It is definitely quite the piece, it took me a couple days to get through myself, but I would definitely not say such efforts are too much for the discussion. Disproving misinformation/misconceptions almost always require a lot more effort than sharing them does, and the topic of infrasound harming humans is one that’s really only provable through scientific studies.

That being said as a tl;dr for his post:

Masley is a former physics teacher who works with Effective Altruism. He begins with talking about the body of literature on infrasound, noting how the current consensus indicates it’s only harmful when it’s either normally audible (i.e. normal noise pollution) or loud enough to physically interact with you (similar to how you can feel a jet engine when it takes off). He also talks about how the idea that non-audible infrasound being harmful is basically a pseudoscientific idea that was created to make people afraid of wind turbines, which has generally been considered disproven.

He also goes over each of Benn’s claims from his three videos and discusses how basically all of his points fail into one of

• They showcase how there is a real harmful effect, but it’s caused by either mundane noise pollution, infrasound that’s entirely audible (therefore just normal noise pollution), or infrasound loud enough you can physically feel it. It’s also probably noteworthy to note that data centers generally don’t show up in these categories, instead being in the non-audible infrasound.
• Benn showcases a study or other source that claims either the exact opposite or inconclusive evidence for the point he’s using it for.
• Benn showcases a study or other source that has repeatedly failed to replicate or stand up to peer review.
• The participants reporting effects more likely due to the nocebo effect.

He also gets in touch with authors from the studies that Benn cites, and the ones that get back to him seem to agree with the bogus framing.

Masley also notes often how deceptive the framing and designs that Benn uses are, such as:

• Using the UV Spectrum of light and its ability to cause cancer to imply that other invisible things, such as infrasound, are harmful.
• Creating a study that basically fails on every metric to be a genuinely rigorous study while portraying it as meaningful.
• Benn claims the body of literature on infrasound is sparse often, when there seems to be a lot of works showing the contrary.
• Benn tries to give credence to some extremely dubious experiments like the Vic Tandy ghost story, that are really bad science.

Masley also notes how Benn seems to make a number of mistakes that he should have expertise in as an audio engineer, so he generally comes to the conclusion that this is intentional deception on Benn’s part.

His big point in the end is that, treating infrasound like a really big problem draws attention away from worse problems like air and water pollution; it also muddies the message with factually unsound claims that can make other more meaningful concerns about data centers, pollution, or similar problems more easily dismissable by critics.

It is definitely worth a read as I’m likely forgetting and skipping a lot here, and Masley was pretty specific about a lot (which does get him into pedantic arguments with Benn later).

I’d be really hesitant with Benn’s videos here. I think Andy Masley has a pretty solid piece describing how they are likely incorrect and possibly even deceptive. There’s enough reasons to hate data center expansions and AI that I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to promote ideas like infrasound majorly affecting our health, as I’d think it dilutes some otherwise important arguments with things that are factually dubious.

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and

It’s mentioned in the substack article that for a single individual his calculations place the poverty line around 50k, while 140k is for a family.

To a degree, yes. As was mentioned elsewhere there is a thing called Wave Function Collapse, which occurs when a measurement is taken of a quantum system and forces the system from superposition (multiple states at once) into a single state. A measurement could be seeing it, scanning it, bumping into it, etc (not human conscious observation, that’s an old and weird interpretation and not relevant nowadays).

Before (and after as well) you actually collapse the wave function you can perform meaningful math using the quantum particles. The one way I’m familiar with is for computer calculations, which is what quantum computers are aiming for. This is basically done by canceling out certain possibilities to only allow the wave function to collapse into ways that give meaningful mathematic results.

As such, this is barely relatable to a quantum Santa which uses this nature to perform meaningful present sharing actions simultaneously using quantum superposition of a quantum system that is spread out over a very large area. Of course, basic quantum mechanics becomes statistically the same as normal physics (i.e. 10 quadrillion particles average out to one normal human), so Santa would need to be a reality bender to allow for such small chances to occur to allow a human sized being to affect a huge area… but whatever.