HN user
That's really cool - you should merge the two sites!
I did feel a certain degree of trepidation commenting what I did because I didn't want to (and hate that armchair devs on this site) just hate on the product or expect you to have considered the global implications of a side project, so I'm glad it's an issue you're thinking about too! LMK if you've got something else to try out!
I think your site is interesting from a technical perspective, but dangerous from a human perspective.
To be more explicit, I feel like the framing isn’t great for humanity. It turns into “I proclaim X, so let me find a source” instead of “I wonder about X, let me look for authoritative information.”
The site spits out one or two links (in my case always just one), and then it’s on the user to click through and parse the paper. That feels incomplete. A Perplexity-style interface would be more useful, where an LLM reads the abstract (at minimum) and explains the nuance.
Take one example on the homepage: “Meat reduces cancer risk.” The site points to a study. I read it. The study absolutely does not prove that meat reduces cancer risk. What it actually shows is a small, observational, and potentially confounded association between higher animal protein intake and slightly lower cancer mortality. The authors explicitly state it isn’t conclusive.
But in conversation, if someone says “meat reduces cancer risk,” I disagree, and they whip out this site—it suddenly looks like “science proves it.” Except it doesn’t. And let’s be honest: neither of us is going to sit down and read an eight-page study in the middle of a chat. I only did because (a) I find it interesting, and (b) I’m stuck on a plane with Viasat wifi speeds blocking real work.
Without diligence, the tool risks turning weak claims into “settled fact.” Further, as science and the scientific method are under continued assault in the free world, tools that oversimplify or misrepresent evidence risk deepening mistrust and reinforcing narratives that science is just a weapon to win arguments rather than a process to seek truth.
It's an interesting point to consider. If you look at Google Earth—there are very few lights on during the night in North Korea. The comparison of the North to the South is stunning—and even more stunning considering the imbalance of raw and earth materials in each country, but that's a separate thing.
I think Americans generally fail to appreciate our shared, unspoken mindset of abundance. Our grocery stores are stocked with food we'll never eat, we leave lights on and charge our electronics when we don't need to, we drive when we don't need to...all the way down to Dunkin' Donuts throwing away hundreds of donuts per store per day. We waste so much stuff, just because we can.
If you remove the North's nuclear ambitions and just consider on a human level—25,000,000/80,000 would mean that for the assumption to hold, an ASU student would need to use 312.5 times more power than a North Korean. It's my guess, that if you do not include the power used in Chinese factories where workers are from NK, that probably checks out. I would take another bold stroke and say that the power used by NK on an institutional and military level is probably similar to ASU's consumption—I know ASU has a (probably smaller) nuclear lab of its own. This also depends on how we count power consumption—is the jet fuel and gas used by students' travel counted? North Korea only has like 3 Soviet-era planes and very few vehicles, and travel is generally a disproportionate use of energy and carbon emissions for the average person.
The problem with any sort of analysis like this is everything we (as the public) know about NK is from defectors. However, the defectors also skew our perspective—they are generally from higher class families that serve in military positions or travel in ways that can get them closer to the border (not all cases, but a fair generalization). They would generally (again making very broad strokes here) use much more electricity than the average person. For this reason, and it's ironic, but most SK scholars I met thought that we in the West _overestimated_ the North's living standards, but they had an ulterior motive in looking to win the soft power war.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughts. I lived in Seoul for a while and was just fascinated by the imbalance between the two countries.