I detect no lack of seriousness or ambition in these students. They believe they are exceptionally well-educated. They have jumped expertly through every hoop put in front of them to be the top of their classes in our country’s best universities, and they have been lavishly praised for doing so. They seem so surprised when asked simple direct questions that they have never considered.
They’re not educated — they’re indoctrinated, and have been, for the most part, since they were five years old. They don’t know what they don’t know, and yet this is where our country’s political leadership comes from. Fortunately, this is why the collapse of the mainstream media is such a disaster for the left. Their ideas are hothouse plants that can only stand up in a debate-free environment. Once they come out of the academic/media cocoon, they quickly collapse, because they don’t even know how to intelligently defend them. Because they’re mostly indefensible.
It’s naive to think education is to produce thinking adults. The left has correctly identified it as their private battleground. Tenure is a perfect example. Growing ratio of admin to teachers, etc.
If you don’t start when they’re five and continue through the beginning of adult reasoning, how are you going to get people to buy into their irrational crap?
I yield to no man in my disdain for the press, et cetera, but — when have they ever been anything but cheap sensational shills for a maudlin and sophomoric collectivism? It’s not like they were different in the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up, and I turned out OK. (Sure, a little twisted, but competent enough.) I don’t think we can blame the media that much.
Academia takes more of the blame, yes, particularly the dreadful fascist hell that is American K-12 public education. But if I were going to try to put my finger on the single most important factor, I would say it is the steep decline of real-life experience in the young lives of the affluent. Your generic teenager in a wealthy community spends his time doing internships and volunteering — i.e. work for which no one is willing to pay any wages. He’s taught that waiting tables or serving up burgers or ringing up grannies in the drugstore is beneath him. He’s discouraged from tinkering with his car, building model rockets, or constructing rickety hideouts in the woods out of scrap lumber, because these things are foolish wastes of his time, time that should be better spent studying the latest Noam Chomsky analysis of where Western society went wrong, or memorizing the names of all 20 amino acids.
But I think as a consequence he misses a great deal of education, in the School O’ Hard Knocks, so to speak, about the limitations of theory, the absurdity of notions of subjective or consensus reality, and the deep wisdom of my pop’s favorite rueful phrase: measure twice, cut once.
Additionally, he — and I emphasize he, because I think the harm here falls disproportionately on boys — loses a valuable opportunity for gaining confidence in his own abilities, and learning to command his own whims and fears. No wonder he grows up a sad combination of arrogance (because he knows well the slogans of the ruling intellectual party) and fearful passivity (because he has no thrilling and sobering experience of independent initiative).
This is what happens when most of the higher education world is dominated by leftist groupthink and political correctness, when wide-ranging debate is discouraged, when dissent is silenced and people are taught that it is more important to parrot the accepted view of the world and of events than to ask challenging questions which demand the use of logic and reason.
Ed Koch inadvertently provides the explanation.
This is exactly what happens when K-12 teachers are required to teach to Tests, must always be politically correct in the classroom (no deep thinking topics) and a college education is seen as a jobs training program. There was a time when education was about producing well rounded individuals who would be informed citizens and leaders, not about finding employment.
Yeah, stupid engineering departments always teaching stupid job skills…madness!
Education is now like the weather everybody complains but nobody does anything about it. Maybe it’s time for a Tea Party plank on education.
1. abolish teacher unions and tenure nationally.
2. education vouchers
Titus,
[[[Yeah, stupid engineering departments always teaching stupid job skills…madness!]]]
Yes, engineers don’t need to know history, politics, literature, economic systems. Just dig those ditches and pave those roads when the enlighten leader tells you to do so and let others decide the big questions. Hmmm, sounds like the engineering school model used by the Communists and Fascists…
Technical skills are good, but you are able to get those at any trade school. Universities used to stand for something more. That is why they were called Universities….
Indeed, none of those subjects are required for a Bachelor’s degree… oh wait…
Imagine a world where courses in Logic and Rhetoric were prerequisites for a Bachelor’s degree.
I am, Ed, in that melifluous Don LaFontaine voice…
Ed,
Those got cut when they did away with Greek and Latin requirements, after all they are not needed to get a job.
