Would you be kind enough to share any links to your own writing and some of the key factors that improved it.
I wish to improve my communication and appreciate that Paul Graham thought hard then freely shared his insights on such a difficult topic for a great deal of people.
I've always wondered how and why Geoff Bezos ran Amazon with six page essays and now I think I'm a bit closer to understanding.
Do you also ask cinema critics to show their own movies, food critics to provide their own food, etc.?
One does not necessarily need to be able to _make_ something to be able to _tell_ whether something is good or not.
Why isn't it tested at 2mm if that is the standard useage?
Why rely on a model?
20,000 phones are being sold an hour. Why not buy 200 phone's off 200 shelves and test them comprehensively at 0 mm, 1mm, 2mm, 3mm ..... The cost to volume sold is completely negligible and it is useful consumer information as 3 percent of the population is electrosensitive.
An estimated 30 million people suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue) in the world and the average diagnosis takes seven years. Chronic health conditions are increasing exponentially. Healthy people aren't sensitive to environmental stimuli but unhealthy people are and the number of chronically unhealthy people grows by the day as livers strain under the stressors and weakening of modernity.
Turn your wifi off in your house at night and see if you sleep any better. Pretty simple anecdotal experiment. A house without the wifi on or excess electrical componentry on has a nicer feel. We did not evolve with this electromagnetic radiation and the cost of testing is negilible given the global population's growing exposure to it and something interesting may fall out of the research.
The risk of Apple having to make slight design modifications if research raises an issue is not a huge concern of mine. One hours phone sales should cover it and then they could further differentiate their products and raise prices.
How many electrical engineering schools are there in the world? Sounds like a great way for a university to get their staff free Iphones with a research grant.
It's interesting how certain you are. What you mean to say is "we've never seen scientific evidence that Electrosensitivity is real, therefore as we currently understand it can't be".
Much like the Earth going around the sun, bacon causing cancer, BPA in plastic being bad (and now the substitutes too) etc. etc.
One will become electrosensitive in a dryer climate.
capacitive touch is derived by galvanic response that can be impacted by pH balance and electrochemistry.
potassium is used to reduce the impacts of gamma radiation
(wrong band, but not irrelevent)
microwaves can be lethal from a distance of 1 km (death ray)
there is so much radiation in the air, to study the affects of one wave length i'd suppose you'd need multiple band pass filters to narrow the band in question and a noise generator for controlled results.
I don't doubt that psychosoma and hypochondria play a role in many cases, but I will posit a couple of scenarios for you to ponder.
You can sense heat, can't you? If your phone is really warm in your pocket, will you notice? Higher output from the radios = more electricity flowing = more heat generation. You will likely notice this.
On another note, do you have eyes? They are sensitive to various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation (i.e, the visible spectrum). Some people are more attuned to the outer edges of this (infrared, and ultra-violet).
Seems a bit aggressive to dismiss all electrosensitivity as "not a thing", considering people are obviously very sensitive to different forms of EMR.
If you disagree, try standing in a fire, or sleeping with a spotlight on your face.
The maximum amount of power emitted from a WiFi radio in the US as regulated by the FCC is 0.071W. You're not realistically going to notice much heating from WiFi. Have you ever tried to cook something on the antenna of your WiFi? Try putting a cup of water next to your WiFi router and measure the temperature difference. You'd need massively super-human levels of sensitivity to begin to notice any warming effects. Sure, if you crank the output up to a few dozen watts you'll definitely start feeling the effects of RF. Get it a few dozen watts higher and you'll be at risk of getting RF burns after some prolonged exposure. Get it several hundred watts higher and you're cooking a dinner in the metal box.
As for possibly almost seeing things like WiFi, that's also pretty preposterous. WiFi operates at 2.4 or 5.8GHz. Your eyes start to get sensitive EM waves at about 4000000000GHz (lower end of what is commonly called visible spectrum). Even if you were at the ultra extreme low end of sensitivity, you still wouldn't really be anywhere near the frequency range required.
