This is a mostly off-topic post, but it starts in chess club.
At the Aptos Library Chess Club yesterday, a gray-haired woman comes in and starts talking with me. “Oh, I didn’t realize there was a chess club here!” she said. For a little while we chat about the history of the chess club, and I’m thinking she is a nice woman. Then she sees me taking attendance with my cell phone. “What are you doing with that?” she says. I explain. She starts telling me about how Verizon wants to build a new cell phone tower across the street, she tells me that cell phone use is probably responsible for my memory loss (never mind the fact that I only started using my cell phone 10 years ago, and my memory was not too great even before then) and cheerfully informs me that the radiation from my cell phone is “lethal, basically,” so all the kids in my chess club are going to die.
All said with a straight face, in a normal conversational tone of voice. And then she departs.
And through all of this, I regret to say, I said nothing. I just said “mumble mumble mm hmm.” Where was all my science training? Where was my journalistic devotion to the truth? Gone. Completely paralyzed by a nice old lady with paranoid delusions. All that was left was my habitual politeness. Tell me lies to my face, and all I can think of saying is “Thank you for coming to chess club.”
After chess club was over, I saw that all of the cars in the parking lot had anti-cell-tower leaflets on them, so that was in fact the purpose for her visit. Seeing me using the cell phone was just an excuse for her to go into her pre-planned rant.
Anyway, after she left I was so angry at myself. “Why didn’t I say anything?” I started going over in my mind all the things I could have said. Like about the fact that it’s ionizing radiation that damages cells, by knocking electrons off of atoms to create free radicals. According to Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect, it’s the wavelength (not the intensity) of the radiation that determines whether it can remove an electron. So yes, ultraviolet radiation and x-rays and gamma rays are dangerous. Science and society recognize that, and give us protection from them. But visible light is not dangerous. Longer-wavelength radiation is equally not dangerous. There is no known physical mechanism by which it could hurt you.
Not satisfied with physics? Then try biology. When cell phones first came out, there were plenty of studies about whether cell phone usage caused brain tumors. They found nothing. There have also been studies about whether electric high-voltage lines and towers cause increased rates of cancer. Nothing.
But what is infuriating to me about the anti-technology propagandists is that you can never convince them with science. The way you’re supposed to do science is to test a hypothesis. If the experiment gives you no evidence the hypothesis is true, you abandon it. You move on. But the propagandists never move on. They still say that cell phones cause cancer. For them, science is only a propaganda tool. They’ll keep looking until they can find somebody with a Ph.D. who’s willing to look authoritative and say the party line.
Anyway, I finally calmed down. After I calmed down, I had to admit that an enraged response would not have done any good. I certainly am not going to convince the “nice old lady” with my argument about Einstein and the photoelectric effect, and if I had made a scene then it would have disrupted the chess club. So maybe being polite was the right thing after all.
This morning I calmed down even more because I read two articles online that seemed somehow relevant to this problem of how to deal with peddlers of pseudoscience. First, a Facebook friend of mine pointed to a link to an article, The Biggest Concerns about GMO Food Aren’t Really About GMO’s. This was a wonderful article, the first one I’ve read about genetically modified organisms that actually took a somewhat balanced approach. It points out, for example, that many GMO’s were developed precisely for the purpose of reducing pesticide use! Not all of them, of course; some were made to enable the use of certain pesticides such as RoundUp. But the article makes the eminently sensible point that not all GMO’s are created alike, and we shouldn’t lump the good ones with the bad ones.
Anyway, I won’t rehash the whole article, but please read it if you’re not afraid of actually having to deal with nuance. Propagandists, of course, hate nuance. They want you to make decisions based on emotions and sweeping judgements like “all GMO’s are bad.” But real life is full of nuance, uncertainty, and the need to make a rational decision in spite of uncertainty. Any time you try to see both sides of a question, you are already striking a blow in favor of reason and against the propagandists.
The second article I read this morning was from the New Yorker, Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans. It was very short, but it made me laugh to think of the nice old lady as a new mutant strain of human. Perhaps humor is the best weapon against paranoia. Or the best antidote. Or at least the best consolation.