Meanwhile the economics, history, literature and politics courses that remain have been dumb down to simply date memorization to avoid controversial stuff and make it easier for the voc-tech folks to pass. After all the tech generation sees no relevance in the ideas of folks who never owned a iPod or wrote a blog 🙂
Taking back government requires fixing both education and the media. Anything less will not work.
Yeah, all that “date memorization” in econ…
The funny part is that I had a history prof who rote a pamphlet called, “A Bunch of Dates and Dead People,” railing expressly against that kind of teaching. My Philo, Psych and Anthro teachers each deliberately covered controversial topics in their classes. Hell, even my freshman comp class required a final report on…a controversial court trial. Yeesh!
But I guess that doesn’t happen in the diploma mill Matula works in. Sad.
In response to Carl’s comment “…He’s taught that waiting tables or serving up burgers or ringing up grannies in the drugstore is beneath him….”, I came from a blue collar background, and my parents didn’t want me working while I was in school in the early 70s. They wanted me to focus on my schoolwork. I had a Pennysaver route, and was required to put half of that into a savings account.
At my high school, which was once upon a time one of the best in upstate NY, I was on an academic par with the upper class families in the community. None of us “worked”; or did silly volunteer stuff. We studied, studied, and more study.
I didn’t look down on the kids who worked, and I did envy them the extra money they had; I wanted to buy more back issues of Astounding and Analog from the local used bookstore. But the kids I knewwho worked after school never made the grades needed to get into a decent college after high school.
I am NOT denigrating the value of working in a retail establishment, but I think the kids would be better off with more study.
@ Carl and Don:
Four words: Boy Scouts of America! Where else is a boy allowed to be a boy? Where else can he test his skills, know his limitations, or lead and help others? Where else can a boy be patritiotic and learn TRUE conservation?
I learned to cook, how to sew, how to make fire and generally take of myself while a member of that organization. I wasn’t even an Eagle Scout, never went any higher than First Class.
Titus,
[[[Yeah, all that “date memorization” in econ…]]]
Actually in Econ its memorizing the formulas, which the techies love. Of course they no longer know how they were developed and why, but hey, its math so its good. And it allows you avoid talking in depth about Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, etc. since they didn’t develop any real formulas. So you get to skip all that complex and politically sensitive philosophical stuff about free markets, capitalism, socialism, etc.
And the new simplified version of economics does make grading easier. You could even have a TA do it now its so simple – i.e. did the student get the right number or not…
But the kids I knewwho worked after school never made the grades needed to get into a decent college after high school.
If you say so. I worked after school from when I was 16, and I got into MIT. Most other people I knew in high school had a job, and many were admitted to just as good a college. Indeed, I think it not totally unlikely that colleges in those days considered a part-time job evidence of sober industry and responsibility, which it is.
What I’d like to distinguish, however, is a very part-time job, a few hours a week, undertaken just to earn enough to buy gas and movie tix for the weekend, with serious work, e.g. 20 hours a week trying to contribute to the family finances because you’re poor. The latter, I agree, is too much and diminishes your ability to study.
I am NOT denigrating the value of working in a retail establishment, but I think the kids would be better off with more study.
It depends, Don. For blue-collar families and folks who are scraping by, I agree 100%. If you’re a smart kid and you already know, from your family cirx, what work is like, then by all means let us try to subsidize your study so you can make something better of yourself.
But what you’ll note was the subject of my tirade were children from wealthy familes and communities. Young people who have oodles of time to study and ponder — but who, generally, lack a thorough understanding of the nature of work and the real world. There are acres of them in my kids’ high school, and I tremble for the future of the Republic when I see the results.
These are young kids who drive new Beemers to school (sweet sixteen gift from Mom ‘n’ Dad) but who’ve never seen a paycheck stub in their life, and noted (1) how many many hours sweating over a grill or forcing a smile at cranky customers over a cash register it takes to pay for a car, or (2) the appalling chunk lifted out of your labor by the state for its various allegedly noble purposes. They’ve spent loads of time dissecting the follies of the American past — the Indians, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, Bobby Riggs — but have themselves no humbling memory of bouncing a check or getting fired from a job for being late once too often. Their arrogance combined with their naivete is scary.
did the student get the right number or not…
I love that kind of teaching. So much of success in life consists of getting the right number. So little involves being able to discuss Adam Smith with crackling fine prose and insights into his toilet training.