So for your example of standing in a fire or having a spotlight on your face, you'd need for it to be a practically room temperature fire or a millionth of a candle spotlight. The scales you're comparing to are just silly to the point of being meaningless.
Electrosensitivity is denied by intelligent healthy people who have never dealt with unexplainable fatigue relying on statistics and body system diagnosis that is inadequate for explaining chronic complex health conditions.
They're all just whinging man. Not one of them ever hoped it was all in their head and they could think their way out of it.
Hacker News is a perfect subset of people lacking the perspective to consider exploring the possibility that electrosensitivity is a thing that occurs with declining health.
Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous? Let's discuss inverse power laws and quadratic functions, maybe we can build a machine learning model with our deficient statistics instead of taking two hundred phones out of two billion and testing their electromagnetic radiation at multiple distances and angles so we actually have a reliable model.
> Why so much negativity about researching something so ubiquitous?
There's nothing wrong with researching electrosensitivity to see if it's real, and to what extent. Heck, I've designed studies to test it (never carried out). The problem is not researching it, yet continuing to insist that it is the reason for people's "unexplainable" chronic pain / fatigue when there's currently zero non-anecdotal evidence for it.
I'm very much in favor of researching electrosensitivity. Whatever the cause, it's undeniable that certain illness patterns are becoming increasingly prevalent.
But I'm not really seeing research from electrosensitivity proponents, and especially not double blind studies. Instead, I'm seeing requests for fairly massive accommodations (along the lines of eliminating all Wifi and Cell phone radiation within a certain radius of a person), backed by not a whole lot of scientific evidence (unless one counts "Rudolf Steiner would have said so" as scientific evidence).
And I'm not even seeing many reports of such accommodations working to the long term benefit of the sufferers. Instead, once the Wifi is gone, they seem to develop MCS, etc. To me, that would support the prior that the suffering (which itself is undoubtedly real) is likely to have endogenous rather than environmental causes.
I agree. It’s a very small component of the overall health picture. But it is a component and should be researched.
Once the wifis gone the MCS patients spend more time sitting in front of wired digital display devices activating their central cortexes burning through their constrained glutamate supplies (which is also the most probable reason blind people don’t develop schizophrenia)which depletes their glutathione which increases their pathogenic load and inflammation while their spinal column is degenerating and inflaming from the sitting and those two things have a larger negative effect on them than the positive effect of the reduction in wifi exposure.
The disappointment at their failed remedy further aggravates their condition and nobody is interested in their next bright idea for alleviating their condition. So they live their life out labelled as a whinger and their negative emotions contribute further to their health decline.
They won't recover while exposed to er but because removing er won't cure them this is not a reason for not benefiting from minimising exposure.
Spinal function and glutathione production is as or more important for MCS suffers than a reduction in ER exposure which is important but nobody tells them that and I've no idea how to prove it but at least Im thinking about it while recovering from ME which has more utility than telling them to just get on with it.
The end of back pain book by surgeon Patrick Roth will gradually fix anyone's spinal function with a kettle bell and exercise ball.
Diet and sleep will gradually fix glutathione production.
No one will make money from researching this so Dr's are forced to ask patients to just harden up. There's a lot of benefit in hardening up as well but it won't recover spinal function or increase glutathione production or decrease er or chemical sensitivity.
Serum ferritin is an accute phase reactant that elevates due to inflammation from acute and sometimes chronic illness or heritable genetic mutation.
When someone is ill and inflamed and fatigued and they have excess serum ferritin circulating in their blood which contains 4500 iron atoms per molecule and absorbs electromagnetic radiation it interferes with their biochemistry.
Why people scoff at investigating the prevalence of electromagnetic radiation exposure when there is a causative mechanism for elevated risk in sick people is because of either arrogance or ignorance. Maybe if the doctors listened to patients instead of diagnosing hypochondria when dealing with edge cases health outcomes would begin to actually you know improve.
This is Iranian research. So what. They have brilliant scientists. Serum ferritin absorbs and is affected by electromagnetic radiation and is highly elevated in sick people. As my serum ferritin has reduced from 1200 to under 310 through venesection and lifestyle I have gradually been able tolerate exposure to electromagnetic radiation without being fatigued by it for extended periods. People running a daily energy budget become pretty adept at working out what burns through their energy and electromagnetic radiation exposure definitely does and bored sick people definitely want to use wireless devices but can't. The hypochondria diagnosis is illogical when it comes to electrosensititivity.
