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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

People are attacking the CSIRO, Australia's public science body, over their recent report stating nuclear power in Australia made no economic or evironmental sense .. nothing could come online prior to 2040 and in the meantime there were better things to do with that money in the near term to mitigate costs of energy and climate effects, etc.

Further to the point, attacking all sciences and suggesting research papers are no better than toilet paper churned out from an AI factory serves the ends of all those that have a grievance wrt vaccines, climate, energy, etc.

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I'm pro-nuclear (in the sense that i would rather live near a nuclear than coal plant, and i don't really care if you build wind/solar or nuclear as long as you fade out the rest) and this report seems quite correct to me? If you have no prior knowledge, commercial power plant will be too late?

Why are people mad?

Australia digs A LOT of stuff out of the ground. People (mining lobbyists pretending to be politicians) are mad because the Sun shines on Australia for free and the wind blows for free.

Nuclear policy in Australia is more about maintaining coal mining contracts for as long as possible and less about actually building nuclear plants. Because if you were going to do the second, you'd need to radically fund and create nuclear engineering positions and industry to support the power companies and the oppositions hasn't mentioned much about any of this.

In this case, they're vaguely gesturing towards the "money being better spent elsewhere", instead of making a cost-benefit analysis including the time value of money.

Do you see how the argument is overly general? You can use it to shoot down anything that's not immediately useful. It's especially silly at the level of nations, which can obtain money much more easily than a random individual. Cash flow is much less of a problem at that level. The way it's phrased exploits people's tendency of thinking about a nation's budget like their own household budget, only bigger.

Science is extremely important and I really admire scientists and appreciate scientific advancement.

With that being said....I just read an article about the fake publications being churned out by AI in the thousands and many of the papers published in my own industry (certainly not all, but a LOT) are essentially worthless outside of keeping academics employed. There's also the replication crisis going on. I'm not sure if it's "publish or perish", politics, or professors having to spend all their time dealing with busy work from the bloated administration or what, but it really seems like we're seeing a lot of "research" that looks a lot like padding a resume instead of actually pushing discovery forward.

This doesn't excuse harassment, but probably shows why trust in science is at an all-time low.

And that lack of trust will likely make science worse.

The number one issue in the academia is the lack of (public) funding. There are far more people trying to make a career in academic research than funding to enable that. When there is a lot of competition for scarce resources, people who are good at politics and gaming the metrics have an advantage. And if the resources become even scarcer due to the lack of public trust, the advantage will grow larger.

It's an issue, it's a real issue.

That said, the AI generated papers are obvious bullshit and aren't taken seriously by "real" scientists at the cutting edge of various fields, they represent more of an issue in the long tail of the "publishing mills" and the puffed up prestige part of the lesser acedemic life.

As an issue it's one that gets push back, recent articles highlight how variou groups have written bullshit detectors for bogo papers and forced the publishing companies to reject those papers and close some of the paper mills.

That's a positive.

The negative circles back to this posts assertion, that there's a growth in bad mouthing scientists and good science .. and articles | blog posts that have used recent reporting of bogus papers being discovered to justify why they have low trust in science .. and so should you.

Ponder that, if it was not for the people in the field complaining about BS papers edging in and working to detect and eradicate them .. nobody would know, not least the trash talking blog authors who don't much read science papers in any case.

I appreciate the context, but will add that it doesn't address the replication crisis where huge amounts of papers literally cannot be replicated (likely fraud) and I forget the exact situation, but I think it has happened to prominent cancer researchers and so on. This goes a lot deeper than just AI BS. Someone just posted an article on HN a few months ago about junior researchers being told to move data points to make the results statistically significant.

> P eople are attacking the CSIRO, Australia's public science body, over their recent report stating nuclear power in Australia made no economic or evironmental sense .. nothing could come online prior to 2040 and in the meantime there were better things to do with that money in the near term to mitigate costs of energy and climate effects, etc.

People are challenging the CSIRO report. Like it or not, politics infects every aspect of vaccines, climate, energy etc. Science and scientists are both players and pawns in such endeavours. As much as we want and need, unbiased, reliable information when making policy decisions, that’s just not how humans work. To quote Sneakers “Everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality but the perception of reality”. Unfortunately, the modern world is all about controlling that perception, and science is often just a tool in that game.

> People are attacking the CSIRO

In what way?

So far largely the Murdoch press (Fox, Sky, The Australian (newspaper) et al) and outspoken ministers of the Liberal|National coalition (former governing party of former Australian PM Scott Morrison).

That side of Australian politics has been strongly pro nuclear as their strategy for to address climate issues (sans any deep studies on the matter) - now that a solid report has landed that isn't "anti nuclear" (in the sense of "we hate all things nuclear") but rather "pro economic feasibility and pro effective climate strategies" that concluded "nuclear (in Australia) ain't it", the character assisinations have began "the CSIRO are all closet green lefty types" etc.

On the other side of the aisle in Australia, the Labour Party is backing carbon capture and other pie in the sky wishful thoughts .. they've bought what Santos and other Oil & Gas giants are selling.

While Australia is home to "the largest carbon capture project in the entire world!!!" (wow, that sounds great) the scale of capture proposed is far short of the scale of additional carbon emissions that go with it ... and the scale of capture to date is .. uhhh, far less than promised.

From the left, from too strong links into industry and so backing the farm sector to send animals to sea alive, which is cruel but economically justified and we are the least cruel of the choices.

From the right, for showing that Nuclear is economically unfeasible in Australia, despite being really ok otherwise.

From anti-AGW, for showing how climate change is fucking up the economics behind Australian lifestyle and primary production.

From all politicians, for speaking up fearlessly, and then getting quashed when they question the politicians agenda.

(declaration: I worked for the CSIRO for a year in 1988 in a very minor role)

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