Stances I take, that you might not have guessed

There are many popular misconceptions, but the ones I like to clear up the most are:

I am an advocate of nuclear power.

• Humans are pretty bad at estimating risk, especially of very low-probability events. Overall, nuclear power is actually much safer than any of the fossil fuels, and is on-par with wind and solar. [2]
  • Chernobyl, the worst nuclear power disaster, killed an estimated 4,000 to 60,000 people (including both short-term and long-term deaths). In contrast, fossil fuel consumption killed an estimated 8 million people in 2018 alone.
  • Coal power plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants.
• Nuclear power is green — it has almost no impact on greenhouse gasses (considering the total lifecycle CO₂ emissions). It has less impact on greenhouse gasses than solar or wind.
  • It's true that nuclear waste has to be handled properly, but the engineering challenges have been more-or-less solved. [2] Nuclear waste disposal remains a problem only in the political sphere.
• While we should move to solar and wind power as quickly as possible, they won't be a complete replacement for nuclear in the near future. There is noticeable gap between electricity demand and renewable energy supply — renewable energy production tends to peak in the middle of the day, while there's quite a bit of demand in the mornings and evenings.
  • Energy storage will eventually solve this problem, but current energy storage solutions are too expensive to be used on a widespread basis.

Historians believe that Jesus existed.

• "In modern scholarship, the view that Jesus did not exist at all is considered a fringe theory, and finds virtually no support from scholars. … The mainstream scholarly consensus holds that Jesus was a historical figure who lived in 1st-century Roman Palestine, and that he was baptized and was crucified."
• This does not mean that historians believe that Jesus was a supernatural being. But as a human who lived in the 1st century... sure, that's more than plausible.
• The thing is, history is murky and it can be hard to find the same kind of evidence that one can for current-day events. And as Marcello Truzzi said so well, "If a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis—saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact—he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof."
• (TODO: try to delve into historiographical methods, and into the sources of data about Jesus)

Active SETI is a bad idea.

• The Columbian exchange caused a death rate of at least 80% in the Western Hemisphere. And while some of the deaths were certainly intentional [2], a decent proportion may have been unintentional, which means that even a benevolent species might do us a lot of damage.
  • (possibly not via biological vulnerabilities, but more likely via computer security vulnerabilities, runaway nanotechnology, or by providing Earthlings just enough knowledge to hurt themselves)