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The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit t

The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show.... ... which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show? Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
All the time: See CSI
jhayward 7y ago
Agreed. The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe, not to debunk the misconceptions, misinformation, and bad science that was present at the time. To get upset that they didn't make a 'debunking Chernobyl' documentary is to miss the entire point of the series.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe They did a pretty awful job then. Or that wasn't the point and they actually wanted to entertain viewers.
mlevental 7y ago
>Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show are you kidding? always edit: making this comment, in response to the person to whom i'm responding to's disbelief made me realize something: it's a really silly thing to sit around and think you're above being influenced by narrative. how much of our indignation at others' naivete is simply privilege? if i couldn't afford a doctor, to whom i could outsource the cognitive burden of figuring it out, i would probably believe all sorts of things about health that had been suggested to me by way of narrative. edit2: it's fun to watch the score on this comment. up down up down. on the one hand it's glib and snarky - HN loves that - but on the other hand it implicates privilege - HN hates that. i probably should've used a word different from privilege but i can't think of one that wouldn't trigger people just as hard.
erentz 7y ago
> The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show.... I’ve seen this pseudo ad-hom rolled out every time one of his articles comes up on HN. Is he really a nuclear lobbyist? Does that make anything he is saying not factual? Can we engage with the facts of the article rather than just attack the author? In this case it’s an article about what a doctor who treated some of the Chernobyl patients is saying. Is that a lie? Is he not a doctor who treated the Chernobyl patients? > which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show? That’s probably how a majority of people learn things especially about topics they otherwise would never engage in or dig deeper on such as the true details of a nuclear accident.
- mlevental 7y ago
  > Is he really a nuclear lobbyist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger > Does that make anything he is saying not factual? it's a smell test - burden of proof goes up
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    The guy has literally been commanding in an expert capacity the treatment of Chernobyl victims, for years. Your sense of smell is defective.
    - mlevental 7y ago
      no my sense of smell is not off: Michael Shellenberger and Robert Gale are two different people
      - H8crilA 7y ago
        Ugh my bad, sorry!
  - erentz 7y ago
close04 7y ago
Unfortunately it's very easy for the uninformed masses (especially with topics such as nuclear power, not the most accessible for most people) to pick up on some of the more unrealistic details and build on their preconceptions or misconceptions. And the "entertainment" part tends to leave a more lasting impression also because they are more dramatic. And then there's that misconception that shows based on true events are somehow more documentary than art. So in such cases movie fiction easily turns into urban legend "facts". The fact that the author of the article is part of a pro-nuclear lobbying group doesn't automatically contradict or discredit the opinions of the doctor that's featured in the article. They come from the actual guy who was there for real to treat the people.
brazzy 7y ago
> Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion. And to me that's actually the best argument against nuclear reactors being "safe". We may have better technology, but we don't have better people or organizations, not really. To the victims, it does not matter whether the mismanagement was due to political careerism, greed and corner-cutting, or just laziness. For an example look at what can happen without any external event in the nation that invented Six-Sigma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_...
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Yes. Two people died. A real tragedy. For comparison, two miners for coal die every hour. Similar for bauxite. More for diamond, gold and tantalum. Not even counting residual deaths attributable to pollution.
watwut 7y ago
In particular, this concrete show was praised for realism and details, so people do. Other then that, yes people are influenced by narratives in stories and often take them as broadly "that sort of thing happened". That does not mean this particular dude is about to tell truth, but nevertheless fact checking of fiction is cool and good thing when it happens.
nerdponx 7y ago
I know insinuating that "you didn't read the article" is against the rules here, so I will take the risk: did you read the article? “Another error [in HBO’s “Chernobyl”] was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive,” UCLA’s Robert Gale wrote in “The Cancer Letter,” a subscription-based newsletter. Gale, who worked for UCLA at the time of the accident, says that the firefighters who suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome were not contagious, as they are portrayed as by HBO's "Chernobyl." Gale criticizes the portrayal in “Chernobyl” of a baby’s death supposedly from “absorbing” deadly amounts of radiation from her dying father, a firefighter who helped put out the blaze. “Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room,” writes Gale. If you read further down, it's apparent that, yes, the guy is clearly pro-nuclear. But his criticisms are on specific matters of fact surrounding radiation poisoning.
- jhayward 7y ago
  The author, Shellenberger, is cherry-picking small quotes from a "letter" supposedly written by Robert Gale, who was a leading radiation poisoning treatment responder during the crisis. This is typical Shellenberger. We are not given any context for the quotes, nor indeed do we even have a reference to the letter itself, to whom it was written, to what it was responding, nor any offsetting quotes that Gale may have made. Why, for instance, are we reading Shellenberger's excerpts of the letter rather than the letter itself? Shellenberger is a frequently repeating offender at cherry-picking and slanted presentation. Just because an isolated fact may be true, in isolation, does not make the re-contextualization and presentation as an ensemble of facts a "truth". It is entirely possible to assemble a bunch of true quotes together in a manner intended to mislead, or even outright lie. In this case, the ensemble is presented as a context in which Shellenberger, taken together with his past writing, is trying to convey that Chernobyl wasn't a serious accident, no one should use it as a reason for concern, and anyone talking about it is either uninformed or biased about nuclear power. None of that is true in the larger sense.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