Actually, I had “Wealth of Nations” and “Free to Choose” as required reading.
Interesting enough, it was actually the econ I had way back in middle school (no math in that one) that got me hooked on philosophy and humanities.
@Carl: In circuits lab, I once started an impromptu discussion regarding the parallels between time vs. frequency domain analysis and western vs. soviet worldviews. Good times.
Carl,
[[[So much of success in life consists of getting the right number.]]]
Actually its exactly that fallacy that led to the Derivative Meltdown and the current economic mess.
http://www.risklatte.com/Features/DIMWTS014.php
[[[a few talented physicists and mathematicians started getting interested in the world of finance. At the same time, financial derivatives, as a product class started becoming popular amongst the sell side bankers. The timing of the marriage of the mind and the matter – the product – was perfect. This handful of physicists and mathematicians working at a Goldman Sachs or a Bankers Trust would eventually, in a span of a few years, revolutionize the derivatives landscape on the Street; and their numbers would soon swell.]]]
and
[[[Closeted in their ivory towers these rocket scientists would toy with new mathematical models to price a particular financial derivative. They would think of synthesizing new products from the existing ones and how mathematical complexity could be literally translated into complex product design. And all this was done with the noble objective of expanding the frontiers of finance.]]]
Unfortunately, economics and financial markets aren’t as simple as physics or rocket science, something they would have learned in a class that focused on the history of economics rather the some simplistic formulas.
Its interesting to see by your statement that the key lesson of the meltdown, over reliance on numbers and models when dealing with very complex subjects, hasn’t been as well recognized as it has by critics of climate science.
Those physicists and mathematicians, like their financial counterparts throughout history, thought they invented a new way to coin money with their “magic formulas”. However they found like others before then that such formulas only work in simple fields like physics, chemistry, rocket science where ALL the variables are well know, behave predictably, and are easy to measure accurately.
They don’t work in the more complex fields like economics and finance where many variables are hidden, behave in unpredictable and erratic ways and are almost impossible to measure. And we are ALL paying for it as a result – i.e. TARP, stimulus, tight credit, mortgage meltdown, etc.
Balls, Thomas. In the first place, it’s absurd to blame the inventor for the use to which others put his invention. Edison is not responsible for the electric chair, Colt is not responsible for handgun murder, and Fermi and Oppenheimer are not responsible for the constuction of nuclear weapons by Iran. The massive errors in judgment that led to the financial crisis were not in the physicists, who put dangerous tools in the hands of idiots, but rather in their masters, the managers trained in the liberal arts, conversant with the thinking of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who blindly implemented the new inventions without having a clue about how they worked. (They probably had a “consensus reality” viewpoint that suggested as long as people believed in Tinkerbell, she wouldn’t die.)
Additionally, I suggest you contradict yourself. The financial meltdown unquestionably was a problem of getting the wrong number — a spectacularly wrong number, as it turns out. People made quantitative estimates of, for example, the probability of certain number of subprime mortgages going bad, and were fantastically wrong. This problem was compounded by all the innumerate fools who took it all on faith and bet $billions on a chimera.
The ability to work well with numbers implies the ability to know when the numbers are bogus. You don’t learn the limitations of plans drawn on paper by pondering them and writing essays on their use and misues: you learn by actually building things from them, and having the distinction between reality and theory driven painfully home. You don’t learn about the limitations of calculations by discussing calculations — you learn by doing them, constructing things based on them, and having those things fall to pieces around you in surprising ways.
Perhaps the problem is that you overlooked the key word “right” in my sentence. You confused “getting the right number” with “getting a number.” Being able to get a number at all means you’re at least human, not a mere trained animal, but it doesn’t mean you’re worth listening to. Getting the right number, on the other hand, means you’ve achieved something remarkable and valuable.
