Beware evangelists
Understanding the nature of the beast
Posted in Management, 3rd September 2009 11:11 GMT
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Evangelists. Plenty of them hang out in the sustainability and collaboration fields where I work. Some irritate while others are acceptable. And this isn't because they necessarily reflect my views. (In case you were wondering.) The trick is to spot, early on, which variety you're faced with and make your excuses and leave if they're the 'wrong' kind.
Last week, the Free Software Foundation, wrote to the Fortune 500 companies (well, it didn't bother with Microsoft) essentially telling them they'd be mad to upgrade to Windows 7. The story was widely covered but few publications would have ended up with such a rich discussion as The Register. As you know, this is a hugely popular online IT publication which takes no prisoners. It has attitude and a healthy disregard for some of the tripe that emanates from the industry it serves. Readers are encouraged to comment on items and, this particular article quickly attracted 145 comments.
The interesting thing is that the article was about an evangelical organisation and it attracted evangelistic commentators, both pro- and anti-, as well as your everyday commenters. The end result is that anyone with the willingness to work through the comments, evangelistic or otherwise, would end up with an independent point of view, providing they read through with an open mind. If they didn't, they'd end up just strengthening their own prejudices.
Lobby hobby
The sustainability and collaboration folk are no different. The evangelists are noisy, in your face, on conference platforms, lobbying whoever and wherever possible, frequently on the web with their blogs, Tweets and comments. They exist everywhere, and always have. The big difference today is that they can be more readily heard.
You can get positive evangelists who show how life could be better. I have a lot of time for them, even if they turn out to be wrong. At least they're trying to help. Then you have the negative ones who are more intent on tearing down than building up. "This is wrong" or "you shouldn't do that" rather than "try this alternative" or "why not do this?". In pop psychology, the former are the I'm OK, you're not OK brigade - the same mentality, incidentally, as criminals.
A lot of evangelists are so immersed in their blinkered view of the world, that they forget (or ignore) the fact that, if adopted, their wheezes might cause more problems than they solve. We're shutting down coal and nuclear power stations to cheers from the acid rain and nuclear waste storage zealots. But how deeply have they considered where the energy is going to come from? Or, alternatively, what impact on our lives a profound cut in consumption will cause? I venture to suggest, 'not a lot'. Out here in the real world, we have to find solutions, not just state problems.
In a way, the easiest ones to deal with are those that have 'Evangelist' printed on their business cards. They're being paid by someone to persuade others of the folly of their ways. You'll find these folk in many major IT companies. Others are not so obvious. Perhaps a company has plied them with gifts or other, more subtle, bribes. Recently I was talking with a Toyota (non-employee) iQ evangelist. Turns out she'd 'won' the car for a six month trial, in exchange for blogs and other social media outreach. Others are just total believers in 'the cause' simply because it makes sense to them within their own frame of reference.
The answer has to be to filter them as quickly as possible. Find out who pays for their evangelism in money or in other ways. Ask them what alternatives they know about in detail. And get them to tell you what the long term implications of their advocacy are likely to be. Some will slink away from the interrogation. Some will bluster, so you can take your leave of them. Those that will remain probably have a good and well thought out story to tell.
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COMMENTS
@Swarthy
And how radioactive is the coal waste?
(Rhetorical question)
@Swarthy
-A nuclear reactor(Enriched Uranium) leaves behind enough waste to fill an 18-wheeler's trailer each year (about 4,000 lbs/~2,000Kg), compared to a coal plant which fills that trailer every two weeks.
Solid waste, perhaps, but how much carbon dioxide?
@bluegreen
You know, I'm considered pretty far-left for my country, (Canada,) and am pretty big on the save-the-whales, hug-a-tree, let's-stop-burning-***loads of coal etc. etc.
But you are full of crap my friend.
Nuclear is the only viable solution for *stable* power demand we have. Does it have it's downsides? Heck yeah! Just like anything else. The reality, however, is that there is flat out no alternative to it except fossil fuels. The reality that no person in this entire debate seems to be capable of accepting is that you have only three choices in this debate:
1) Nuclear energy. (Fission, and eventually Fusion.)
2) Fossil Fuels. (Until they run out.)
3) Massive planetary economic collapse, including, (but not limited to,) planet-wide retrograde society with limited or no access to modern medicine, massive starvation, and ultimately at least a decimation of our population.
