[klodolph]

> Reducing this all to wattage is a mistake.

It's wrong to call it a mistake. It's not a mistake, it's a simplification. We understand that simplifications have limited explanatory power. That's the tradeoff--simplified models are easier to understand but less accurate. All models sacrifice some amount of accuracy.

[georgia_peach]

It is a mistake, and it is an incredibly harmful one. Our technician class takes these low-rez undergraduate abstractions, & beats everyone over the head with them. Meanwhile, the average person can barely read, & is really in no position to argue--even when (correct) instinctual misgivings remain, and the technician was wrong to begin with!

Reducing the interaction between varying electromagnetic fields and the staggering dimensionality of health & living things to wattage is a mistake.

[klodolph]

The only time I see people call a comment "harmful" on HN is when they're trying in vain to sound smart, trying to make big talk about how somebody's comment is stupid. I'm honestly just kind of tired of seeing these accusations of "this is a harmful misconception, that's a harmful way of explaining things," etc. It's pointlessly adversarial. It doesn't contribute to the discussion. It doesn't even make you sound smart.

It was used well when Knuth said "goto considered harmful", but that is a clickbait title for an article which advocates structured programming. The title may get people to read the article, but the actual article is the interesting part, the "goto considered harmful" title itself is reductive and just gets copied as a meme into HN comments.

[georgia_peach]

"Goto Considered Harmful" was Dijkstra. Aside from that, you've spilled a lot of ink for a weak ad hominem.

Beating normies over the head with physics 101 explanations--ones that don't even begin to address the complexity of the subject at hand--to silence perfectly reasonable lines of questioning, is harmful. Exceedingly harmful.

[klodolph]

You're right, it was Dijkstra.

The comment is about how "that's harmful" is a terrible comment. It's just such an awful, terrible type of comment that I've let some ad hominem in there.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Actually I understand the positions of both of you. Some comments can be harmful when they reinforce false beliefs that have negative consequences for some aspects of our lives. At the same time, this expression is overused. And it remains to be seen if it's valid in this particular case or not, because we simply don't have enough data. Clearly there is an obvious and strong relationship between the influence of radiation on objects and wattage (having factored in the distance), but it's not the only factor - the wavelength is another obvious one, and the relationship between the wavelength and the type of material another one. So yes, reducing it just to wattage can be seen - depending on your pov - as either simplification or mistake.