Against your one paper supporting the idea, there have been 100s of studies that do not. I’m all for science doing investigations, but we can’t accept a premise because it feels right.
What’s the fastest way to figure out the average existing fatigue levels and serum ferritin levels in the hundred studies so that I can quickly disprove my hypothesis?
I’m not saying it causes an illness I’m saying if you have a certain subset of illness it increases your fatigue. It also hurts your hands but you aint never gonna believe that ha ha. Iphone 7s are the worst.
I’m getting better and so is my tolerance to er so I’m not overly concerned about myself.
It’s the millions of other edge cases wrongly labelled as whingers by the medical system that I feel for.
ER doesn’t cause fatigue it exacerbates it in certain people. I better look at those hundreds of studies to figure out why I’m so wrong about this.
I don’t want to sell anyone a tinfoil hat or phone case and reducing exposure to er at night is great for sleep and CO2 emissions so why wouldn’t you.
Its not even funny how ignorant people are but let me rub it in: that one doesnt want to know there are biological effects has no more than placebo level effect. It is still an effect tho.
The "I'm not aware of any such research" should rule out any conclusion. Unawareness is only evidence of it self.
Personally im more worried about having my attentionspan cut into small chunks by endless notifications and having my sleep interupted.
I actually own the fancy rf measurment toys. Odly the most comfortable spot to sleep in the house also has the lowest measurments. Its sohh anecdotal, i know, i know..
My ISP supplied router has an option to turn the lights off, which is great as otherwise it illuminates the whole hallway. I don't get why electronics makers think their product needs to have such bright lights.
The worst design is where the light is initially off but turns on when some condition arises (e.g. battery fully charged). You fall asleep in total darkness only to be woken up at 3am by the brilliant light of "your phone is charged now".
Simple. The engineers are working on the product during the day in well-lit spaces. Since the lights are always on, it never occurs to anyone that the LEDs might be too bright at night.
In a bright environment, a bright LED is useful. Instead they should also have a light sensor used to determine the ambient light level, and then adjust the status LED display accordingly. My Samsung TV does this with its "powered on" light.
Of course, that adds to the BOM and manufacturers love shaving off fractions of a penny. Asking them to add an extra 50 cents of parts for something consumers don't think about prior to purchase is a lost cause.
Old LEDs are fine in both bright and dark environments, too-bright LEDs are a recent (5y? 10y?) thing. I wonder if LCD could be even nicer... I don't think I've ever seen single-pixel LCD status indicator.
Any kind of light in my bedroom is deeply annoying to me when trying to sleep. And I have the same problem with sound too. Any kind of high pitch, etc, from a plug, light, etc, really does cause problems with my sleep.
In college, all of my electronics were in my bedroom as well as the communal router. I taped off as many LEDs as I could (even the router wall wart had a big blue light) and disconnected any LEDs that had leads (like inside a PC case). There were only a few instances of LEDs that I actually needed so those got white electrical tape over them to diffuse the light or swapped to red if the tape diffused it too much to see.
I don't mind having a nightlight on when I sleep, I think it helps me fall asleep quicker rather than pitch black but bright blue lights that fill the fucking room with light are the devil. I have much less electronics in my bedroom now since I now have personal space other than my bedroom to put stuff.
I've had a tiny chargeable buzzer that would light up entire rooms when it was plugged in. I started habitually closing the bathroom door just so it didn't bother me when trying to sleep.
I eventually got fed up that I broke the LED with some fingernail clippers. The device never turned on again.
I'm a pretty easy going person in life but learned how mad I could get over time at a pointlessly bright light and the people who put it there.
When I was mining bitcoin I discovered graphics cards under load mess with my sleep, I would wake up feeling like I was very sick if I slept in the same room as a rig.