Carl,
Hindsight is always 20-20 which is a convenient cop-out for you. Of course we know their models were bogus now. But their faith in numbers and math precluded them from seeing that. And their arrogance closed them and their followers who were in awe of their numbers to any arguments their numbers might be “wrong”.
The bottom line though is that the core of the meltdown was derivatives and the developers of them do need to step up and take responsibility and not hide behind the fact they were only “inventors”, an argument that always seems to be used by inventors when their inventions turn out bad.
And the second key is if they studied economic history understood more about human nature rather then just focus on formulas they would have recognized the limitations of their formulas. They didn’t and we are all paying for it now.
What’s hindsight got to do with it, Thomas? The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and anyone who’s good with numbers understands that.
You are deliberately (I think) misconstruing my point. You are denouncing a blind faith in numbers. But I have, of course, supported no such thing. I have suggested the key quality is getting the right numbers, emphasis on “right.” By definition that means I would be just as critical of blind faith as you.
However, I go further: I suggest blind faith in numbers comes exactly from an arrogant dismissal of the importance of mastering them, a failure to pay your dues working with them, a naive faith that you can achieve a good judgment of the quality of numbers by any means other than working with them long enough to tumble down every crevasse of error awaiting the newbie.
And the second key is if they studied economic history understood more about human nature
More nonsense. You don’t understand squat about human nature by reading textbooks, and I bet all the people you are criticizing had plenty of “good” history classes in high school and college. After all, they went to good high schools and colleges, which have been following your suggestions (“to hell with the quantitative and specific! Teach more generality!”) for a generation now. It takes a peculiar arrogance to have had your suggestions followed by the educational establishment for 50 years, have things turn out badly, and conclude the answer is more of the same. This is the mark of the academic Marxist, the person who can’t take “no” from reality as an answer. The engineer who has often barked his shin painfully on reality doesn’t make this mistake. In the face of unpleasant and unforeseen data, he questions his assumptions.
If you wanted your “quants” to have had a better feeling for human economic nature then you should have asked them to step away from their books and lecture halls and run a falafel stand.
Carl,
Funny, those are not the High Schools I see which teach to the tests, and if its not on the standardized test don’t discuss it. Its also funny you mention Marxist as it if there is any political system that worships engineers its the communists and other socialists. In fact that is their key failing, the belief that Engineers and other experts using numbers are better at deciding how to allocate resources then the market are.
Also there is a different between reading textbooks and literature. Try reading Shakespeare or Johnson sometime if you wanted to get a good sense of the human condition and a framework for what you experience in real life.
You also seem to misunderstand my point. Financial markets and econsystems are too complex to get the “right number”. Think of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle on steriods. That is what makes fields like Economics and climatology so complex compared to the simple fields of study like Physics and Chemistry. The problem was individuals coming from such simple fields of study had the arrogance to think they could apply the simple mathematical tools they used in those fields to those more complex fields. If they studied history they would have recognized the risks.
Financial markets and econsystems are too complex to get the “right number”.
I think you’ve encapsulated the problem right there. Because what, then, do you use if it’s impossible to get the right number? I’ll tell you what. You use politics, or philosophy, or wishful thinking, or naked self-interest, that’s what. That’s what people actually did. All because they had contempt, as do you, for getting the right number.
There’s bourgeois truth, comrades — mere numbers! — and then revolutionary truth, made of much truthier stuff. Blech.
those are not the High Schools I see which teach to the tests, and if its not on the standardized test don’t discuss it
I love standardized tests. They are about the only restraint on my childrens’ teachers going utterly off the rails into their inherent deep narcissism. If it hadn’t been for the actual AP US History test that they were going to take in May, my daughter’s history teacher would’ve spent the entire year telling stupid anecdotes about his draft-card-burning days and spinning out his paranoid dope-addled fantasies about how the world works. It was only because he had to “teach to the test” that he (reluctantly) taught them when the Civil War began and ended, what the Zimmerman telegram was, or the nature of the Great Compromise that gave us a bicameral legislature.
Standardized tests — cold, objective factual measurement — are the only instrument we have to keep teachers and schools honest, just the way the DoT’s pitiless crashworthiness tests keep GM and Toyota from lying through their teeth about how safe their cars are. I see no reason whatsoever why education should be exempt from objective measures of the quality of their product — and I have been myself a teacher for long years. I wish there were far more standardized tests, given more frequently, in many more subjects — and I wish the outcome had far more drastic consequences for teachers and schools.
