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Fact checking of claims about nuclear power projects
- Spivak 2y ago"Fact checking" as a means of combating mis/disnformation is kinda doomed from the start. The whole reason you're fact checking in the first place is because some nugget of bullshit was put into some large distribution channel and the damage is already done. Nobody reads the retraction, fact checkers by their very nature have smaller reach than the misinformation they're chasing. The Wikipedia list of common misconceptions are still common and a lot of them are embarrassingly old if you believe that correcting misinformation is something that's possible to achieve on any scale other then waiting for people to die and hoping the next generation learns the right thing this time round.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago[flagged]
- Spivak 2y agoI think you're agreeing with me? I'm not gonna wade into the issue in the link, but assuming its premise for purposes of discussion you have misinformation spread in a channel with a huge amount of reach — official government communications during a crisis, and the people trying to fact check it and correct the record failed miserably even with what they believed to be the truth and scientific evidence on their side.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoNot every comment is a disagreement. You should read the link though. It’s two issues. Fact checkers are needed because of misinformation, “official sources” are spreading their own misinformation.
- defrost 2y agoThe Federalist isn't an official source, just a US ultra conservative rag putting spin on early reasonable statements about airbourne transmission. That whole selective quoting out of context thing is a good example of misinformation though.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoSounds to me like you are attacking the source and not the content of the article. Are you saying that he lied under oath and that there was scientific reasoning behind the social distancing directive?
- Spivak 2y agoHe didn't lie under oath, but both you and the article are extrapolating quite a bit from the testimony of one guy who's not an authoritative source of anything, absence of evidence and all that. The 6ft (really the 2 meter) rule didn't come from nowhere and does have research backing -- a lot of it going back to the late 1800's. Here's a great overview of the research and history surrounding it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504878/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504878/ Were it gets interesting is that this model of disease transmission doesn't fit covid (and might not fit anything really) but the take-away is the opposite -- that it's actually worse and that 6ft isn't enough. It would be easier to take the criticism leveled from the anti-social distancing crowd seriously if they were arguing for more distance and isolation, not less because that's just fixing wrong with different wrong.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoAh, so before or at the dawn of germ theory is part of your point? OK, I’ve heard enough.
- defrost 2y agoThe content of article selectively quotes and frames things to suggest that advice to keep distance to reduce the rate of spread of a severe acute respiratory virus was bad advice. It was very good advice. It has been known to be good advice for decades, recent decades. The fact that this had not been specificly reproven specifically with SARS-CoV-2 during the earliest days of a global outbreak isn't relevant to the value of that advice. Sturgis, and numerous other outbreaks arising from events in the shit show that exampled the US approach to social distancing highlighted what happened as a result of not heeding such advice ... some of the highest per capita death rates in the world.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kjeldsendk 2y agoKeeping distance to people under a virus pandemic is pretty much self explained. "In fact, the only real purpose the guidance served was as a justification to suppress Americans’ free speech" Says everything about that article.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago> Keeping distance to people under a virus pandemic is pretty much self explained. Self explained but not scientifically backed. Unless you can prove otherwise to the NIH legal council who testified under oath?
- meisenhus 2y agoFrom that article: "In fact, the only real purpose the guidance served was as a justification to suppress Americans’ free speech." Criticising fact checkers is one thing and can get me partially on board, but any article sprinkling in such conspiracies automatically disqualifies itself to me as it is just clearly a propaganda machine with its own political agenda.
- jandrese 2y agoEven so, you still have to do it. The only alternative is unchecked bullshit, and that is highly corrosive to polite society. It's basically information guerilla warfare. Lies are cheap and easy to produce, while the facts require investigation and analysis. Lies lead to conspiracy theories which lead to radicalization which lead to destruction of society.
- Spivak 2y agoI guess what I'm getting at is that checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth. Nobody believes the moon landing happened because they read a fact-checker's piece on the hoax, they believe it because there's so much positive evidence just floating out there that the conspiracy theory can't take hold except in teeny tiny little pockets.
- lazide 2y agoAnd how do you do that when the bullshit is in some new direction where there is no truth?
- squigz 2y ago> checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth. Maybe so, but one of the problems is that the bullshit is more often drowning out the truth - so why not do both? Get the truth out there, and push back on bullshit.
- robertlagrant 2y agoThe best antidote is speech and information flow. The Covington kid story changed drastically when an unclipped video of what happened came out, for example.
