Are microwaves and cellphones actually safe? On the theme of not trusting the experts, I did 5 minutes of research with google scholar.
Initial conclusions:
Microwaves are safe. The research was done in the 70s or earlier. Looks competent. The radiation is dangerous but the shielding works.
Cellphone research is shoddy and a bunch is industry-funded and biased. We could add cheap shielding to reduce radiation by multiple orders of magnitude, but I think we weren’t doing that as of 2009, presumably to keep phones slightly thinner and lighter (or maybe to keep a better external shape?). So cellphones might be a brain cancer risk. ugh.
This fits with a general theme I’ve noticed: science got worse. Random papers from the 70’s are better than now. Publish or perish is evil and some things have gotten more corruption. Science is having an Eternal September problem and being flooded with mediocre people who are then pressured to publish tons of stuff. Also maybe it’s been bought more by big corporate interests. It was a gradual transition but a very rough guideline is science after 1995 is worse. Also stuff that’s too old is problematic because we knew less in the past (this varies a lot by field). For a lot of topics you have to read stuff from after WWII or later to find work that’s still good today not obsolete.
BTW a lot of meta studies are really low quality – pretty brainless efforts to search some keywords in some databases of papers then categorize the papers with simple metrics. Instead of thinking about explanations, concepts, arguments, what is refuted or not, etc. And this crap is much more common today b/c computers enable it and publish or perish incentivizes it. This is ironic because the “hierarchy of evidence” stuff advocated by some rationality type people says meta studies are the best evidence. What is the Hierarchy of Evidence? | Research Square Reviews are useful when they summarize ideas and talk in terms of concepts and explanations, but I often find just looking at some of the actual research, not meta stuff, is most useful.