Nor am I worried the least little bit about teachers not touching what’s not on the test. In the first place, if it’s not on the test, it’s probably not very important. In the second place, once they cover what’s on the test, well and thoroughly, so that their students all do well, there’s nothing stopping them from moving on to other optional things. You want them to cover their pet obsessions in place of what’s on the test, which is what they need to know to get along in life. As a parent and taxpayer, I say no thanks. Get a blog if you think the world will suffer from lack of your brilliant insight.
Try reading Shakespeare or Johnson sometime if you wanted to get a good sense of the human condition and a framework for what you experience in real life.
You’ve got it exactly backwards, Thomas. Try experiencing real life — get a job, make and lose a fortune, woo a woman without success, experience betrayal by a friend — and then Shakespeare will make far more sense. Great literature helps a man who has lived a full life interpret that life. It is not meant to, and cannot, substitute for experience, nor instruct the naive in any useful way.
Carl,
You are the classic example of what is wrong with today’s students as Rep. Wilson noted. They are able to parrot the answers and work the formulas. But they haven’t a clue what they mean.
Also keep in mind. You will never know what the right number is except in hindsight. You may make a very good guess and have high confidence its right, especially in simple fields like physics and chemistry. But you will never know until afterward.
And yes, there are ways to explore complex fields like economies and ecosystems. But it requires the ability to move beyond simple math formulas into complex simulations. Ever heard of the Santa Fe Institute? They have been doing some good work in such fields.
But you illustrate the mistakes the physics and math experts made with derivatives. If you are not able to get the right number, then you need to be flexible so you are able to adapt when things change. That is what they didn’t do, they didn’t prepare for the worst case. I.e. practice the basic principles of decision science and balance upside possibilities with management of downside risk.
Really, Thomas? I’ve got a few papers in Phys. Rev and similar places, and a few former students at Harvard and MIT, who would differ with you. Er…and since I left academia for the rough ‘n’ tumble real world, I haven’t done half bad, stumbling around parroting answers and working formulae. My sales guy says we’ll do about $1.2 million in gross receipts this recession year.
I have a suspicion that if I indeed represent what students are doing “wrong” then quite a few graduate schools, medical schools, and employers rather wish more students would go “wrong” in just my way.
simple fields like physics and chemistry…complex fields like economies and ecosystems.
Apparently neither of those words mean what you think they mean.
they didn’t prepare for the worst case. I.e. practice the basic principles of decision science and balance upside possibilities with management of downside risk.
Go read Taleb’s The Black Swan. To the extent there is any sense in what you’re saying, you’ll at least be able to say it well enough not to come across as a post-modernist cross between New Age mysticism and an intellectual sour-grapes Luddism fashionable among those who failed Algebra II twice.
And ferfuxsake listen to yourself. You think the world keeps trundling along, generating the amazing value it does so you and I can chat about metaphysical crap on the Intertubes without having to worry about predators and keeping the rain out, because soi-disant philosophes sententiously mutter there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio into their absinthe?
Hardly. The wheels of the world are turned daily by car mechanics who know exactly the correct toe-in for my Odyssey, by surgeons who know exactly where to cut and whether to cut, by ER RNs who can instantly tell the difference between a stroke and a hangover, by pilots who can ditch a 737 safely in the Hudson, by first lieutenants who know how to take a squad into the dark in some Afghan hole and bring everybody back out safe, by engineers who can make $1 billion drilling decisions on Gulf oil platforms and get them right, every time — in short, by a vast army of millions of folks who know 1+1=2 and get the right number for tens of millions of real-world problems every day. The enduring shame of American education is that very little of that expertise and competence stems from the pompous shibboleths people learn from age 6 to 18 in school.
Carl,
[[[fashionable among those who failed Algebra II twice.]]]