Noise, heat or blinking LEDs should be your first suspicions. Maybe transformer whine, with low quality power supplies. EM noise should be very low down your list of plausible causes.
Placebos work. If that's what you want, cool. If you want to figure out if RF affects sleep, that's cool too, but you'll need to double blind the experiment. Because placebos work.
Yes but so does human intuition and its a heck of a lot faster.
A healthy person can endure a toxic environment. An unhealthy person becomes more unhealthy from increased toxicity.
I’m not saying electromagnetic radiation makes a healthy person unwell i’m saying it delays or worsens recovery of some unhealthy people and there are million different subsets of unhealthy people so which subset are you going to run the double blind placebo on before you decide reduce electromagnetic radiation while you sleep.
It’s a simple experiment anyone can try. Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment as per research which eliminates electromagnetic radiation from the equation. I think its a zeitgeber in subsets sick people but there’s no profit in researching that so the only tools you have are existing research, intuition, self observation and logic.
People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial. Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression. Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost is the smartest thing someone can do with the available evidence.
Placebos in truth's clothing are toxins of human society. Please verify placebo vs truth before spreading, k? Thanks.
> Two weeks of camping is an effective insomnia treatment
Or two weeks away from the grind reduces stress. Or getting away from artificial lights/schedules reduces stress. Or it selects for people+times with less stressed. Or more healthy. Or higher SES. Or you're getting away from pollution. Or you need temperature variation to feel healthy. Or any two of those. Or three! Many plausible explanatory factors compete with RF, and you'd have to control for them in order to point the finger at RF. That's not impossible, and not even particularly difficult, but it does mean that you can't go on a camping trip, get better sleep, and then use that as proof that RF was to blame for your insomnia.
> People figure out how to sex chickens without a causative mechanism. It isn’t a placebo effect or a double blind trial.
The double blind trial is how you establish whether or not something is a placebo.
> Electrochemical gradients as per Michael Levins research affect genetic expression.
You need to blind you studies whether or not you have a plausible mechanistic explanation. You don't need a plausible mechanistic explanation to blind your studies.
> Much like hedging one’s bet by believing in a creator just in case
Which one(s)?
> reducing your exposure to RF at zero cost
Foregoing the advantages of technology is not zero cost. If you mean that turning your router off at night is zero cost, go ahead! I don't take issue with that.
I do take issue with spreading unblinded anecdata, because whether or not RF-induced-insomnia is real, RF-anxiety-induced-insomnia is definitely real, and anecdata like your own definetly spread it. If RF-induced-insomnia is real, that's for the best, but if what you experienced was a placebo (and I'd bet a substantial sum of money that it was), then unblinded anecdata literally are the problem. And that's not cool.
In the privacy of your own home: do what works and ignore the haters!
In society: please apply good experimental technique before causing anxiety in others. It's only polite.
I think you are uncomfortable that some phenomena particularly biological don't fit in a scientific experiment neatly and are more comfortable labelling 3% of the population hypochondriacs to alleviate your own anxiety.
What I've stated is that I experienced increased fatigue from exposure to ER while I was seriously ill and had elevated serum ferritin.
Each ferritin molecule has 4500 iron atoms and serrin ferritin increases with acute or chronic viral infections. A healthy level is less than fifty. So a 1150 times increase in iron atoms in someone's blood could plausibly cause fatigue when it absorbs er.
Who does this cause anxiety in exactly?
How is turning off electronic devices going to cause anxiety?
People can turn them off. If it helps great. If it doesn't don't bother.
No anxiety necessary.
You might be better educated than me, better connected than me and more intelligent but there's something to be said for original thought. I'd love to take you up on your bet where you impolitely just called me a whinger. I think I'm smarter than you are just sayin there wasn't one insightful thing in your comment as you tried to apply a method that doesn't really fit the situation. How do we do this? Let's bet our hacker News anonymous reputations on it.
Are you unfamiliar with how powerful the placebo effect is? Totally meaningless "treatments" can have real biological impacts, simply because the person receiving them believes it will.
If you truly cared about this topic, I assume you would want to know if the effect is real, or just your mind playing a trick on you.
