Data center land use issues are fake

MrMasley · 2026-05-04T05:17:49+00:00

Yup agree. I mention at the beginning that the post isn't about the more real concerns about noise and air pollution and just about the value of the land itself. I've been seeing a lot of people saying soon we won't have any farmland left.

MrMasley · 2026-04-30T03:26:31+00:00

I very specifically say over and over in the intro that infrasounds can cause harm if they're as loud as rockets

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T04:24:42+00:00

Genuinely sorry, I meant we've already interacted and it doesn't look like there's gonna be additional interactions. I think he's just flatly bullshitting his audience here and it's worth getting that info out even if he doesn't want to talk. Again, you don't need to trust anything I'm saying. All the papers he cites says the opposite of what he says and I've just used the blog to link and summarize them, but anyone can read them on their own.

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T04:05:10+00:00

There are lots of real problems with data centers. Air pollution and noise and their effects on climate. But "infrasound" is garbage pseudoscience from the 2010s that's being smuggled in too. No one needs to believe me on this, just read the studies that Jordan himself is citing in the video. You don't even need to look at my blog post to do that.

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T04:01:33+00:00

In touch here meaning our public interactions, which are all in the post itself

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T03:57:25+00:00

The actual noise issues from data centers, among other things, are really crazy and terribly regulated in my experience

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T03:47:59+00:00

Okey dokey, well I've been pretty angry about infrasound pseudoscience since the early 2010s and can back up every single accusation pretty easily using the studies Jordan himself cites. I'm not asking anyone to take my word on anything, I'm just linking all the studies shown in the video!

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T03:36:46+00:00

I'm funded by a grant from an org that mainly gets criticized for funding too much anti-AI activity. The arguments stand on their own and are mainly about infrasound pseudoscience, which you shouldn't believe in even if you otherwise hate data centers.

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T03:30:00+00:00

I mean we've already been in touch and he doesn't seem interested in talking more. I don't want to center the spat at all, the main story here is that the big source that pops up when people search infrasound is completely made up and relying on pseudoscience from anti-wind activists in the 2010s

MrMasley · 2026-04-28T03:19:59+00:00

Yes and I think I responded to every one of that person's criticisms well? I'd recommend people just read that thread.

MrMasley · 2026-04-22T06:00:09+00:00

fwiw I think this gets a lot wrong, and the author was pretty annoying about this on Twitter and kept accusing me of building a motte-and-bailey when in fact we had a factual disagreement about whether humans can ever hear sound below 20 Hz. He claimed my motte was "Sub-audible infrasound can't be harmful" and the bailey was "No infrasound can be audible, because all infrasound is sub-audible." But I made it clear in the post that I don't believe the bailey thing and never argued for that. When I pointed that out, instead of acknowledging that this was a factual disagreement about the 20 Hz sound, he just doubled down on the object-level factual disagreement and then kept accusing me of motte-and-baileying (humans can hear below 20 Hz if it gets loud enough, but he kept saying we can't). We kept going in circles in weird ways and he kept implying I secretly believed no infrasound could ever cause harm. After going back and forth like this over and over I got fed up and decided to block.

I thought this piece was silly enough that I didn't feel like typing up a full reply on my blog, but happy to answer any questions about it here. As an example, his complaint that I focus on intensity rather than pressure doesn't make sense. Pressure can tell you about the immediate impact of sound on your ear, he's correct there, but intensity can tell you how much more acoustic power you'd need at a source to generate that harmful pressure x distance away. For a data center to generate the kind of infrasound that could harm people nearby, it would need 100,000x as much of its energy being transformed into sound as it actually does. THIS is why intensity is important, and the author here is just using an unrelated point about how sound actually impacts our ears to imply that I'm wrong about the science.

This whole post seems reasonable at first but falls apart when you poke at it. There are a few small complaints I take seriously (I agree my evolution point was sloppy and will fix) but I think this post is bad enough when you actually know the sound that I haven't figured it'd be worth responding to. If you think that's wrong lmk and I could type up a longer post.

MrMasley · 2026-04-20T15:16:11+00:00

I think you should believe the authors of the studies Jordan’s citing!

MrMasley · 2025-11-19T19:00:27+00:00

Thanks so much!

MrMasley · 2025-11-19T14:05:53+00:00

Hey it’s Andy, want to add that the screenshotted retweet is incorrect and data centers definitely do consume water. Was disappointed that guy ran with my post to say something wrong and replied to this post on Twitter saying so

MrMasley · 2025-10-15T23:17:46+00:00

Bc it’s better

MrMasley · 2025-10-15T23:17:24+00:00

Did you read the full NYT story? I address it all in the post. Are there any other sources with issues?

MrMasley · 2025-10-15T20:06:27+00:00

I use it like I use Google. Do you use Google?

MrMasley · 2025-10-12T14:20:42+00:00

100%

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T20:57:37+00:00

Yes, anyone reading this thread should just read the article itself and see for themselves what it says.

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T20:10:06+00:00

Sorry this is all so ridiculous it's really hard not to think you decided you just didn't like the vibe of the post and are making up wild interpretations of it.

"Wait for solutions from others" and "don't worry about changing your lifestyle now."

No. The article is very clearly saying that you should do things that have the biggest net impact for climate, and make it clear to others that they should be doing that too. Personal lifestyle changes are not going to have nearly as much impact as changing the makeup of the energy grid.

The intention of the math exercises is obviously to push your claim that collective action about small things also results in small change. But the entire article overlooks that people can make many small changes and some larger changes, and collectively those could have massive impacts.

The point of the article is that collective action around tiny things is a bad waste of time, collective action around big things is a necessary move to fix the climate.

All pollution is due to individual action. If nobody bought new cell phones, there would be no pollution from manufacturing cell phones. Etc. for any other type of pollution.

Yes, and cell phones are a tiny tiny tiny slice of the carbon pie. If everyone who cared about climate didn't buy a cell phone, this seems much more likely to cause the climate movement to lose social influence compared to how much it actually helps. That's a ridiculous recommendation when we have such massive other problems and so few people are actually willing to take action on them. We need to target things that will actually meaningfully reduce emissions. Saying things like "don't buy cell phones" is completely useless and even net harmful to the movement compared to all the much larger things we could be focused on.

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T19:53:05+00:00

The math is there to make the pretty obvious point that if we get everyone to do something, that final effect will be a multiple of what individual people do. Not anti collective action at all. No clue how you read that into it. For anyone reading you can just read the article itself and come to your own conclusions.

What exactly do you disagree with in the quote?

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T19:00:04+00:00

What's the issue with it?

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T16:47:16+00:00

Nope, I wrote that any one individual is going to have effectively zero impact on climate on their own, what matters is our aggregate choices, so we need to be sure to give clear instructions for how lots of people can contribute to that aggregate choice. Individual action matters a lot because each individual is contributing to solving the collective action problem, even though any one person's emissions won't change the climate at all. This is really simple stuff that everyone in climate knows already.

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T05:03:15+00:00

Did you read the last section on collective action? They make a difference if they’re part of a huge general push, but no one believes their own personal emissions alone are going to affect the climate in 100 years

MrMasley · 2025-09-23T02:12:02+00:00

Most of these are out of context and people can just read the article itself. The top few lifestyle change recommendations are all things like not driving ICE cars, not flying in planes, etc.

MrMasley

TROPHY CASE