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This is much less convincing than a peer reviewed article would be. This is basically a list of concerned people.


Those people would be the ones doing the peer review of such a paper. If you want research literature, you can just click the links. Some of them are pointing to papers. Other to lists of scientists which you can then look up and read their works.


A list of concerned people who area also engineers, scientists, and understand the field. And why shouldn't we demand that a new technology that affects large blanket areas populated by millions of humans be proven safe before it is deployed?


>A list of concerned people who area also engineers, scientists, and understand the field.

This is false. Just look at the list. It's full of homeopaths, electrosensitive people, 'independent researchers', people totally outside their fields, retirees, or people with degree but no research records in the field.

As a Finn I looked at people from Finland in the list. All cranks.


I was curious, and did a google scholar search on the Finland folks. Didn't see anything to back up your claim. Just people who have expertise in related fields. Care to elaborate?


Each of them are proponents of the Electromagnetic hypersensitivity theory. EHS has no scientific basis. It's either imaginary illness or not related to EM radiation.

Prof. Osmo Hänninen has solid science background. After his retirement he has become a pseudo science crackpot. He supervised Dowsing PhD thesis in University of Oulu called "SPONTANEOUS MOVEMENTS OF HANDS IN GRADIENTS OF WEAK VHF ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS". It caused a scandal and the PhD thesis was rejected as pseudoscience. http://jultika.oulu.fi/files/isbn9789514297601.pdf


Excuse my ignorance; You used quotation marks around independent researcher. Is that because these are “regular” people who are doing research outside their expertise?

I’ve always thought that an independent researcher was someone who studied within their field just had no monetary backing. Ex: a person with a PhD in X that does research on a subset of X, in their free time.


your understanding is roughly correct.

I met an independent researcher (Bob Edgar) who had sold his company to Intel and was bored. He started to attend seminars at Berkeley to find people who wanted his help, met a few folks, and ended up being one of the top people in the field of protein sequence alignment. At first, my advisor helped him by giving him an arbitrary appointment at Berkeley because otherwise journals wouldnt accept his papers because he was "independent". Eventually he reached the point where he could publish with his email address as affiliation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15034147). Of course, these days, he'd just publish to biorxiv and put the code in github.


Thank you for the explanation.

Reading his CV (http://www.drive5.com/papers/resume.html), it seems that even though he is a peer reviewed "Computational Biologist", his PhD is in Theoretical High-Energy Physics, who became a systems developer.


Isn't your point some sort of ad hominem?


It is, but ad hominem arguments are not always fallacious; in fact, they're probably valid as often as they're not. A list of experts vouching, with their credentials, for a concern is about as far from "fallacious" a setting you can get for an ad hominem argument.




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