- roenxi 2y agoThe incentives are against good fact checking. There are 3 broad kinds of misinformation: 1) Stuff that just isn't true and is kinda stupid. Flat earth territory (you can literally see the sea curve, c like). Barely worth debunking because nobody who cares about the truth is going to hold on to an opinion like that, but something for fact checkers to do. 2) Stuff that is not true but has powerful interests pushing it. Like war propaganda. The fact checkers are useless because they tend to get either drowned out or co-opted by someone since the players involved are so big they can corrupt things. 3) Hazy stuff that is plausible where the fact checker probably doesn't know what happened either. So if the fact checker focuses on accuracy they tend to focus on trivialities, on money they tend to get corrupted and on important stuff they will tend to be wrong about a lot of things. There is no winning that game.
- riedel 2y agoI guess it all depends on the distribution/business model of fact checking. News magazines and classical broadcasting can actually decide what to publish. Other might call it censorship if non-verifiable stuff does not happen there, but that is clearly a matter of scaling and money. I agree that fact checking the internet is useless. However, that is why I heavily rely on our well financed national public broadcasting. In cases that they cannot check, I at least get mostly a disclaimer like 'war party is source of information'.
- meisenhus 2y agoI'm in the same camp w.r.t. national public broadcasting, but obviously there could be interests there too. It's different in different countries, and one red flag is if an election changes the governing majority and as a result, the leadership of the broadcaster is exchanged (like happened in Poland the previous election and the most recent as well), or if its a more authoritarian country anyway with elections mainly being a sham (like in Russia).
- blowski 2y agoAlso, there are fuzzy lines between opinions, consensus, and facts. What may be considered a fact amongst one group will be described as a wrong opinion by another. Chances are, the LLMs will try to work out what group you are in, and present accordingly, without seeking any real truth.
- toenail 2y ago> The whole reason you're fact checking in the first place is because some nugget of bullshit was put into some large distribution channel and the damage is already done. Selective fact checking that only happens when you're prejudiced against the people who presented the information? Sounds like confrontational activism.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWe could make it a little less bad by not treating fact checker content the same as the content that it refers to. Google news has a "fact checking" section at the bottom as if it were the same sort of thing as "entertainment" or "science". If you could subscribe to somebody's fact checking work, it could appear as annotations on the original content that was being checked. You could then either delay that content from showing up in your feed until it was checked, or you could subscribe to retraction related notifications which could be filtered based on whether you browser thinks you actually saw the retracted thing. We could divert some ad revenue to fact checkers (the checkers could be chosen by the users, as a browser setting, and communicated to the ad). I'm not confident that the protocol that I'm designing for this is any good, but I am confident that the problem won't get any better until we design some kind of protocol for it and bake it into the web at a fundamental level. And yes, you should do it for yourself also. But there's no reason to do that in a vacuum.
- johnchristopher 2y agoI was told verbatim "we don't care about fact checkings, we have had enough of it and you always bring them up" in a thread about covid. People like that are not in the fight because of some facts they disagree with, it's about raging against the Man for other reasons.
- robertlagrant 2y agoI think that's to do with the idea the fact checkers appeared to move in lockstep with social media trust and safety teams, rather than being independent sources of actual facts. I don't know if that's true, but that was the reason. It's not about not liking facts. It's about not trusting people who claim to be fact checkers.
- johnchristopher 2y agoI don't disagree with you about the situation regarding fact checking initiatives from social media moderation and safety teams and how their social capital and brand image play out against them. In that particular case though the sources I provided were (1) an fact checking piece from a well known and respected information household and (2) a detailed and documented rebuttal of how the numbers provided by the other party (something like "millions of people died in Europe from RNA vaccines") were actually wrong.
- robertlagrant 2y agoYeah, at that point people are too far gone. But it's taken a lot of small steps over decades to get them there.
- acidburnNSA 2y agoIt really does seem relatively easy to raise money in nuclear power for making a few dubious claims about factory production, reactor performance, and delivery timeline. In the industry, we call the 10 years it takes to realize that it's a lot harder than newcomers initially think, and that the people who tried in the past didn't fail merely because they were idiots who didn't think about economics: "getting run over by the nuclear bus". After 15 years professionally in the industry, I'm just amazed that Rickover wrote his paper reactor memo back in 1953! https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
- wordofx 2y ago[flagged]
- epistasis 2y agoThis has been completely disproven by the entire history of nuclear power. Rickover's letter about paper versus real reactors has been linked in the comments already. You're talking about paper reactors, but unfortunately we need real reactors if we want electricity.
- wordofx 2y ago> This has been completely disproven by the entire history of nuclear power. lol no it hasn’t.
