On wanting to disbelieve inconvenient things

It might just be that I’m adjacent to Weird Health Twitter, but I keep coming across the idea that exposure to artificial electromagnetic fields (EMFs) may be harmful to health, or at least that they interact more with our bodies than we generally believe.

I’m not going to write about whether or not I think this is true, because that would require a literature review and a refresh of some key concepts from my physics degree¹, but I’m curious about my response to the idea itself. Whenever I encounter it, I notice two thought processes:

• intellectual: this is really interesting and I’d love to learn more about it
• emotional: nah this can’t be true though

It’s the second of these that I want to explore, because it reveals an interesting pattern: my tendency to dismiss things that would be inconvenient if they were true. And it’s definitely not just me who does that.

Let’s take this EMF thing as an example, but remember that it applies just as well to many things that have inconvenient implications, like wealth inequality, limits to economic growth, global warming and AI risk.

Artificial electromagnetic fields are everywhere in the modern era. In my home in central London, I am exposed to multiple Wi-Fi networks as well as cellular networks from a high density of masts, and then there are the phones, baby monitors, Hue lamps, and other sundry Bluetooth-enabled gadgets.

In order to minimise exposure, I would need to move to a rural location, live far from any neighbours, only use wired internet, use wired headphones, exile all bluetooth gadgets and keep my phone on flight mode or off most of the time. All this, of course, would be extremely annoying.

Rather than deal with the hassle—or risk being seen as a crank—it’s easier to dismiss the idea outright. And if you consider the scale of impact if EMFs really are harmful, it makes even more sense that we all collectively choose to dismiss the idea, and to enforce its dismissal amongst each other.

The problem is that whether something feels true has little bearing on whether it is true, and I find myself increasingly wanting to attune to what is true, alongside what is good and beautiful. If my habit is to immediately dismiss everything that feels untrue, I am likely to dismiss many things that are in fact true, because my feelings are almost certainly inaccurate.

It doesn’t help that the feeling of whether something is true or not is extremely easy to manipulate. I’m sure that for a long time the idea that smoking was harmful to health would have felt untrue, and we know how much effort and money went into generating that feeling. There are tremendous incentives in place to make sure people feel like EMFs are perfectly harmless, and the notion that they might not be should therefore be made to feel so preposterous as to be instantly dismissed as the product of a feeble mind.

In navigating what is true, it seems that one of the most important skills to train is to delay deciding. I don’t want to fixate on believing or disbelieving an idea without first having meaningfully inhabited the felt experience of not knowing. That doesn’t mean I can’t quickly land on one side or the other—the apple will definitely fall, and the Earth is not flat—but I still want to retain conscious control over delaying that assessment when necessary so that I can reason well.

The lack of this skill seems like a failure mode of a kind of naïve rationalism, where if a sensible mechanism can’t be found to explain an observation, there must be something suspicious about the observation. The lack of a known mechanism creates a feeling of untruth, and the immediate fixation on not true happens without conscious consent. My concern is that this happens all the time, unconsciously, for most people and obviously this has enormous implications for our capacity to see clearly and address many of the big challenges we face.

In the case of EMFs, it appears there may be plenty of sensible mechanisms by which they might be harmful, but the felt untruthiness is already firmly established and shared. That’s another layer of difficulty, because when there’s an established feeling of untruth around a subject, evidence needs to really pile up before it shifts the Overton Window enough to allow for sensible discussion.

So, are EMFs harmful? Should I be seeking to minimise my son’s exposure, e.g. from baby monitors and wireless devices near him?

I have to say that I don’t know. The burden of not knowing is to be forced to feel the discomfort of not knowing, and to welcome feeling that way indefinitely. I’d rather feel my not-knowing than jump to knowing and be wrong.