“[We have] excessive confidence in what we believe we know, [and an] apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.”

– Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow

Imagine that you have been invited to be part of a dietary study that involves all of the hot academic brands in your area, and the investigator explains:

Investigator: We’re going to assess your dietary fats, but we’re only going to measure your yogurt intake, and only for one day. We will use this to estimate your fat intake five years ago.

Guinea Pig: But what about the other sources of fat? What about changes from one day to the next and one year to the next? What about when I eat out or don’t read labels and don’t even know how much yogurt I might be getting?

Investigator: This study is sponsored by a yogurt producer, so we’re only looking at yogurt fat.

The average person, who may well have cut intake of one or more fats and learned to read helpful food labels, might very well see why this study will tell you little about how foods impact your body—even for the specific product it focuses on.

But when it comes to non-ionizing radiation, the average person may have no idea that cell phones emit microwaves. If they did, and tried to look up details, they would not be able to get information about the product emissions of most electronic or electrical devices. They probably won’t recall the microwave oven controversy that lead to shielding—or even know what shielding is.

For an average person to integrate their personal exposure to non-ionizing radiation at home, at work, and in between, they’d have to measure and add up their personal exposure at each frequency in the spectrum with commercial meters that may very well be insensitive, poorly calibrated to an arbitrary standard, and toxic in their own right. And the average person cannot rely on studies because those studies have foundations in science as weak as that of the unsound study of dietary fat described above.

Let’s look at an example of what a well-meaning what an investigator might say if she were like Jim Carrey in the film Liar, Liar, wherein she blurted the truth—in this case, even truths she had not faced:

Her: We’re going to put a meter in your house that measures very low frequency non-ionizing radiation levels for 24 hours and use that to estimate your total exposure five years ago.

You: What about the copiers, computers, wi-fi, and fluorescent lights at work?

Her: We’re evaluating the electrical grid as it affects your house.

You: What about how all sources affected my nervous system over those five years—during which my non-ionizing radiation exposure has skyrocketed?

Her: We’re using the best meters on the market.

You: How does that help?

Her: It doesn’t.

You: And what about the biology and physics behind your study?

Them: There isn’t any that’s relevant. And there’s no clinic science at all.

You: That explains a lot about why this study seems to be poorly designed, and a waste of my time. I’m outta here…