It's amazing what can be accomplished if nobody cares who gets the credit.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

On criticism

`Criticism is the most important skill an engineer can learn. This is something they don't teach you in school, because how can they? You mostly work on your own things. Sometimes you work with a group of one of two other students, all of whom are mostly interested in finishing whatever they're doing. This is the nature of academia, and it's unavoidable.

But when you work for a living, the time you spend actually working on a project goes down significantly. The odds of you being the only engineer on your project are low. The odds of you creating everything from scratch are lower. Engineering is a group effort, and a big part of any group effort is reviewing what others do, and indeed, what you yourself do.

That's one of the reasons that I have become so incensed with the political climate -- and I should qualify this by saying that this feeling is not recent. Criticism of George W. Bush during his years was sometimes fair, but sometimes utterly unfair, and criticism of Barack Obama has been largely unfair. There have been some valid criticisms, but unfortunately, they have come primarily from his own party. He has not stuck to his schedule for closing Guantanamo Bay; he has involved us in more, instead of less, foreign conflict; he has done a very poor job at reining in spending. This last accusation has been repeatedly leveled from the right, and it is perfectly justified. His projected deficits for the next 5 years are unacceptable.(1) This is in stark contrast to one of his goals as President, which was to rein in spending. I will discuss these criticisms in some detail a bit later, but for now I want to address why I'm very disenfranchised with the overall style of criticism of Obama, and to a lesser degree, of Bush before him.

It's easy to criticize a president. He is in the news 24/7/365. He is probably the most public figure in the world. He's going to make decisions every day, and people are going to disagree with him. Those people should lay out broadly why they disagree with him, specifically on what points they disagree with him, and propose their own solutions. As to the former two, "everything," is not an acceptable set of points, nor is it acceptable to say "the vast majority of things," even if it is true, and use that to revert back to "everything." There is rarely a "right" or a "wrong" answer, and beyond everything else, it's important to acknowledge that. Before you disagree with something you must understand its merits - how can you criticize something you don't understand? You must lay out both the costs and the benefits to your proposed solution, as well as highlighting the differences and similarities with the solution presented by your opponent.

That's not what's happening right now. That's not even close to what's happening right now. What's happening right now is an ideological shit-flinging contest. Ideology helps keep us focused and directed, so there is merit to it, but if it puts in a double shift as your logic center as well, you're in trouble. For Republicans, this is what is happening, or at least the face they're presenting to the public. I don't doubt for a second that every Republican in Washington is capable of being a reasonable, intelligent lawmaker. Contrary to public belief, you have to be very smart to make it in Washington. But it seems GOP policy is preventing them from doing so.

The health care debate is, of course, a marvelous way to frame this discussion. Republicans have been railing against the bill from day one, but strangely, have produced very few specifics that they disagree with. This is, of course, a clever strategy. They haven't really campaigned against the provisions in the bill, nor against the idea of universal health care. They have campaigned against The Bill. The Bill is a socialist menace. The Bill is a government takeover. They will fight to repeal The Bill. From what I understand (and take this with a grain of salt, as it's one of those things that I Heard On The News but have not been able to validate) most people tend to support the provisions of the health care bill when presented to them individually, but those same people will turn to rabid opposition when asked about The Bill. People frequently say "we need health care reform, but not This Bill." I don't understand what that means, because that presents no criticisms of the President's proposal. They call it a Deficit Increaser and a Jobs Killer without understanding what those things mean. Vague ideas are presented -- 'This bill will force small businesses to stop hiring' but with little to no substantiation. In what way will it do this? It will run up costs for small businesses. What is the mechanism by which costs will be run up? Money. For which businesses will costs be run up? Small ones. What kind of small businesses? The small ones. Which provisions in the bill will run up these costs? The ones that target small businesses.

But none of these demonstrate any understanding of the workings of the system. No proposals were brought forth during the process to amend portions of the bill that Republicans believed would harm small businesses. During the health care summit, complaints were brought forth about various things -- the process by which the bill was created, the philosophy contained in the bill, and even a few of the specifics in the bill -- but no solutions were proposed. It is not a criticism until you finish that process. "This provision will unfairly harm this type of business in this manner, and here is an alternative." Until that is done, you're just complaining. And "scrapping the project" is not an acceptable suggestion.

Let's talk specifics for a moment, as a specific criticism of this nature demands specific examples.

Let's take the conservative response to the recent oil spill disaster. (2). Rush Limbaugh recently called the oil spill "Obama's Katrina," and conservatives are having a grand old time comparing Obama's long reaction time (8 days before he was on site) with the long reaction time (4 days before he was on site) of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina.

Now, I'd like to take a moment, if I could, to discuss some of the criticisms leveled at the Bush administration about hurricane Katrina. A lot of mud was slung his way for the subpar response of FEMA to the crisis. And let's be clear, FEMA's reaction was mediocre at best; it left a lot of people and as president at the time, it was George W. Bush's responsibility to accept responsibility for that, which he did. That being said, Michael Brown was directly in charge of the enormous fuck-up that was the Katrina response. To provide an example of valid criticism, Brown allocated inadequate resources for evacuation, failed to even consider the possibility of civic unrest, and his information network was poorly deployed--he learned of the starving refugees in the Convention Center only via media coverage. His coordination was overall lacking, and on these points in particular, and on more salient points -- late-in-the-game search-and-rescue operations, subcontracted corpse retrieval work, perceived preferential treatment of non lower-class citizens--he could have improved his response by requesting additional support from the national guard and giving commanders the authority to engage in immediate and constant search-and-rescue operations, and by coordinating information gathering by placing agents on the ground at sites of interest. These are valid criticisms of the response to Hurricane Katrina. "George Bush hates black people," is not. "George Bush was an incompetent fuck-up" is not.

Similarly, criticisms of Obama's response to the oil spill have ranged from the unfair ("This is Obama's Katrina" -- no populations were at risk during Obama's time of inaction, and he has, in fact, taken many tangible steps to ensure that BP fixes the mess it made at no expense to the taxpayer, and is taking steps to ensure that if BP can't do it, the government will, at no expense to the taxpayer.) to the absurd ("Obama waited for the spill to worsen to push public opinion against offshore drilling" --Former FEMA director Michael Brown, the man in charge of the botched Katrina response (3)). None are actual criticisms. Just ideological nonsense. A valid criticism would be, "Obama could have arrived in the areas affected by the oil spill sooner to make a public announcement and reassure the public." This is not the criticism that was made.

Another easy example is the Republican response to the recent efforts towards Wall Street reform, which mirrors their response towards the health care reform package. ("We want to do something, but Not This Bill.") Their responses are vague and ideological -- "Regulation will stifle wall street, and it will Kill Jobs and Cost the Taxpayers Money," with no specifics, and with no intent to improve the ideas presented, only to shoot them down.

If I were to take umbrage with a specific of one of my projects, and suggest to the team I work with that it be scrapped and started over, I'd be laughed out. If I were to limit my criticisms of their work to saying what socialist nincompoops they all were, I'd be fired.

Why would we hold politicians to any lower of a standard?

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