Jean wrote:
> who takes the responsibility for implementing, maintaining and
> endorsing the accident of major technological systems ?
> [...]
> Note that I am saying accident, not failure. What is, by essence, not
> predictable.

You're asking who takes responsibility for what is not predictable?
Some kind of emergency response / expert group?  I'm not sure I
understand the question.

Say I start a fire by accident in my house.  Firefighters come; they
take responsibility for putting out the fire.  Then insurance brokers
come: they take the responsibility of managing the finances of
replacing the house and the burnt bits inside.  These groups
(firefighters, brokers, etc) came to exist as a result of a common
perceived need for organized, expert response to certain
situations....

Or am I missing the point again?

This bit is more interesting to me:
> Why, and to what extent, the debate is broken down to
> experts-who-know against people-who-don't.

I have noticed this more and more in the last 20 yrs or so. A
combination of lack of communication (between scientists and others),
mistrust of scientists (for reasons typically based on ignorance),
controversy (evolution, for instance), a sense of entitlement (by
people without merit to expect it).

However, I also have to wonder if this phenomenon is real or only
perceived.  To demonstrate this, consider this quote:

"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect for adults and love to talk rather
then work or exercise. They no longer rise when adults enter the room.
They contradict their parents, chatter in front of company, gobble
down food at the table and intimidate their teachers."

I think this quote describes fairly well my sense of how students have
changed since I started teaching some 20 years ago.  Certainly, I
perceive that they have changed for the worse.

But: This quote is attributed to Socrates.
The kicker is this: If *he* thought kids of his day sucked, then the
question is: am I seeing a real decline? Or is my vision changing?

The only way to answer the question is to look for ways to measure
these effects - whether it's vacuous children or the breakdown in the
debate between experts and the general population - such that the we
can rely on the scales of the measurement to remain fixed over time.

So what I'm suggesting is that all the concern being shown about the
robustness of diverse energy systems may be quite pointless because we
can't really measure what's going on properly.  And our conclusions
are only as good as our measurements.

Jean, could you explain why you think it is odd that:
> the destroying "potential" of some of our
> technological systems (major dams, power plants, but also the aggregated
> consumption of natural resources) is close (for the human community) to
> those of natural disasters.

I agree that they are similar.  I don't understand why that similarity
should be odd.

Finally, Jean I admire your goal of developing a democratic decision
making process.  Any group that will perform such a process with
respect to something having physical aspect - urban planning, policy
about nuclear power, etc - will have to have a grounding in science
far superior to that of the average population today.  Without that,
they'll make very democratic, but very wrong, decisions.

I really don't know which is harder to achieve: making everyone an
expert, or getting everyone to trust experts. :)

Cheers.
Fil

On 18 March 2011 10:35, Jean Schneider <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am not sure whether I misread or misunderstood most of the mails, but I
> haven't found yet any answer to Clive's point:
>>> The second question, which asked "to what extent does the failure of the
> Fukushima plant throw up the generic failure of purely technological
> models of design with respect to the construction, operation and
> implication(s) of complex systems?" was both a provocation and a deeply
> serious question.
>
> I wouldn't blame any engineer, operator etc. for what is happening as such.
> I tend to believe that all these people do their jobs reasonably well,
> within the limits of probabilities.
> If, in 30 years from now, the consequences of global warming render
> significant parts of our Earth inhabitable, will it be time to see who
> should be blamed ? This is the same question : any nuclear engineer (living
> in a country that has the arrogance to produce 75% of its energy through the
> safest nuclear power plants that exist...) will tell you that it is all,
> almost planned for. Tested. Calculated. Doubled. Tripled. 0,0001%
> probability... but who knows that, for the oldest power plants, some
> operators and engineers are retiring, and when they leave, no one really
> knows any more the story of the wiring, relays, control systems that are not
> manufacturd anymore (BTW, old is short, in that field : 25/30 years... no
> upgrade or fix... and then : a monument of concrete and radioactive waste
> that needs to be taken care of for thousands of years). All this takes care
> of the entity in isolation, not in connection to. Say: to a truck that
> crashes on the motorway and blocks the access, while you would need all fire
> brigades, to an engineer on holiday and his replacement ill.
> In my understanding, what Clive is asking is closer to an ontological
> question : who takes the responsibility for implementing, maintaining and
> endorsing the accident of major technological systems ? It is too easy to
> blame a few politicians. It is like blaming some stupid engineer who didn't
> crosscheck the results. The question is : why, and to what extent, does a
> community delegate. Why, and to what extent, the debate is broken down to
> experts-who-know against people-who-don't. Why is the fact of that a
> community says calmly and deliberatly "no" (to nuclear energy, to shale gas,
> to GM crops, to mining, to dams...) considered primitive and regressive.
> When imposing this is the local consequence, the upper crust, of an
> unsustainable society?
> Note that I am saying accident, not failure. What is, by essence, not
> predictable.
> The odd thing is that the destroying "potential" of some of our
> technological systems (major dams, power plants, but also the aggregated
> consumption of natural resources) is close (for the human community) to
> those of natural disasters. Uncertain (don't know when and where), affects
> the "innocents" (no victim has made the decisive wrong act), massive and
> long lasting (reshapes deeply the life of communities).
>
> I do think that Clive has an essential point. Maybe my phrasing and
> understanding is slightly different, but it seems to me important that the
> design community, as one of the communities that claims to interface?
> connect ? represent ? mediate ? between the human society and its material
> and specificaly technical "infrastructure" goes a bit beyond the "it could
> be designed better". However you turn it, a disaster is an event, not a
> design failure.
> One of the things I am trying, extremely modestly, to push design to (at
> least: in some projects and actions) is to use its tools to create a
> democratic decision process on the decisions that should be taken by
> communities. But, before that, it is probably up to each of us, as
> individuals, to infuse his/her own understanding of technology and
> technological arrogance in his/her daily work.
>
> Here, we used to have this monuments to soldiers dead in operations. In a
> near future, we should have a monument to those workers (in Tchernobyl,
> Fukushima maybe, and so many elsewere) who died as soldiers fighting the
> 0,0001% event that turned into a real nightmare.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jean

> [...]

--
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/