Comment by alanctgardner2
13 years ago
Engineering isn't engineering without constraints... it's just spending an unbounded amount of time and money on a thing ( or science, in some terms). Engineers are obligated to not work on a project which cannot be safely completed within guidelines. You can't push off that obligation elsewhere: if you design a building, and that building falls over, you need to justify why. You can't say they asked you to make it cheaper; you either find a way to make it safe and cheaper, or you don't do it.
This isn't to say that nobody makes mistakes, but it's worth remembering that engineering is applied science. It's not practiced in a vacuum, it takes into account economic and political influences and balances them against public well being. The buck stops with engineers.
Of course everything has constraints, and a social system will have political constrains.
Yet, those systems had "accidents" only after politicians overrided the engineers and acted against their recommendation. Using them as evidence that engineers create systems that are as flawed as the ones created by politicians is wrong.
Anyway, it seems that we still can't engineer social systems. It may be either because the political interference inherent on it makes it impossible, or because we just don't have the right technology... Or maybe we can, and PRISM is the kind of tool that makes it possible. Engineers create all kinds of systems, for all kinds of reasons, well intented or not.
My point is that engineers have no recourse to complaining about being 'overridden'. Politicians don't act; they don't build space shuttles, they don't design nuclear reactors. They give a high level set of orders which engineers either fulfill safely, or not at all. As an example:
In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was actually inexperienced plant operators running an experiment about disaster recovery on a reactor with a positive void coefficient and poorly designed control rods. The positive void coefficient was a limitation of our nuclear design capabilities at the time, the control rods were just poorly designed by some engineer. Either of those factors could have prevented the disaster, and neither of them can be attributed to any politician.