You can only support an industrial-sized society as long as you have enough stable, consistent energy to support them. Solar, tidal and wind power are too unstable to provide anything except power to industrial sectors which can spin up their factories and then down again as supply becomes available. (Admittedly, this is a huge chunk of our power requirement as a society, so investment in renewable still makes lots of sense.) Geothermal is still too young, and bears it’s own risks. (Upsetting the delicate balance in geologically unstable areas by extracting too much heat, etc.)
That said, energy is spent for all sorts of critical things that maintain our society, and allow the earth to carry a population pushing 7 billion.
What you propose, (elimination of our only dependable generation capabilities, being fossil and fission) is flat out GENOCIDE. Even if every human being on earth gave up every creature comfort we had, and agreed to live in third-world conditions, there would not be enough energy to sustain our population's most basic needs. (Food, shelter, clothing, medicine, defence, disaster relief, etc.)
So, as a hippy-pinko-commie or whatever the righttards want to call me, I tell you this: we need fission, and we need it now. (I accept that even with breeding the fuel into plutonium, and reusing it, we've only got about 50 years worth of fuel there anyways.) With any luck, it's enough to get us to fusion. It certainly is enough to sustain 50 years of scientific research into real renewable sources that can replace both fossil fuels and fission.
Even if a dozen reactors go critical, and drop radioactive waste on a few million people, giving them a spate of exotic cancers, and even killing a few of them outright, that is a completely acceptable risk. We are talking about risking *potentially* a few million people “dying before their time” of cancer, versus the deaths of billions of us either dying outright from starvation, or “before our time” because we don’t have the energy to sustain bits of our society like proper hygiene, shelter or medicinal needs.
"The needs of the many" is a pretty clear guideline on this. You may be afraid of fission, but…suck it up, princess. Your fears about what *might* happen to a *few* people just aren’t that important compared to needs of 7 billion people.
@Swarthy
- A nuclear reactor(Enriched Uranium) leaves behind enough waste to fill an 18-wheeler's trailer each year (about 4,000 lbs/~2,000Kg), compared to a coal plant which fills that trailer every two weeks.
I'd be surprised if it a coal plant produced that little waste bulkwise, unless it was ground down. I've seen coal power station clinker and it's light but voluminous stuff. However, despite my comment about physical size or risk, you're still trying to equate the two so perhaps we should just dump our nuke waste in open slag heaps. Can you see a problem?
- If that "waste" was bread into Plutonium ...
dunno. No comment.
- While Chernobyl did take a giant shit on the world, that was caused by running the reactor (housed in a tin shed) without coolant to "see what would happen" and then not being able to cool it as the coolant boiled away faster than they could add it, and thus became part of the problem.
A decision was made to run a working nuke power station in a deliberately untested way. Are you though putting forward this as a pro or anti point for nuclear power? Kind of makes my point about human problems being harder to solve than technical ones.
- Three Mile Island *may* have contributed to 3 extra cancer cases in the immediate surroundings, or it may not have.
Does that mean up to 3 but perhaps less, or as few as 3 but perhaps more? Does that stat actually mean anything useful at all?
> In short the only problem with nuclear fission is a very vocal part of the population hear the word "nuclear" and add "bomb" no matter the context. These people cannot/will not understand that there are other uses. I imagine that fire met with the same protests way back when.
I'm partially with you. However I don't think we've evolved in the context of dealing with hugely dangerous threats, which is why we as a race prefer to ignore them. As I said, if we could solve the human problem of bad management I'd be very pro-nuclear.
About that Nuclear waste
Here are some little-known factoids:
- A nuclear reactor(Enriched Uranium) leaves behind enough waste to fill an 18-wheeler's trailer each year (about 4,000 lbs/~2,000Kg), compared to a coal plant which fills that trailer every two weeks.
- If that "waste" was bread into Plutonium and re-used (currently out-lawed in the US as part of a non-proliferation "idea") the by-products would then be useful in medicine and other fields, also having a half life of years/decades rather than centuries/millennia.
- While Chernobyl did take a giant shit on the world, that was caused by running the reactor (housed in a tin shed) without coolant to "see what would happen" and then not being able to cool it as the coolant boiled away faster than they could add it, and thus became part of the problem.
- Three Mile Island *may* have contributed to 3 extra cancer cases in the immediate surroundings, or it may not have.
In short the only problem with nuclear fission is a very vocal part of the population hear the word "nuclear" and add "bomb" no matter the context. These people cannot/will not understand that there are other uses. I imagine that fire met with the same protests way back when.
..I can only hope that this bit of evangelism counts as the "good story" type.
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