Petty Deceit
I was struck by something in Michael Barone's column this morning. Referring to the Obama Administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf, Barone writes:
The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly "peer reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium....
From "there are no serious economists who oppose the stimulus" to the exaggeration of the stimulus results to "the GOP has no health care ideas" to switching from the-mandate-is-not-a-tax to well-yes-it-is-a-tax -- has there been any administration in memory that practiced petty deceit on matters of policy on such a consistent and extensive scale?
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May '10
Re: Petty Deceit
As an engineer who has been published a few times, it's unbelievable that there is no general outcry or acknowledgement that this happened. One would hope that the authors involved have enough personal integrity to defend their work, but the silence from the media is even more troublesome. The administration turns objective experts into political pawns, and the media is complicit. It exposes the mediocrity and general incompetence of the mainstream media. (Truth to power? Yeah, right.)
Undermining the very experts who are doing the best they can to objectively assess the situation? Very petty. Very short-sighted. Very Orwellian.
Jun '10
Re: Petty Deceit
Not very petty deceit actually. This regime in particular, and the current Democrat Party leadership in general, seems to practice the propaganda tactic of the "Big Lie". They simply repeate the lie de jour over and over and over until it is belived as "truth".
It is simply inexcusable that our supposed "objective observers" in the Establishment Media lack either the intellectual ability, or moral fortitude" to challenge the regime on this habitual deceit
Re: Petty Deceit
Jonathan, do you think part of this is due to the almost universal ignorance about any engineering issue? Every engineer I know is astonished by how few of us know anything at all about how bridges work, or oil gets out of the ground, or the internet works. Politics aside, some of the "outrage" about this oil spill reflects people's almost willful ignorance about the physical world (oil, deep water, pressure, etc.) and its complicated forces. The left is always talking about Mother Earth and Healing the Planet and they've created this cartoon version of Earth like some giant soft lego set, rather than what it is: a scary, powerful volcano factory on which we're lucky to be holding on.
Jun '10
Re: Petty Deceit
Somehow, when the most productive and modern rigs are stationed off Brazil and Africa never to return, I suspect GWB policies will get the blame for the dearth of work in the energy sector and lack of production therefrom off the gulf coast for the next ten years as well. Don't you?
Jun '10
Re: Petty Deceit
Rob,
Most modern people would starve if you gave them a knife and a cow. In fact it was a widely circulated meme sometime back that even engineering students couldn't light a flashlight bulb with a battery, a bulb, and a paper clip.
May '10
Re: Petty Deceit
Rob, I don't think that engineers expect people to know how things work in detail, but we would like to think that people have the basics down. It's one thing to know that oil comes from a drilled well in the ground, another to think that the internet comes from a wire in your wall. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWPwrIVk6v4 comes to mind.)
It's also infuriating when engineers don't get the credit for what expert knowledge they have; I had an argument with an elementary school teacher about how "easy" it should be to stop the oil leak "because they drilled there in the first place." Wow.
All that being said, I know of no practicing engineers who write as columnists on these issues; the genre seems to be filled with journalists and academics. Engineers have a unique perspective, but I haven't found many strong voices in print.
May '10
Re: Petty Deceit
This reminds me of an anecdote one of my coworkers told me. He was talking to a liberal artsy friend about his job doing at Lockheed Martin doing orbital mechanics. As a lead-in he asked her, "Did you ever wonder how they place these enormous satellites into such precise orbits way out in space?"
She replied, with little sign of interest, "No, don't they just use a computer?"
May '10
Re: Petty Deceit
It's Not Rocket Science
She replied, with little sign of interest, "No, don't they just use a computer?" · Jun 21 at 5:36pm
That's the precarious position engineers have found themselves in these days: we've done our job so well, people take all the technology and innovation we've brought to society at large for granted.
This comes to a head when things go wrong: any form of construction on the interstate, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Interstate 35W Bridge Collapse, and--of course--the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. "What happened?" Well, we messed up.
A lot of this stuff is bleeding edge: new, exciting, and one-of-a-kind. That mean a lot of good things: new methods of delivering more better things at lower prices. It also means we're going to learn a lot of new things the hard way.
There's a poster in the civil engineering department at my school: "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement." It's a Mark Twain quote, but it's also the only real way engineers synthesize real knowledge. As much as we try to get it right the first time, we can only know what doesn't work. Everything else is just a suboptimal solution.
May '10
Re: Petty Deceit
". . . a failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats it might hold for the next generation of engineers." --Henri Petroski, To Engineer Is Human