You should do a double take on information learned online.
Recently, I re-watched a video Hank Green uploaded earlier this year, in which he talks about four lies he initially believed because they aligned with his views. The claims came from sources he considered trustworthy, and they seemed overall convincing.
The science communicator explained that he didn’t read into the fine print on graphs exaggerating certain information, or believed a misquote of Jane Goodall from a panel at the World Economic Forum.
This got me thinking: What are some similar misconceptions I believe in? What have I recently changed my mind about, or what do I question in general? I started digging.
The first topic I decided to explore was wind turbines. They provide us with a source of renewable, clean energy, and while exponentially better than fossil fuels, they’ve got their share of problems I only learned about recently.
Some small communities — tiny towns and Indigenous communities all over Canada and America — fought against installing wind turbines being installed too close to their homes.
While wind turbines aren’t very loud from a distance of 400 metres away, their impact on the environment around them is direct. They can become a controversy for communities built around nature and tradition.
Strictly speaking, from a technical perspective, a wind turbine’s main weakness lies in ever-changing wind speeds. Wind turbines require varying gearboxes to ensure they produce energy at a constant level even as wind speeds and directions change.
Those gearboxes are, however, the main breaking point. The wear and tear are simply too significant, and while the rest of the turbine can usually surpass its life expectancy, gearboxes are what destroy them.
Although wind turbines lower animal, habitat, and human death dramatically compared to fossil fuels, they are still more wasteful and less effective than energy sources such as nuclear.
I’ve also had a common misconception that the extreme housing costs we’re currently experiencing are all due to a lack of supply and higher profit margins.
While those two factors play an immense role, a study published by a Toronto developer, Urban Capital, pointed out how dramatically construction costs have increased from 2005 to 2019. The largest cost increases were by far in development charges (government fees, taxes, etc.), which went up a whopping 3244 per cent in 14 years.
Fees such as broker commissions increased by 605 per cent, while land prices more than doubled. This really puts into perspective how bureaucratic regulations and government policies shape our livelihood costs.This adds to the conclusion that, more often than not, there’s more than one factor affecting a particular issue.
Growing up watching documentaries followed by lengthy Wikipedia or other encyclopedia reads, I believe fact-checking is a practice more of us can adopt, especially considering how easy it is to manipulate data nowadays by simply exaggerating a single parameter.
