The HBO/Sky collaborative effort "Chernobyl" has been rightly and extensively praised by critics. No doubt there are plenty of much more thorough and better reviews elsewhere about its first-rate acting, characterisation, cinemetography and stortytelling, so I won't dwell on that. Nor will I venture into the accuracy, though it does (quite unusually) explain to the viewer in the afterword that one of the characters is invented. As a narrative, it works extremely well, and provided one remembers that it's a dramatisation, not a documentary, it would be hard to find any serious fault with it.
(I will find a minor fault though : the occasional lapse into Russian without subtitles. I get why everyone speaks English with an English accent, because that's the equivalent of how they'd actually sound to each other. Fine. But then the very occasional lapses into Russian feel extra-specially weird, and the writer's excuse that they wanted to make a show that viewers from many countries could relate to just doesn't make any sense to me at all.)
But what I will point out is just how resolutely and unashamedly pro-science the show is, despite any inaccuracies. Insisting on realism in drama is all well and good, but in my view it's far more important to advocate for respecting the truth in the real world (for a much more extreme example, see Doctor Who). Because if you don't do that... that's how you get Chernobyls.
It would have been easy to tell Chernobyl as the story of scientific arrogance left unchecked, of hubris gone haywire, of telling a tale of a villainous and out-of-touch elite who cared not for the concerns of others. It doesn't do that. Instead, it does the exact opposite. It focuses on the heroic efforts of scientists dealing with very human problems by doing exactly what they're good at : finding the truth. We see the villains as the villains they are, but we also see how the insanely hierarchical nature of the Communist system contributes to the problems. Science itself nowhere comes in for criticism. It is science, in the depiction here, that solves problems like Chernobyl. The cause of the disaster is left to the very un-scientific psychological and sociological realities of political ideology, tribalism, and personal character.
Three quotes sum this up well. There's a very nice larger selection here, and I've taken the second two from there. But this first also deserves to be more widely used :
(I will find a minor fault though : the occasional lapse into Russian without subtitles. I get why everyone speaks English with an English accent, because that's the equivalent of how they'd actually sound to each other. Fine. But then the very occasional lapses into Russian feel extra-specially weird, and the writer's excuse that they wanted to make a show that viewers from many countries could relate to just doesn't make any sense to me at all.)
But what I will point out is just how resolutely and unashamedly pro-science the show is, despite any inaccuracies. Insisting on realism in drama is all well and good, but in my view it's far more important to advocate for respecting the truth in the real world (for a much more extreme example, see Doctor Who). Because if you don't do that... that's how you get Chernobyls.
It would have been easy to tell Chernobyl as the story of scientific arrogance left unchecked, of hubris gone haywire, of telling a tale of a villainous and out-of-touch elite who cared not for the concerns of others. It doesn't do that. Instead, it does the exact opposite. It focuses on the heroic efforts of scientists dealing with very human problems by doing exactly what they're good at : finding the truth. We see the villains as the villains they are, but we also see how the insanely hierarchical nature of the Communist system contributes to the problems. Science itself nowhere comes in for criticism. It is science, in the depiction here, that solves problems like Chernobyl. The cause of the disaster is left to the very un-scientific psychological and sociological realities of political ideology, tribalism, and personal character.
Three quotes sum this up well. There's a very nice larger selection here, and I've taken the second two from there. But this first also deserves to be more widely used :
Anyone who's had the more mundane but common experience of seeing months of work compressed into two paragraphs in a paper will recognise themselves in that. And perhaps if they've encountered a response from a referee that says, "this isn't very interesting", they'll be only too familiar with this one :
And that is a key aspect of psychology I'd desperately like to know more about. As an interested outsider, I don't know what's going on in the field, but most press releases I see focus on how irrational humans are, presuming them to be basically rational but flawed. More interesting is to start from the opposite perspective, at least when it comes to higher reasoning*. In particular, what is it about people that means some people profess so loudly that they want the truth that they shout it down in the process ? No-one ever says they want lies; everyone wants to believe they're correct - Flat Earthers seek the mantle of scientific truth as much as anyone. But few enough are actually interested in the truth. I don't count myself immune to this at all - on the contrary, I have in mind several occasions when I was disappointed in the truth and preferred to believe the original lies. So what's the secret to genuinely craving the truth ? Is it innate personal character, upbringing, sociological factors, what ? What would be the key change we could make that would promote this ?
* A guess : for each and every decision we make there are rational and irrational factors affecting us. For decisions like which way to walk or how to use a fork, there are few irrational factors compelling us to walk into a fire or jab ourselves in the eye. But for others, such as political decisions, there are a very great many irrational factors at work, which is why we sometimes make obscenely ludicrous choices even when the decision should be buggeringly simple.
And here, for all that scientists should be philosophers, is a key difference between the two, where scientists are far more similar to detectives than philosophers. In investigating an event like Chernobyl, for all that nuclear physics is concerned with the deepest nature of reality, a scientist is necessarily drawn back into the human world of observations and facts. A philosopher can and should dwell on what knowledge is and how we establish truth. A scientist cannot. He must accept the reality that lies before him and deal with it as he finds it. No amount of brooding over subjectivity or the internal nature of perception changes the blunt reality of a brick to the head or a nuclear reactor in meltdown.
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