Currently, I think there is a ~99% chance that Havana Syndrome is completely uninteresting. If the 60 minutes segment adjusts my credence down to 95%, this will resolve yes.
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Did a bunch more research, still very unconvinced. The evidence presented is mostly wishy washy and they leave out so much. There's a classified CIA report from 2022 which analyzed 1,000 cases and ruled out foreign involvement in 976 of them. We only hear from the one federal agency who believes in it and not the (presumably) 17 others who do not.
Two new studies find that there's no evidence of Havana Syndrome.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/18/havana-syndrome-study-government-officials
I maintain that it's psychogenic mass hysteria:
A lot more information here. https://theins.press/en/politics/270425
There's some interesting evidence, like geolocating members of a specific GRU unit and matching them to alleged cases, but I'm also struck by how many degrees of freedom there are. I've had tinnitus for a decade but it's counted as a symptom. I think pretty much everyone on Earth gets headaches and that's counted as a symptom. I don't really get nausea but my understanding is that's quite common. They say that in total, there are 'well over 100' cases, but it's not clear that this is a super large fraction of intelligence officers relative to the percentage of the general population who gets similar symptoms without being targeted by mysterious weapons.
They extensively interview the guy who led the investigation team of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was certain that it was a foreign adversary, but the overall report by the Director of National Intelligence, including assessments from all agencies, said it was quite unlikely to be an adversary. I find it somewhat hard to imagine in the current geopolitical climate that the DNI would be covering this up to defend Russia.
I'm a generally skeptical person so I'm immediately biased towards picking the article apart, but there are definitely some interesting pieces of evidence. This has certainly updated me in favor of Havana syndrome being real, but I'm not sure if it's up to 5% yet. I'll make a conclusion and a more full writeup probably tomorrow, but will open things up to people who think that I'm missing something important in either direction. I do subscribe to the Peter Miller school of not actually calculating out a probabilistic analysis and just going with an answer that seems correct.
@SemioticRivalry I agree that DNI would not cover it up to defend Russia, but it would make sense to delay officially attributing the attacks while the US prepares for the type of response(s) that voters/legislators will likely demand once the official attribution becomes public.