I never took Algebra II. I placed straight into Calculus at New Mexico Tech, the school I graduated from. Which was expected for those studying Mining Engineering. And having had both advanced engineering courses AS WELL as advanced economics courses I know which field is simpler by experience. (Remember, Einstein never passed economics, nor did Issac Asimov, although both went on to get Ph.D.s in their respective fields, Physics and Chemistry…)
Its easy to set up engineering problems and then test your models in the labs. That is because you are able to break things into nice neat little pieces to test. So you are quickly able to determine if you have the “right number”. (Labs were always my favorite part of engineering because you got to build things and make them work.)
Economics isn’t that simple because it is not dividable into nice neat little pieces. The components of the system are just too interdependent. That is why its considered a complex field of study. You might want to read “Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics” by Eric D. Beinhocker. It covers well the material we have been discussing as well as the worth of the Santa Fe Institute in developing tools to study complex fields like economics. It might also move your economic thinking beyond the 20th Century into today’s world.
Carl,
I felt it better to break this into two threads. I am well familiar with the Black Swan. I have used it as a supplemental textbook in my Strategic Management class to emphasis the importance for managers to be flexible and adaptable while not chasing statistical randomness. Its far better to have a good intelligence system to detect real changes in direction then a forecast system based on historical data.
BTW Dr. Deming had a great demonstration on randomness in his Red Bead demonstration. If you haven’t see it here is a good Youtube on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBW1_GhRKTA
Our guests today on crossfire are Carl and Thomas. It should prove to be an interesting show…
Economics isn’t that simple because it is not dividable into nice neat little pieces.
Oy, Thomas. Look, I respect the complexity of economics — it’s you who’ve fantasized that physics, for example, is “simple.” Maybe you want to ponder the fact that Mandelbrot (on whom Taleb showers praise in that book as being the only mathematician who understood the fierce nature of complexity) garnered the most honor among physicists, those interested in complexity of the form trivially named problems in chaos. (As you probably know, Taleb is contemptuous of most economists as being — irony ahoy! — imprisoned by models of reality so facile as to approach numerology in their general uselessness. I don’t share his broad contempt, but as a generally acknowledged prophet of fundamental unpredictability, in Don Rumsfeld’s immortal words the unknown unknowns, he’s a damaging witness for your side.)
Anyway, let me assure you that in this area you are utterly naive. As it happens, my specialty in physics happens to be exactly the kinds of problems you describe: problems that are what are sometimes called “inherently many-body,” where it is ipso facto impossible to subdivide the problem, or construct mean-field approximations, and where fiendish complexity is the order of the day.
Why do you think physicists who got out of that field because they couldn’t keep up went into economics and finance? Because many of the mathematical tools developed for handling strongly interacting many body systems — e.g. generalized Brownian dynamics (with memory kernels) or perturbations of hydrodynamcs and thermodynamics away from their realm of strict applicability — turned out to be extremely useful in understanding economic systems. They still are. The fact that idiots and clowns made inappropriate use of the tools is no greater indictment of their validity and utility than the fact of Hiroshima is an indictment of the technology of nuclear fission.
Remember, Einstein never passed economics, nor did Issac Asimov
Yeah, well, I did. So consider me underwhelmed by this argument. And let us not put Dr. Asimov, a fine writer but a quotidian scientist, in the same category as Einstein. Besides, Einstein dealt in simplicity and fundamental principles; he was not a maven of complexity in physics. If that’s what you want, you should consider the names of Gibbs, Boltzmann, Smoluchowski, Poincare, or in modern times Lars Onsager, Ken Wilson or Irwin Oppenheim. These thinkers dealt in complexity that would (or should) curl your toes, next to which imagining a tesseract is child’s play.
And in any event, I stand by my assertion that getting the right number is the sine qua non of genuine understanding. I don’t give a damn how elegant a liberal artsy essay you can write about the ineffable qualia of things, how beautiful the snowflake lies on your mitten: if you can’t navigate your way to reliable conclusions from measureable facts, you know nothing of real importance.
Carl,
[[[Why do you think physicists who got out of that field because they couldn’t keep up went into economics and finance? Because many of the mathematical tools developed for handling strongly interacting many body systems — e.g. generalized Brownian dynamics (with memory kernels) or perturbations of hydrodynamcs and thermodynamics away from their realm of strict applicability — turned out to be extremely useful in understanding economic systems.]]]
