Obama spill panel big on policy, not engineering | Hacker News Reader

Obama spill panel big on policy, not engineering

news.yahoo.com

9 pointsjackfoxy6 comments

Don't need engineering experts to run a cleanup, which is inherently a management/organizational undertaking, not directly an engineering problem. Familiarity with the subject material is really all that's needed. They need to be able to put the problem and proposed solutions into context, and have a basic understanding of what makes sense and what doesn't so they can guide the things.

If these people were on the ground floor, working on the minute technical details, I'd be more worried. As they aren't, I'm not.

(And reading the comments on the Yahoo article are worse than your average YouTube comments. It's mind-blasting.)

Well, truth to be told, Obama is NOT an engineer, is he?

He is a policy maker, so he should concentrate on policies so long as: 1. his policies generally agree with the popular consent and the constitution (the US is a democratic republic, last time I check) 2. his policies are flexible enough for engineers to work around in corner cases.

Otherwise, why the complain?

Seems reasonable. Policy drives the energy industry.

And, wrt. the oil spill, isn't the popular theory that the disaster was caused by shoddy engineering due to a lack of oversight? A policy panel could be the beginning of a reset button on the supposed regulatory capture of the Minerals Management Service.

Oversight is a nice word, but rarely beneficial when formalized as an ongoing process. To see this, do you believe that the loss of an entire platform, death of 11 workers, and possible loss of all mineral rights in US territory wasn't enough to motivate the company to follow the engineering recommendations of their best and brightest?

Along those same lines, anyone who would have had the insight to avoid this kind of terrible accident would be highly valuable in the industry, and easily lured away from a mid-level bureaucratic position. An oversight commission will be left with only busy-bodies and those with out of date knowledge and skills.

If it were mining and drilling policy, perhaps. But this is more about energy policy.

Sigh... Reporting like this is why traditional media is dying a not-so-slow death. It's big on policy because it's a policy panel. The engineering panel was formed separately and includes several high-profile scientists / engineers, including:

Jonathan Katz - astrophysics professor at Washington University

Richard Garwin - IBM Fellow Emeritus, helped develop the original hydrogen bomb

George Cooper - civil engineering emeritus prof at UC Berkeley

Alexander Slocum - mechanical engineering prof at MIT

Tom Hunter - president of Sandia Laboratories

These are some freaking smart people. Let them work on solving the problem without having to deal with all of the politics.

EDIT: the article detailing the scientific team's roster: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-14/obama-sends-bomb-in...

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