- Xylakant 2y agoSo the result of the “fast and loose with regulation around nuclear stuff” is perfectly visible in Germany right now. Low to medium active nuclear waste was deposited in an old salt mine in Lower Saxony. There were strong indications that the mine is structurally unsafe dating back to 1979, but the warnings were ignored. Nuclear waste was dumped in barrels with no further protection. Now, water is seeping into the mine - dissolving the salt which serves as a protective barrier for the radiation and at the same time resulting in a corrosive brine that makes the barrels rust. Plans were drawn up to recover the waste at huge cost, but recently, the water ingress became so high, that it’s doubtful that the mine will survive until recovery can begin. We’ll likely end up with a lot of fun radioactive and poisonous materials in the local aquifers. Cancer rates are already elevated in the region. In theory, nuclear materials can be handled safely. Sadly, humans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
- anoy8888 2y agoThe only way to win here is to make it expensive to produce lies . Make people take responsibility of the consequences and punish them .
- verisimi 2y agoWho has the truth though?
- jessriedel 2y agoPrediction markets
- verisimi 2y agoGood answer, but isn't that a practical answer, based on consensus? Ie its what people believe is true, but might not be actually true.
- jessriedel 2y agoThey are useful for things that become less ambiguous in the future.
- croes 2y agoLehman Brothers anyone?
- epistasis 2y agoCourts.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- photochemsyn 2y agoFact-Checking the Fact-Checkers initiates infinite recursion... Specifically, the section on the 'audacious claim' that small modular reactors generate more long-term waste (per unit of energy generated) than much larger traditional reactors does seem to have some support [1], based on issues like irradiation of the support structure (possibly more support structure is needed for many small reactors vs. one big reactor, plus the small structure might get a higher net flux of neutrons), and cases where sodium metal coolant is used as it becomes lowishly radioactive. The tradeoff I suppose is less risk of meltdown in the small modular designs? The latest pebble-bed SMR designs avoid some of these problems as they use helium as the coolant, but similar efforts in South Africa failed several decades ago as the graphite pebbles broke down and graphite dust (and fuel particles) clogged the system. Now several plants in China and Canada using pebble-bed are currently in the works or operational (notably the one in China passed a natural-cooldown-after-loss-of-power test, i.e. no need to fire up a diesel generator to keep the coolant flowing to prevent meltdown[2]). However, there could be other catastrophic scenarios, as graphite is flammable and when hot reacts with water to form hydrogen. Loss-of-coolant >20% seems bad[3]. [1] https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/interview-small-modular-reactors-get-a-reality-check-about-their-waste/ https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/interview-small-modular-reac... [2] https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reactors-achieve-full-power-11406071/ https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reacto... "Three-dimensional modeling and loss-of-coolant accident analysis of high temperature gas cooled reactor" [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306454920305387 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
- Grimeton 2y agoGod I'm so tired of fact checking. First of all you cannot fact check an opinion. You can talk to the person and argue that, *IN YOUR HUMBLE OPINION* they're wrong. You can even present additional information that you think should help the person to change their mind, but you cannot expect it to happen, especially not at once. Also, it doesn't matter as much WHAT you say but HOW you say it. Approaching someone for a discussion is one thing, attempting to be Einstein that knows everything better and presents everything he says as fact usually creates a defensive demeanor. Especially as journalists, that usually know jack shit about anything and happen to fail to reproduce even simple information correctly when depicting a story. Then there’s another problem: A lot of people argue with science w/o even remotely understanding what science is. They present a lot of stuff as facts when suddenly a new player appears: progress. And that player can turn a lot of so called “facts” into questionable information. That’s the moment when it’s not about facts anymore but about the question how fast the information traveled and who it reached first. So while a journalist is still stuck in the past, does fact checks that get a lot of posts/comments deleted on a website, others have already gotten to the new information and are trying to have a discussion on that, which is then successfully prevented by the fact checking journalist. When the new information has reached the journo 12h later, they don’t see themselves being responsible for anything… But it’s not even that. A lot of science has been tainted by politics/ideology and is not in the least objective anymore, because the people in it are trying to further a political or ideological agenda. Which creates a whole new problem. I could come up with many more examples here why fact checking is one of the worst ideas in human history, but it all boils down to one question: Who is in possession of the so called truth? While the idea of fact checking is honorable, the simple information that there is no higher instance that holds the “ultimate truth” and that is not “politically or ideologically tainted” in one way or another should make it clear to anyone how bad the idea is once it’s put into action. Not to mention how tinfoil hat connoisseurs behave once a fact check turns out to be wrong.