Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake
blog.andymasley.comIn my opinion, this was a great debunking of Benn Jordan's infrasound videos.
When I first saw his videos, they didn't quite sit right with me. I was reminded of the arguments people made about WiFi and 5G. But I couldn't put my finger on the flaws in the logic, or the specifics of it. I also didn't feel like I had the time to dig in and research all his claims myself, so I just kinda left them feeling skeptical.
Reading this article felt great. Admittedly, it confirmed my biases so I tried spot checking it here and there. What little I did check seemed right and I trust Andy Masley's previous reporting.
I only have two criticisms of the article. First, the few cheap digs he took at Jordan (e.g. the CO2 emissions from his long drive) which I agree with but are unrelated to the overall argument. Second, some of the paragraphs had a strong "written by AI" tone. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but that made me trust those specific paragraphs slightly less.
The thing Benn totally avoids is ever putting decibel levels on anything he measures. Yes NASA showed clearly that infrasound is dangerous at 140 dB (omg of course) and at 100dB it’s annoying and has psychological effects. But all the research says that below about 70dB there’s nothing harmful. Of course there must be some decibel level below which it’s completely innocuous. But Benn never goes there - infrasound bad.
I would guess a chunk of this is because Benn’s home grown microphone simply hasn’t be calibrated to any reference standard - because that would require access to expensive lab-quality equipment he doesn’t have or hasn’t bothered to find. Why do the really hard work to make things rigorous when it would make the YouTube story less compelling?
Comparing sound to light of any frequency is wrong.
Light causes damage at a chemical level: heat, photochemical and ionization. It damages our cells. While light carries energy, it must interact with our tissue to deposit that energy and that interaction is quantum, i.e. frequency-dependent.
Sound causes mechanical damage to organs. It works at a different scale.
So intuition about the relationship between waves and harm is unrelated between light and sound, analogies between the two are not very useful.
The author of this article is an AI industry promoter and lobbyist. Just read through his substack which was the first red flag. He's on Substack. The author has a history of making misleading claims about the environmental safety and efficacy of AI. This guy is going to need some pom-poms to cheer any harder for the AI industry.
Would you care to explain in what way his claims have been misleading? Because I have read all of his articles and attacked his math and his sources, and so on, and I haven't found them misleading at all. The biggest way I've seen him accuse of being misleading makes the exact mistake he responds to from Joshi in [this piece](https://blog.andymasley.com/p/replies-to-criticisms-of-my-ch...).
We don't need to take sides though. It's fairly easy to find some of the papers and whether they were referenced in the Benn Jordan video or not, and whether they say what he says or the article author says.
I have generally enjoyed Benn Jordan's videos, but I have also been skeptical about the infrasound / hum stuff. It seemed like amplifying a fringe pseudoscience, much like the wireless and 5g stuff. So not that surprised to see a debunking article.
He is getting people aware about data centers and other things (Surveillance tech) coming into their towns. Companies are lying to people, not giving them the full picture, or not even including them in the conversations.
Please make a video that talks more about these things which would reach more and don't really need to throw shade.
You should talk about the other things people should worry about with these data centers instead of what he talks about.
I am wondering did you message him to talk about these issues? I feel usually when people do not want to have a discussion it is not productive and this actually can harm regular people. Maybe that would be a great discussion both of you can have and even in a podcast form to gain a bigger audience?
This person's other articles are defending AI water usage and such.
Forgive me for not caring too much.
Is he wrong about AI water usage, though? Using the fact that he defended AI water usage, as a reason to ignore everything he says, only works if he was wrong to defend AI water usage.
I read that article in depth and checked all the math and the extensive sources and found it very much accurate and it convinced me that the water usage issue is not serious.
He’s kinda wrong. The facts he states are correct. Others are clearly exaggerating or making mistakes. But he jumps from that to the incorrect conclusion that “data centers don’t use water”.
There are water accounting games on how much water is used for the electricity - Masley is right about that. But he ignores the water actually used to cool data centers, which is about 1/10th that. (About 25 billion gallons per year vs the 200B misstated as consumed during electric generation.) 25B gallons is actually still quite small in the big picture, but it’s growing very fast. And in the local regions where these data centers are built that can be a huge strain on the water supply.
So I would say Masley is biased in his reporting, and should be read critically. But on infrasound I think he’s right.
Agreed.
I think my takeaway from the water usage deep dive was about the scale of the numbers and a better intuition about water usage, but also that you really need to consider each data center uniquely. He'll say in broad strokes that data centers are fine, and then mention the few exceptions (in the infrasound article, that's the xAI DC). That's fine for the moment when he wrote the article, but if I'm evaluating a proposed data center in my local area, I don't know what bucket it falls in. Is it the exception or the norm? Still, because I read that deep dive, I feel better equipped to make that evaluation.
I don't think saying "as a general rule, data centers don't use remotely enough water to be any kind of significant threat, when you see through the accounting games, media hype, and look at things in a proper context" is made wrong or misleading by admitting that there are a few exceptions.
> That's fine for the moment when he wrote the article, but if I'm evaluating a proposed data center in my local area, I don't know what bucket it falls in. Is it the exception or the norm?
It does help you set your priors though, and not fall for the "all AI guzzles water, and DCs are dehydrating every town they're in and are always bad, without doing the research" rhetoric that's driving DC bans around the country right now.
I think we agree? I can't tell if you meant this as additional support for what I wrote or as a rebuttal.
Regardless, yeah, I don't think that's wrong or misleading. I only meant to say that because there are exceptions now, there might also be more exceptions in the future. Which, to me, means it's important to evaluate each new local DC individually.
And your point about setting my priors is exactly what I'm saying, too.
Ah ok, we probably do agree then.
> Others are clearly exaggerating or making mistakes.
I'd be interested to hear a specific example, so I can get a sense for what you mean.
> But he jumps from that to the incorrect conclusion that “data centers don’t use water”.
He doesn't ignore the amount they are using, though — he goes to great lengths to contextualize how much water that actually is, compared to other industries (at a national scale) and other industries and recreational things (like golf courses and water parks and so on) at the local scale, specifically to point out that "25B gallons is actually still quite small in the big picture," as you yourself say — and yes, the water usage is growing "fast," but I don't know that anyone's actually quantified that growth rate, and it's still small in comparison to plenty of other industries that also grow year over year, and I neither he nor I think it'll continue to grow forever (AI bubble and all that).
> And in the local regions where these data centers are built that can be a huge strain on the water supply.
He explicitly deals with this, and as far as I can tell he's also right here, that there isn't a meaningful strain on most local water supplies either, as a fraction of total water production or in comparison to other industries those places also choose to host that are water intensive, despite being in arid climates, like the aforementioned golf courses, water parks, and other more industrial things. He goes through all the specific news headlines that claim that the water thing is a serious issue, and show that either they're talking about something different (like data center construction temporarily dirtying well water in nearby houses) or just pointing out that data centers "use water" and are also in arid areas, as if that's self-evidently bad, when other water using industries are already there and it isn't a big issue.
If you could point me to sources that he missed that disprove this, I'd be open to it for sure — I'm open to being wrong, and not committed to absolutely defending the honor of a guy I've never met on the internet against all odds. But I'm not personally aware of any contradictory evidence. I've been linked to a few reports from various foundations before, but they always are referencing numbers from other reports that link to other reports that, if you follow the whole process to the end, bottoms out in random news articles with unsubstantiated numbers that don't line up with what any actual math or other reports say.
> So I would say Masley is biased in his reporting, and should be read critically.
I read everything very critically, especially when it seems "too good to be true," like a lot of the stuff he says, but I might've missed something?