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Comment by thomasz | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand why you assume that the risks were not disclosed to the government. In my eyes, it's way more likely that the government decided to go ahead anyway. This was one of Saddam Hussein's prestige projects - telling him that it couldn't be done could've been fatal.

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So, crazy idea (and completely inapplicable here, because dictatorship). Is there any government in the word that has an empowered "science" branch of government as a check and balance?

I'm not suggesting science is apolitical, but I feel like there's some merit to "We wanted to build a broken dam because {political considerations}, but the {science branch} vetoed it."

Kind of like a Supreme Court, except informed by scientific knowledge rather than law.

That's an interesting thought. I believe the EPA, FDA, OSHA, etc, are supposed to be the quality control science branches of the government. But instead of preventative maintenance, they just dole out fines after some violation.

The problem is that these organizations are headed by appointed politicians. And I've heard in the EPA at least there's an institutional boundaries between researchers (who do science) and administrators (who make decisions). I can try and dig up a citatation if you're interested, but my impression was scientists researchers were encouraged not to become involved in policy decisions.

In practice, the administrative agency apparatus works this way in the US. Projects go through things like environmental impact assessments, unless they're explicitly exempted. Of course, calling it a "science branch" is wildly optimistic; even theoretically objective assessments are skewed towards the favored result.

I wish! Though implementation would be tricky and might heavily politicize science in a bad way (as opposed to a good way; which could also happen). The closest I've seen anywhere to that is in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

Here's an excerpt from the "Martian Constitution" in the accompanying book "The Martians": """All laws passed by the congress shall also be subject to review by the constitutional and environmental courts, and a veto by these courts cannot be overridden, but shall be grounds for rewriting the law if the congress sees fit, after which the process of passing the law shall begin again."""

I found the rest here: http://pastebin.com/YeR74Yyb

Good find. I remember the constitution they hammered out in the books was interesting, as there was a lot of Aldo Leopold "think like a mountain" stuff.

(Of course, in the book, they've discovered a genetic repair mechanism that effectively makes people immortal, so I suppose it's still self interest)

While Saddam Hussein may not have been a friend of human rights I doubt he would have had European engineers killed for declining to work on his project.

He might have killed the people who reported to him, who in turn did everything to make that project happen, future cost and risk be damned.

"To understand his tantrum one must understand the kinship he feels with the great men of history, with history itself. Lack of reverence for an image of Copernicus might suggest a lack of reverence for Saddam."

From : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of...

Dictators are violent, not stupid. They understand risks, and make decisions like any other leader.

Most dictators tend to behave in ways that doesn't exactly encourage their minions to be open and honest with them - the unhappy outcome of the 1937 Census in the Soviet Union being a good example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_%281937%29

I think it would have been a foolishly courageous engineer who told Saddam that his dam project wasn't going to work...

>>I think it would have been a foolishly courageous engineer who told Saddam that his dam project wasn't going to work...

That isn't how it works. You don't just walk up to the dictator and troll him/her in the face about their project.

You discuss engineering merits/demerits, risks/advantages make a brief conclusion and leave it there. You leave the decision to the them. Its a totally different thing for them to neglect all of that and continue with their will.

But a good engineer would talk on the project's merit instead of talking about the dictators foolishness on the project.

If the ego of the person in command is dependent on a certain outcome, evidence of that outcome's impossibility will seldom be met with rational thought.

From the linked Atlantic article:

> Samarai had detailed evidence to back up his views—photographs, news reports, numbers. The Iraqis could expect nothing more than swift defeat, and the threat that Iran would take advantage of their weakness by invading from the north.

And Saddam's response?

>To Samarai's surprise, Saddam did not seem angry with him for delivering this bad news. In fact, he acted appreciative that Samarai had given it to him straight. "I trust you, and that's your opinion," he said. "You are a trustworthy person, an honorable person."

Saddam didn't listen to him, but he also certainly didn't punish him for giving him the truth.

I'm reluctant to accept the caricature of evil dictators who have a "kill now" button on their desk for anyone who tells them something they don't like. I don't believe anything could get done that way in the real world.

Certainly the census you're referring to is a sad example of political denial, but it doesn't say anyone was killed (just imprisoned, and while prison isn't a lot of fun, it's a far cry from execution) and my guess would be that the article glosses over a lot of detail, like meetings with Stalin where he said "Hmm, I don't think these results are gonna work, they're very politically inconvenient and must not represent reality. Fix it. Let me know if you can't, and I'll find someone who can." The statisticians failed to "fix" it and failed to inform Stalin that he needed to find someone else to conduct the manipulation he sought.

I understand that statisticians with integrity would decline the responsibility to change the numbers (though statisticians with a sense of self-preservation would resign rather than release accurate details), but numbers on paper are a much different ballgame than "this structure will literally fall apart and kill millions of people when it does".

Reports and studies are manipulated to fit an agenda constantly because they're so easy to manipulate. This happens all the time now and surely it happened all the time in the past. The nice thing about construction is that you can't manipulate the outcome. Something either stands or it doesn't, regardless of human opinion, threats, or insistence.

Look up Christopher Hitchen's lecture on how Saddam Hussein consolidated power in his Baathist purge of ~1979.

Step 1: Randomly select a large portion of the assembled party as enemies of the state / party.

Step 2: Enlist the remaining party members to execute the first.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit!

It's a formula even more twisted than Hitler and Stalin.

Nine minutes: https://youtu.be/CR1X3zV6X5Y

Isn't that a very good reason for not telling the truth to government?

Not really. That's a very good reason for going ahead when told to go ahead (instead of the ethical refusal to go through with the project).

One possibility is that a lot of people did tell the truth to the government, but the government kept asking more questions until it got the answer it wanted. There's always somebody willing to be paid to do that, and it isn't necessarily an indictment against a profession that it doesn't have literally 100% compliance to some ethical standard, on the grounds that I don't tend to indict entire professional fields for failing to accomplish the literally impossible.

>> There's always somebody willing to be paid to do that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1m-AEWMRVo

If those firms knew if the extreme risks then they should have decided not to accept the work!

I think it's pretty much a given that Sadaam Hussein, even back then, was a dictator who wouldn't necessarily put the safety of his people first.

I do not think that because he was a dictator he would not care at all.

Probably, he did not want to destroy Mosul and all its people. And even if this did not worry him, taking into account that he was doing this for publicity (either internal or international), he would not have wanted the dam to fail and kill thousands of people.

Yes, if he wanted to kill all the people of Mosul, I'm sure there would have been a lot things that could have been done for much cheaper than building a dam, and maintaining it for 30 years.

Bad does not equal stupid.

Iraq was relatively friendly with the US up until its invasion of Kuwait. We liked Saddam back when his main thing was fighting the Ayatollah.

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