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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lcall on Tuesday August 29 2017, @03:48PM
It seems that deciding whom to trust, while being willing over time to look at new information and always integrating/synthesizing, seems to be a very important part of developing personal maturity. Casting a wide net, corroboration among trusted sources, personal evaluation of competence and agreement with already-trusted (well-verified) info, and gauging motivation are key parts of that. Trust, unlike forgiveness, must be earned, based on behavior over time; it is not based on appearances, bluster, nor earnest promises. It's also good to be humble enough to know conclusions have to be tentative as there is always more to learn.
(This makes much "news" seem a bit fluffy after a while, and makes it clear that some sources can be ignored, starting with "this just doesn't sound right...", until the whole "fake news" meme becomes less important for an individual, and more of a societal problem, IMO.
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