Which I think means the most likely explanation is that it’s a solved phenomenon, but the information just hasn’t been made public.
This seems like an "appeal to secrecy" fallacy. There's no obvious reason to keep such information secret (cue ten people speculating something random but no hypothetical here is clear here and the US government's incentive to show seems fairly high).
The simple explanation is that it is psychosomatic and the arguments against that are weaker than they seem (as has often been the case over the years).
> There's no obvious reason to keep such information secret
... Is this the right assumption to make based on what we know about how US intelligence and the US government works (historically)? There are any number of reasons why these people would have an interest in keeping it secret. It might not seem rational to you because you have completely different priorities and values, but that doesn't mean other people won't think it's rational to keep it secret.
I'm not making any assumption that I know for certain what US intelligence does though I know sometimes the US likes to embarrass it's enemies by describing bad things they do.
The thing I'm pointing out that it's problematic to automatically dismiss contradictions to ones' argument by saying that these are explained by secret government actions when there's no clarity about what would or wouldn't motivate those actions - ie, if you assume secrecy takes care of all contradictions to your theory, you can prove anything.
The only thing secrecy would take care of is why we are missing information. If you rely on the absence of info to contradict a theory, without taking this variable into account, then you will come to a weakly supported conclusion.
A tricky thing about secrecy is that it exists to reduce clarity. If you had another sensitive way of gathering information (an insider, for example) you would not want an attacker to draw that conclusion by just sharing everything, by default. You will want to keep this motivation secret as well. Embarrassing the enemy has the lowest yield.
>The simple explanation is that it is psychosomatic
From the article:
"There are other reasons to think that purely psychosomatic reasons don’t explain what’s happened. For example, the first cases in Cuba were treated confidentially and didn’t appear in the news until six months later. And yet there were several different people suddenly seeing doctors for similar symptoms at almost the same time. Those symptoms came on rather suddenly and were reportedly accompanied by strange sounds. The affected people described those sounds as sharp, disorienting, or oddly focused."
This was happened on a single place among a select group of people (US diplomats and related, in Cuba). They could have talked to each other about the events as they were happening.
I don't know what actually happened and details overall are scarce. The only thing I know is that ruling out psychological effects is difficult to rule out and the kind of argument you quote above has failed in other instances.
> There's no obvious reason to keep such information secret
One very obvious one, actually: if this is a weapon, then there's strategic value in concealing how much the gov't knows about it. This should be obvious, because it's been true for decades, if not centuries - the less your enemy knows you know about their weapons, the better. For instance, if (again, if it's a weapon) the gov't knew how it worked, and how to counter it, then the developer would begin to develop the next version of the weapon, and so any mitigations now would be useless - conversely, if the government didn't know how to counter it, then the developer could continue to deploy it with impunity. For another concrete example of this principle, look at the Cold War bomber gap[1].
And the government wouldn't have nearly as strong of an incentive as you would think. The creators (China? Russia? Cuba? Kekistan?) could (and do) always claim that the US is just making stuff up and it's not them (and people like yourself would believe them).
From the lack of response to the continued cyber-attacks from various countries over the past few years, it doesn't seem like the public would care very much, either. Or, the public might not believe the government - the white house released documents that claim that Edward Snowden was a compulsive liar and not the hero that the public believes him to be (although there's already good reason to believe that's the case even without those documents - just look up the fraction of leaked documents that were actually related to spying on US citizens), and everybody just says "oh, they would say that, wouldn't they" - so what's the point of revealing strategic knowledge to your adversary just to try to convince a public that's already made up their minds?
> The simple explanation is that it is psychosomatic
No, the simple explanation is that there is something physiological going on. Assuming mass hallucination (or whatever) is the convoluted, complex explanation. You want to explain how people's dogs are having these psychosomatic episodes[2]?
> The simple explanation is that it is psychosomatic
That’s what it seems to me as well. Could long term stress cause white brain matter to reduce in mass, for example?
Another possibility is that some are just fabricated. Many of these individuals are CIA or other intelligence agencies employees. Telling lies and making up cover stories is what some do professionally. Here they are in an embassy which with a new Trump presidency was not that awesome of a place to be. They see one of their colleagues say they heard a sound, have headaches, difficulty concentrating. That person perhaps got a medical leave with pay. Perhaps extra pension for injury on the job, on foreign soil. They just have to say they too have those symptoms. Well you get the idea…
>That person perhaps got a medical leave with pay.
Until last month, there was no medical leave or compensation of any kind for such injuries (psychological or mental health related injuries) so there's little incentive to make up such injuries. Furthermore the initial set of reports were submitted confidentially, so unless a large group of employees were colluding with one another and to this day never managed to get caught about it, it's unlikely to be that either. It's worth noting that the CIA highly scrutinizes its employees and is incredibly selective about who they hire, which doesn't mean that some of them wouldn't lie or even commit crimes... but it would be very difficult for them to successfully collude with one another for such little benefit since all it takes is one person to decide not to go along with it and then everyone is in some deep shit.
There is some plausibility that it's psychogenic, induced by stress. The FBI originally came to this conclusion in their investigation but some later studies conclude that while stress was likely a major component, it does not explain the auditory phenomenon. Certainly it's possible for some people feeling stress to hear phantom noises, but for a large group of people to all hear noises within the same geographical location and over the same period of time is quite unusual. I mean there are plenty of stressful and ordinary jobs people work everyday but you don't hear about how a mass group of nurses working overtime due to COVID are all of a sudden having auditory hallucinations, or other stressful jobs resulting in large groups of people all experiencing somewhat similar symptoms.
This seems like an "appeal to secrecy" fallacy. There's no obvious reason to keep such information secret (cue ten people speculating something random but no hypothetical here is clear here and the US government's incentive to show seems fairly high).
The simple explanation is that it is psychosomatic and the arguments against that are weaker than they seem (as has often been the case over the years).