General > General Technical Chat
heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
AndyBeez:
In the UK and with Covid, the political class expended a lot of energy convincing the population they were following scientific guidance. And with Climate change, the same mantra of appearing to rely on solid facts applies. Sadly, scientists whose funding often depends on political favour, are obligated to provide the political class with the 'evidence' they need to make them look good, commanding and/or decisive. Even if they know the real truth, no scientist wants to be branded as a whistle blower, not when their institution's budget is subject to review by a politically biased oversight committee. When things go wrong, politicians brief the media against their own scientific advisors, claiming they were misled by flawed science :-//
coppice:
--- Quote from: Bud on August 05, 2023, 08:48:08 pm ---Yes yes, Ebola. Paid kids falling into mud and rolling in the mud in imaginary pain while their mothers watched a few meters away. Who leaked that, someone from Reuters i believe?
--- End quote ---
Perverse financial incentives mean we have very poor records about a lot of health issues. A number of African doctors have said that huge numbers of deaths used to be reported as AIDS in their countries, because that brought lots of international funding they didn't get for the real causes of those deaths. You can't blame them. You can blame funding agencies that hand out funds depending on which form of human suffering is fashionable at the moment.
PlainName:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on August 05, 2023, 09:11:24 pm ---When things go wrong, politicians brief the media against their own scientific advisors, claiming they were misled by flawed science :-//
--- End quote ---
Being over on Christmas Island you no doubt missed this kind of thing:
Two groups of prominent scientists write open letters with conflicting advice on how to tackle virus
Coronavirus: why experts disagree so strongly over how to tackle the disease
Plenty more. Politicians could ignore their advisors advice (if given), but when the advisors can't even agree on the facts it's no surprise that everyone is seen as clueless, a shill, whatever insult is currently du jour. Oh, throw in two spoons of hindsight and it's a mix made for conspiracy theorists.
Dr. Frank:
--- Quote from: PlainName on August 05, 2023, 09:40:50 pm ---
Being over on Christmas Island you no doubt missed this kind of thing:
Two groups of prominent scientists write open letters with conflicting advice on how to tackle virus
Coronavirus: why experts disagree so strongly over how to tackle the disease
Plenty more. Politicians could ignore their advisors advice (if given), but when the advisors can't even agree on the facts it's no surprise that everyone is seen as clueless, a shill, whatever insult is currently du jour. Oh, throw in two spoons of hindsight and it's a mix made for conspiracy theorists.
--- End quote ---
Thanks, very interesting.
I'm writing too much, I fear.
Anyhow, here are my last thoughts about the subject, but it's again about Engineering, i.e. optimized decision making in a commercial company.
Well, for both problems you can observe, that the decision makers/experts are fully focused on their problems, tried to solve them, get rid of them.
Those people were announced because they work solely on these domains.
These cognitive limits led to the big social and economic damages, as latter aspects were not addressed at all.
An optimized method is to bring experts from many different fields of knowledge to illuminate all possible root causes and especially all consequences of the different solutions. They also bring a lot of ideas with them.
In our company, we regularly solve the problem of terminated components, which is as well a real threat to our business, by calling in purchasing, logistics, quality, engineering, sales, process technology, manufacturing, layout, component technologists, as required.
The problem itself could be solved by purchasing only, to convince the supplier to withdraw his PTN. This only happens in 1..2% of the 300 PTNs each year, of course coming with a certain price tag. So the other colleagues all come up with their ideas, how to make a work-around, i.e. not solving the problem itself, but eliminating the threat, instead.
Logistics can organize an All Time Buy, Quality might look for alternative suppliers, Engineering could use 2nd source parts, make a re-engineering, Sales could offer the customer an upgraded instrument which would not use the component, and so forth. From all these solutions, you'd chose the optimal configuration, i.e. lowest price tag, shortest response time, smallest effort.
In case of COVID, it's of course very delicate to weigh up threat of human life vs. social and economic aspects, but latter as well are important for the well-being of people, in case of wrong decisions even more. But politicians only task is, to take care for the well-being of the people, in all aspects. Here they swear an oath on the Holy Bible to do so, but usually they forget and only do their own thing.
I always wondered, why here in GER no engineers or companies joint to the energy business were involved in all the discussions and decisions. Economy experts also were not consulted, as well not the population.
These Climate experts and activists just see the White Elephant in the room, i.e. a possible danger from Climate Change, create a lot of anxiety and brutally push through their 1 dimensional decisions, w/o any regards to huge losses or complete failure of our country.
My company would have long been bankrupt, if we would solve the issues that way.
Frank
Veteran68:
--- Quote from: Wallace Gasiewicz on August 05, 2023, 11:52:41 am ---RAPo:
PLEASE QUOTE CORRECTLY
That was not me saying this particular quote
It was me Quoting tom66
--- End quote ---
Not to sidetrack but pointing out that your method of quoting others is extremely frustrating to make sense of. Please quote using the forum Quote feature, like I'm doing in this post and like everyone else is doing. It takes care of formatting it so you can clearly see who said what when you're 4 or 5 quotes deep. :)
Now back to the debate...
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