> simply because the person receiving them believes it will
Perhaps somewhat bizarrely, maybe even if they know it's only placebo:
> In these four studies patients were randomised to receive open label placebo (pills described as "inert placebos containing no medication") plus usual treatment or usual treatment[...]
> The consistency and magnitude of symptomatic relief across these studies—performed in hospitals on two continents—suggest that open label placebo may have a real therapeutic benefit.
Right, but you wouldn't know if your sleep improved because the wi-fi is off, or if it improved because you have greater peace of mind just knowing that the wi-fi is off.
These are different things. A blinded test would eliminate the peace of mind component and allow you to determine if there's a physical effect from the wi-fi being on or not.
Furthermore, if your peace of mind is the true reason why you sleep better with RF off, note that by talking of your experience you could actually be creating the problem that you were trying to solve (difficulty sleeping due to worrying about RF). If RF is really to blame as determined by a blinded test, it's worth talking about, but if not, please exercise restraint.
I think you need to acknowledge human nature and profit from it.
Human’s love observing an argument.
Twitter is too concise to form decent arguments.
If there was a website called Dual - where people could register a username - then post on the forum where they were arguing to verify their dual account and then continue the argument on a platform set up for settling written arguments and integrating external references.
People would talk less anonymous smack or have to back up their smack on dual and then write at a level that convinces the masses they know what they are talking about. No swearing on dual. The disagreements would actually educate everyone and the voting and following would tell you what to advertise.
If someone was talking smack on a forum and didn’t register on dual you could assume they were a coward or a troll. If followers could supply duelers with arguments we would get to the truth in an entertaining way very quickly and any misunderstanding would be highlighted and documented.
People often do great thinking in the heat of an argument. We should harness the anonymous arguments. Politicians should accept duels instead of televised debates.
Limit the responses to 300 words and six references or something effective.
I wish I had the money and health to clone twitter and do it but someone should do it. Both sides have to watch the arguments unfold so it brings observers and duelers closer to the truth rather than polarising them.
The trick is in trusted auto verification of anonymous duelers and getting enough duels and spectators to make internet dueling a thing.
This is an intriguing concept. A number of websites have tried this sort of thing with limited success but your idea of making it a forum specifically for challenging people to duel is a superior hook.
Yes and other car manufacturers capital is tied to a return on manufacturing lines of petrol and diesel vehicles so if BMW were to release 7e tomorrow what would happen to the 7 sales.
This is while Telsa is building out a charging network and fighting for a direct to consumer sales model and also possessing a knowledge base of every fault that's ever occurred in it's entire fleet and every Tesla Sale increases the return on Tesla's deployed capital plus a highly dedicated creative resilient workforce that are at the point of smoothing variability and product refinement.
So for BMW to win they have to bet the factory that they will take enough market share while Tesla's quality and brand strengthen. Hence the current share valuation.
Now a lot of people say Elon is a manipulative exaggerator but the fact remains he has built car sensor database company with a carbon advantage that has BMW on the ropes while reigniting a space race. If machine learning can sort the data and it seems to be improving year on year then alot of people who haven't built nearly as much will probably be taking a Tesla to work.
Why do people want Tesla to fail. Economies of scale, improving battery technology and a global charging network and everyone eventually has a cheaper travel option. How revered the founder was is a quite irrelevant.
I find this also works great with instructional videos like pluralsight and lynda. It's easier on your working memory and concentration and if you relisten to tricky bits as you are going through you have a much deeper understanding that is more richly connected to your knowledge tree than plodding through at normal speed.
Mind map the book starting with the conclusion then toc.
If a book takes more than 4 hours to mind map it's either a good book or poorly organised.
The reading speed isn't the constraint. It's placing the knowledge in your knowledge tree without tiring yourself out. Only read the key parts of the knowledge tree slowly in depth.
Use A3 paper and a click pencil. Speeds the reading right up. When the books mapped, explain the mind map to someone.
And map Technical books that build on concepts backwards. Your brain wrestles away and it clicks into place by the time you are explaining the mindmap.
I know a brilliant junior school teacher teaching years 1 to 3.