All the time: See CSI

jhayward 7y ago

Agreed. The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe, not to debunk the misconceptions, misinformation, and bad science that was present at the time. To get upset that they didn't make a 'debunking Chernobyl' documentary is to miss the entire point of the series.

zzzcpan 7y ago
> The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe They did a pretty awful job then. Or that wasn't the point and they actually wanted to entertain viewers.

mlevental 7y ago

>Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show are you kidding? always edit: making this comment, in response to the person to whom i'm responding to's disbelief made me realize something: it's a really silly thing to sit around and think you're above being influenced by narrative. how much of our indignation at others' naivete is simply privilege? if i couldn't afford a doctor, to whom i could outsource the cognitive burden of figuring it out, i would probably believe all sorts of things about health that had been suggested to me by way of narrative. edit2: it's fun to watch the score on this comment. up down up down. on the one hand it's glib and snarky - HN loves that - but on the other hand it implicates privilege - HN hates that. i probably should've used a word different from privilege but i can't think of one that wouldn't trigger people just as hard.

erentz 7y ago

> The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show.... I’ve seen this pseudo ad-hom rolled out every time one of his articles comes up on HN. Is he really a nuclear lobbyist? Does that make anything he is saying not factual? Can we engage with the facts of the article rather than just attack the author? In this case it’s an article about what a doctor who treated some of the Chernobyl patients is saying. Is that a lie? Is he not a doctor who treated the Chernobyl patients? > which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show? That’s probably how a majority of people learn things especially about topics they otherwise would never engage in or dig deeper on such as the true details of a nuclear accident.

mlevental 7y ago
> Is he really a nuclear lobbyist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger > Does that make anything he is saying not factual? it's a smell test - burden of proof goes up
- H8crilA 7y ago
  The guy has literally been commanding in an expert capacity the treatment of Chernobyl victims, for years. Your sense of smell is defective.
  - mlevental 7y ago
    no my sense of smell is not off: Michael Shellenberger and Robert Gale are two different people
    - H8crilA 7y ago
      Ugh my bad, sorry!
- erentz 7y ago

close04 7y ago

Unfortunately it's very easy for the uninformed masses (especially with topics such as nuclear power, not the most accessible for most people) to pick up on some of the more unrealistic details and build on their preconceptions or misconceptions. And the "entertainment" part tends to leave a more lasting impression also because they are more dramatic. And then there's that misconception that shows based on true events are somehow more documentary than art. So in such cases movie fiction easily turns into urban legend "facts". The fact that the author of the article is part of a pro-nuclear lobbying group doesn't automatically contradict or discredit the opinions of the doctor that's featured in the article. They come from the actual guy who was there for real to treat the people.

brazzy 7y ago

> Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion. And to me that's actually the best argument against nuclear reactors being "safe". We may have better technology, but we don't have better people or organizations, not really. To the victims, it does not matter whether the mismanagement was due to political careerism, greed and corner-cutting, or just laziness. For an example look at what can happen without any external event in the nation that invented Six-Sigma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_...

AstralStorm 7y ago
Yes. Two people died. A real tragedy. For comparison, two miners for coal die every hour. Similar for bauxite. More for diamond, gold and tantalum. Not even counting residual deaths attributable to pollution.

watwut 7y ago

In particular, this concrete show was praised for realism and details, so people do. Other then that, yes people are influenced by narratives in stories and often take them as broadly "that sort of thing happened". That does not mean this particular dude is about to tell truth, but nevertheless fact checking of fiction is cool and good thing when it happens.

nerdponx 7y ago

I know insinuating that "you didn't read the article" is against the rules here, so I will take the risk: did you read the article? “Another error [in HBO’s “Chernobyl”] was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive,” UCLA’s Robert Gale wrote in “The Cancer Letter,” a subscription-based newsletter. Gale, who worked for UCLA at the time of the accident, says that the firefighters who suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome were not contagious, as they are portrayed as by HBO's "Chernobyl." Gale criticizes the portrayal in “Chernobyl” of a baby’s death supposedly from “absorbing” deadly amounts of radiation from her dying father, a firefighter who helped put out the blaze. “Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room,” writes Gale. If you read further down, it's apparent that, yes, the guy is clearly pro-nuclear. But his criticisms are on specific matters of fact surrounding radiation poisoning.

jhayward 7y ago
The author, Shellenberger, is cherry-picking small quotes from a "letter" supposedly written by Robert Gale, who was a leading radiation poisoning treatment responder during the crisis. This is typical Shellenberger. We are not given any context for the quotes, nor indeed do we even have a reference to the letter itself, to whom it was written, to what it was responding, nor any offsetting quotes that Gale may have made. Why, for instance, are we reading Shellenberger's excerpts of the letter rather than the letter itself? Shellenberger is a frequently repeating offender at cherry-picking and slanted presentation. Just because an isolated fact may be true, in isolation, does not make the re-contextualization and presentation as an ensemble of facts a "truth". It is entirely possible to assemble a bunch of true quotes together in a manner intended to mislead, or even outright lie. In this case, the ensemble is presented as a context in which Shellenberger, taken together with his past writing, is trying to convey that Chernobyl wasn't a serious accident, no one should use it as a reason for concern, and anyone talking about it is either uninformed or biased about nuclear power. None of that is true in the larger sense.