spots on instrument dials. In common form it has a bluish-greenish light that stays constant (over shorter timespans of weeks to months, where the phosphor degradation is too slow to measure).
The charged-by-light stuff is based on copper-doped zinc sulfide. It is not radioactive at all. In its common form it has greenish light that decays within minutes to few hours. It does not degrade significantly if well-sealed. These days it is mostly replaced with europium-doped strontium aluminate, which has better brightness and longer shine.
Note that uranium is nowhere to be found here. It is present in some glazes, e.g. the Fiestaware dinnerware, but none glow in the dark and neither will you as the radiation is rather low. And the ones made after WW2 are even less radioactive because they use depleted uranium, instead of the natural pre-WW2 stuff.
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