He constantly configures his classroom to maximise learning continuity for the entire class. It is a massive challenge balancing out the problems students face physically or outside the classroom. Teaching has become the easy part of teaching.
The problem with student learning is that is affected by three things.
Emotional Health
Physical Health
Teaching Quality
to build an educated adult you need to optimise all three variables.
The problem with rewarding teachers is that their students aren't objectively assessed on all three dimensions.
In every district in the world there should be three person educational assessment teams that consist of an emotional health assessor, a physical health assessor and an academic progress assessor that work as a team to objectively assess the students and work with the teacher and support agencies to eliminate learning barriers.
Any students that need help should get referred to the correct service or program as quickly as possible. The teacher should focus purely on teaching and integrating support agencies.
Teachers deserve to be rewarded for their teaching ability in an objective way. As it happens there is a lot of unnecessary subjectivity and people blame teachers for not being social workers, counsellors and doctors. The education of every child in a class deteriorates as these three dimensions become less homogenous because the maximised learning continuity of the group depends on a limited resource. It is teachers who can creatively balance them while engagingly delivering the curriculum that are creating unrewarded alpha in the educational space.
Paying $250,000 a year in salary to a group of 3 specialist objective assessors with the data linked to the health and social services would get a better return on investment than any other expenditure a government could make in lifting the health, education and future earning potential of children.
If a child isn't learning there is always a reason. The faster you address that reason the more value you create. Sometimes it's the teacher, sometimes it isn't but for the child's sake we should definitely diagnose the reason.
I think it is a brilliant product if it works as explained will sell at the price you have set. I will buy some.
I think a little bit of silicone is a smart trade off to save a lot of toilet-cleaning chemicals and compared to a toilet brush this is an order of magnitude better.
It would be interesting to know how many hacker-news users actually clean a toilet regularly. I'm guessing not many if any but that is an outrageous assumption. I know you will still have to clean the toilet after a spotLESS application but it will be easier and use less detergent.
Does the silicone lubricant have to come in a spray application or could you license spotLESS lubricant to the likes of Toilet-Duck to incorporate into toilet cleaners? If councils treated their sewers with the nanohair layer would the silicone lubricant floating past keep it lubricated.
It's a shame that the swoosh logo is already taken.
In my country the most common uber vehicle is a Toyota Prius which uses about 4 L per 100 kms. As our buses are poorly run and empty the majority of the time, Ubers are the optimum environmental option to get from A to B.
Taxi and delivery customers benefited. That’s why there were 10 billion uber tickets sold in 2018.
Maybe siting in a taxi shouldn’t be a $100,000 a year job.
The only benefit I see between a uber driver and a licensed taxi driver is that the uber is exponentially easier to heil.
So much better than phoning some droll dispatcher for a slower service.
Licensed taxi operators used to do exactly same thing with a slower more expensive service.
If they were better Uber wouldn’t have sold 10 billion tickets in 2018.
Uber adjusts Taxi fares to supply of drivers and demand. Licensed taxi drivers restricted supply to charge the more for a worse service.
Uber can do this because they are a now a verb. Customers love Ubering and that’s all that matters.
If legislation changes to increase driver pay Uber will still have network, cost and brand advantages over it’s competitors in the growing taxi market.
Ignoring laws broke taxi cartels globally. I think that is forgiveable.
And they aren’t forcing anyone to drive Uber but uber does provide an low barrier autonomous employment option that never existed to millions of people. The fact this works in their favour is irrelevant because customers love Uber.
It’s not like there’s a training opportunity cost to driving uber. You use a car you have and know how to drive anyway and you drive it in your spare time or on a full time basis to deliver people or things. The cost to secure this employment is $30 for a police record check. Don’t even need to write a cover letter.
They mightn’t be the straightest company in the world but neither are taxi cartels so they had to go to the edge of the line to displace them for the greater good.
I wish to improve my communication and appreciate that Paul Graham thought hard then freely shared his insights on such a difficult topic for a great deal of people.
I've always wondered how and why Geoff Bezos ran Amazon with six page essays and now I think I'm a bit closer to understanding.