[RealityVoid]

I just think that people need to out things into perspective. The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event. I think in our mind we make these events far far more serious than they were. Not that they were not serious but every thing in life is a tradeoff and you need to look what you are trading and what you are getting.

[hrktb]

No. The tsunami was extremely damaging and the death count was shocking. But it’s over.

The nuclear event had fewer immediate deaths, but the whole area is still unlivable, the sea is still getting more polluted every second, nothing is over, and won’t be for at least hundreds of years if we ever engineer a way to deal with the core of the reactor.

[merb]

> The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event.

because we still live with the nuclear accident, while the tsunami damages are mostly repaired? Do you want to swim in the water in front of the plant? I probably wouldn't.

[godelski]

I think what bugs me more is the armchair expertise, or rather the confidence behind this. It is the people whose argument essentially boil down to experts being idiots and not seeing things that are clearly obvious. I don't see these people significantly different from anti-vaxers. Both do real harm to society and make it substantially more difficult to solve the issues at hand because we're distracted by misinformation and often radicalizes others. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that people are researching and learning. I like that people question authority and expertise too. But there is a balance here. You can say things with confidence if you have only read a few wikipedia articles on it, but if someone disagrees with you don't pull out a baseball bat. I find this behavior frequently common on places like HN and Reddit. I often find that the real answers are buried in a thread because they are complicated and nuanced, or non existent. I don't think I'm immune to this behavior either, but I do try to use the Murry Gelman Amnesia affect as a metric to check myself, and I think there are other good strategies that we should utilize and encourage. But I don't think our society encourages honesty over simplicity.