Best Explanation

In order to learn you must desire to learn, and not be satisfied with what you're already inclined to think.

― Charles S. Peirce

Victimhood and illogic drive many American tragedies, as they drove Nashville Bomber Anthony Quinn Warner to target AT&T on Christmas Day.

Films like "Silkwood," "Erin Brockovich" and "Radium Girls" teach us that all industrialists are avaricious and amoral victimizers, and that to stand up to them—as the Nashville Bomber did—is heroic. 

And conspiracy theorists, knowing illogic is our tragic flaw, teach us that to believe is to know, when it's not.

One conspiracy theory afflicting us now—the one that consumed the Nashville Bomber—holds that the industrialists behind 5G are killing us. Cigarette-makers killed their customers, after all, so why wouldn't AT&T?

Proponents of the theory claim that all wireless radiation is deadly, but that the research which proves it has been willfully ignored. 5G, proponents of the theory say, is the deadliest of all. Once deployed, it will expose people for the first time in history to a steady shower of super-fast millimeter waves, and cause hair-loss, memory-loss, sterility, cancer, neurological disorders, genetic damage, and even structural changes to the human body.

But physicists know a lot about wireless radiation, including millimeter waves. 

Millimeter waves—like all radio waves—carry little energy compared to other forms of radiation, and cannot damage genes or upset metabolisms. Millimeter waves are for all purposes inert, and will travel uninterrupted through human bodies—as well as the rest of the universe. If you want to worry about possible damage to yourself, you're better off worrying about your exposure to light: a single visible-light photon has a trillion times more energy than a millimeter-wave photon.

If the proponents of the 5G conspiracy theory don't strike you as paranoid, consider that some believe 5G, besides causing cancer, is a "Chinese plot" against America; that 5G is of a piece with vaccines, fluoridation, genetically engineered food, and fracking; and that 5G, designed by Bill Gates to reduce the world's population, transmits Covid-19.

The 5G conspiracy theory is an example of flouting what philosophers call inference to the best explanation. 

According to that principle, when faced with a question, you choose the theory that best explains the available data. You don't choose a theory that ignores the data, presupposes other data, adds a bunch of data, or invents data out of whole cloth.

If you're rational, when your kitchen appliances all stop working at once, you infer that a fuse blew in the basement. 

You don't infer—although it's possible—that a secret cabal of Chinese manufacturers has coordinated, to the precise second, the mass failure of your appliances; that the cabal seeks only to victimize American customers; that it's covering up its ability to plan mass, simultaneous product failures from the West; and that Bill Gates must be on the payroll.