If they were so useful then why did they crash the economy making basic mistakes that any economic historian would easily recognize? At least if they stayed in physics they wouldn’t have done any harm to the nation. And once again I see you use the cop out of “they didn’t know how it would be misused used”. Sorry, but what did the physicists think political leaders would do with the A-Bomb? Worship it as a beautiful physics experiment that was successful? The inventors of derivatives knew exactly how they would be used, that is what they were getting the big money for…
The question is not why the ex-physicists invented new toys. That’s what they do. That’s for what, as you say, they were paid — and being paid to do something is widely, and correctly, seen as a strong signal that society generally approves of what you do, by the way.
The question is why their managers, who I am quite sure had plenty of economics degrees and history courses under their belt, made such disastrous management decisions. These were guys specifically charged with deciding whether the cool new tools invented in the lab would work in the real world the right way. Charged with keeping the company from losing money, if nothing else. Why did they, who were actually paid to make these decisions, screw them up?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest it wasn’t because they absorbed too much physics knowledge from their underlings.
And once again I see you use the cop out of “they didn’t know how it would be misused used”
It’s not a cop-out. It’s the only rational way to correctly assign individual responsibility in a complex society. If you get into the terrorist calculus that says anyone bears responsibility for a thing if by some action, or lack of action, he could have prevented it, then you open the door to collective guilt, to the literal terrorist argument (If you don’t give me a plane to Cuba, you’ll be guilty of the murder of this hostage), standard teenager arguments (If you don’t let me go to this party, I’ll become depressed and kill myself — and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT.), sociology “root causes” lies (9/11 was America’s fault for not being sensitive enough to Islam abroad), vicious racism (The Jews were responsible for the Holocaust because they were clannish and insensitive) and other such collectivist whiner garbage, all of which make it much harder to rationally assign responsibility.
Responsibility lies with those directly charged by the nature of their job for making decisions, a good proxy for which is whether or not they get paid to make those decisions. Physicists at Los Alamos were paid to build nuclear weapons. Politicians in Washington were paid to decide whether and how to use those weapons. Hence the responsibility for Hiroshima is Truman’s, not Oppenheimer’s, Tibbets’s, or the guy who put air in the tires of the Enola Gay before it took off.
Sorry, but what did the physicists think political leaders would do with the A-Bomb?
Drop it on Japan, of course. Thus winning the war with far fewer loss of American lives. And after that? Keep it around to threaten, if necessary, future Hitlers with such destruction that they wouldn’t even think of invading Poland. They seemed to have been right on both counts.
Carl,
Hmmm. You need to study a bit more on history. In fact several of the physicists involved argued against its use…
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm
Document 16: Memorandum from Arthur B. Compton to the Secretary of War, enclosing “Memorandum on ‘Political and Social Problems,’ from Members of the ‘Metallurgical Laboratory’ of the University of Chicago,” June 12, 1945, Secret
Source: RG 77, MED Records, H-B files, folder no. 76 (copy from microfilm)
[[[Physicists Leo Szilard and James Franck, a Nobel Prize winner, were on the staff of the “Metallurgical Laboratory” at the University of Chicago, a cover for the Manhattan Project program to produce fuel for the bomb.]]]
[[[Concerned with the long-run implications of the bomb, Franck chaired a committee, in which Szilard and Eugene Rabinowitch were major contributors, that produced a report rejecting a surprise attack on Japan and recommended instead a demonstration of the bomb on the “desert or a barren island.”]]]
So at least some of the physicists recognized the potential social impact of their invention. But then that generation was trained to be more then mere technicians. Especially those from Europe where a strong tradition of education in liberal studies was still the norm, which included reading the Greek classics.
But that was not the case of the physicists who caused the meltdown. (and yes they were physicists. Look up Econophysics…) In fact they don’t even accept responsibility today. And folks like you support them by claiming the mangers above them didn’t understand the risk. If they felt their manager were too stupid to understand the risk, then weren’t the physicists assuming the moral responsibility by giving them the tools for destruction? How is what they did any different then giving a loaded gun to a five year old?