Edmund Storms writes:
> Of course people have always been ignorant. However, that deficiency has always
> been relative to what they needed to know. Throughout most of history, such
> people had very little power. This has now changed. Not only must more be known
> to make a rational decision, but the bad consequences of ignorance are greater.
That is a good point. With things like nuclear weapons, leaders can cause vastly more harm than they could previously. Still, political leaders have had great power in the past, and they caused mayhem such as World War I and China's Great Leap Forward. Even in ancient times leaders triggered wars and famines that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
As for knowing a lot, I agree that modern times call for a larger mass of technical, detailed knowledge, but the intellectual challenge for a leader has not changed much. Projects such as the Great Wall of China or the transcontinental railroad required enormous managerial skill and highly detailed knowledge. They took far more knowledge than any single individual could master. Thousands of years ago, the job of running civilization already exceeded the abilities and imagination of the smartest individual person. Experts were needed then just as they now, and the main job of leaders has been to appoint and judge the performance of experts, and to settle disputes between groups of experts. A modern American president or DoD Secretary never makes any technical decisions himself. When the experts all agree, he invariably goes along with their decision. When groups of them disagree, and he must make the choice, and for the most part he has to depend on intuition, majority vote, or a sense of which expert is wiser. After all, if the technical issues were easy to understand, the issue would have been decided at a lower level.
I am not trying to excuse the administration, but I think we should try to understand how mistakes such as this are made. I think problems usually occur when some fool or neo-con fanatic at a lower level dismisses the advice of the real centrifuge expert, and substitutes some nitwit idea about what those aluminum tubes are for. I expect everyone above that level in the chain of command -- including the president -- sincerely came to believe those tubes were for a centrifuge, and the poison gas really was fired off by Iraqi troops. No leader can possibly know enough about centrifuges or poison gas to judge. A president or a DoD sec. has to be good at asking questions and recognizing fools; he does not actually have to know lots of technical details himself. He could not possibly know enough details. Clinton is a policy wonk and a smart cookie by all accounts, but he was taken in by the poison gas story. Sec. Powell knows orders of magnitude more about weapons than I do, yet he was taken in. He never thought to stop and ask: "Say, are we sure about that gas?" If I were in his place, I suppose I would not think to ask either. I would just assume that some poison gas expert in the Pentagon nailed down the details years ago, and knew precisely who did what to whom. I guess there was some experts in the CIA who knew better, but he could not pick up the phone and call the Sec. of State, could he? People can't do that in a giant bureaucratic organization. The Sec. of State would be on the phone 24 hours a day if every low-level expert were to call him with information he considers important.
This obviously is one of the major problems holding back cold fusion. Many leaders, including oil company executives, honestly do not feel comfortable judging calorimetry or mass spectroscopy. In 1989 I assumed such people generally have a technical background, but I have learned otherwise. These people really do rely on their staff scientist experts, and most of the staff scientists, unfortunately, dismiss CF without bothering to read the papers. It does not occur to the executives to question the staff judgement, or to probe, or to read the papers themselves.
At least, that is the impression I get from my infrequent contacts with the execs, people at EPRI, university presidents, and others.
- Jed
