3 ms·

Defer to the experts.

ImFatYoureFat 16y ago
Why? How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?
- j_baker 16y ago
  I can only conclude that you do surgery on yourself because you aren't willing to trust the experts.
  - ImFatYoureFat 16y ago
    I didn't want to side track to discussion into an argument over whether laymen can think critically about complex issues or not but this is kind of a ridicules accusation. There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas. I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    that would be as crazy as trying to fix your own blown out oil well
- hga 16y ago
  Well, "the experts" are informed by the physics, mechanical engineering and chemistry that's been learned over the years WRT to oil drilling and these problems. As some of the other threads have illustrated, you certainly can't ignore the basic physics required, which I'm sure many if not most of us never learned or have long forget (or we're just very rusty at solving these sorts of problems). If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.
- moultano 16y ago
  You asked what I would do, so I answered. :) More seriously, the biggest barrier to laypeople coming up with practical solutions to this is that all of the forces involved are orders of magnitude outside of our experience. None of us has any intuitive concept of what things are like 5000 feet below the surface of the water. None of us has any idea what oil is like in that volume, let alone at that pressure and temperature. I'd be more charitable about common sense solutions to the cleanup, since that seems like the type of thing we can have an intuition about. The bottom of the ocean however is an entirely alien environment, with (for all intents and purposes) different physics. The only people with an intuition for this are the ones working on the solution professionally.
- wlievens 16y ago
  Because nobody here knows anything about how stuff works at that depth. And a million other reasons. You can't "hack" this can you?
mkramlich 16y ago
The "experts" have let this go unstopped for 5 weeks now.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  Correction: The "experts" have tried in vain for 5 weeks to stop this, and have thus far failed. Even the most cynical of minds cannot possibly conjure up the conspiracy theory that everyone is just sitting around doing nothing. It is in BP's own best interests to fix this ASAP - the magnitude of fallout this creates for them increases as the problem drags on. One of the less impressive aspects of our new information culture is that every Joe Schmoe now thinks he is an expert materials engineer, rocket scientist, political expert, economist, sociologist, historian, physicist, chemist, biologist, medical professional, and general. As a trained mechanical engineer turned software guy, I find it ironic that we softies bitch about laymen's assumptions about our field, and we are aggravated constantly by other people who assume that everything just takes "a couple of days" to build... yet we are so quickly to leap to the same conclusion when it concerns a field that is not our own.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    On the conspiracy point, I disagree. Oil companies are mostly aligned with the Republican Party, and we have a Democratic president and Congress, Bush had a Katrina black eye, so one theory is that BP is "taking one for the team" in order to give Obama a black eye. Even Halliburton is involved, which Cheney led at one point and likely still has strong connections to behind the scenes. I'm not saying I 100% think that is what happening, or that they even caused the original accident in the first place, but there is political benefit at play here, which gives somebody a motive, somewhere. Just a theory, but I can't rule it out yet. Especially given what appears to me to be dangerous incompetence and/or a lack of planning, preparation beforehand, and a lack of hustle and applied common sense after the incident began. I have to wonder how much is due to incompetence and how much to evil/intent. Also, I'm not sure these experts have really "tried". If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc. -- it makes one wonder whether there could have been more attempts made earlier -- I mean, afterall, this person's hair is on fire. And whether they could have had more backup/failover techniques sitting on the sidelines ready-to-go quickly during the first few hours and days after the leak began. All the talk about the challenges of having the depth and pressure constraints are legitimate, but what should also be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person is that another constraint is time. Regardless of what particular technique is use to stop/reduce the leak, the most effective thing you can do is to implement it very early. The total damage to the environment will be proportional to how many hours/days/weeks the oil is left to leak into the sea. So making the investment in process and equipment and people and training to be able to stop this very early will pay off. Since a decent engineer could probably have told them there was a chance the blowout preventer could fail (for a variety of reasons) they should have had several alternate/backup plans to execute very soon afterward. Given that the magnitude of the downside impact could be so obviously huge. Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water. Just stop that flow from happening. Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure. With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work. But they all need to be tested (at 5000 foot depths) and fine-tuned and resourced and have people trained on before a real accident occurs. What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this. Also there have been big oil spills in the past and the companies involved almost always live to fight another day. Exxon Valdez was one of the biggest spills in US history. In the recent news about Apple overtaking Microsoft in market cap, that still only brought them up to #2. Know who was #1? Exxon. All costs/penalties/grief BP will get from this is really just going to turn into a dollar charge against their balance sheet. And they already have billions in cash. The negative PR/psych effect will slowly fade away. And if they have to raise prices, they just pass it on as a cost-of-doing-business to the folks who buy their product. Us.

Why? How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?

j_baker 16y ago
I can only conclude that you do surgery on yourself because you aren't willing to trust the experts.
- ImFatYoureFat 16y ago
  I didn't want to side track to discussion into an argument over whether laymen can think critically about complex issues or not but this is kind of a ridicules accusation. There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas. I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  that would be as crazy as trying to fix your own blown out oil well
hga 16y ago
Well, "the experts" are informed by the physics, mechanical engineering and chemistry that's been learned over the years WRT to oil drilling and these problems. As some of the other threads have illustrated, you certainly can't ignore the basic physics required, which I'm sure many if not most of us never learned or have long forget (or we're just very rusty at solving these sorts of problems). If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.
moultano 16y ago
You asked what I would do, so I answered. :) More seriously, the biggest barrier to laypeople coming up with practical solutions to this is that all of the forces involved are orders of magnitude outside of our experience. None of us has any intuitive concept of what things are like 5000 feet below the surface of the water. None of us has any idea what oil is like in that volume, let alone at that pressure and temperature. I'd be more charitable about common sense solutions to the cleanup, since that seems like the type of thing we can have an intuition about. The bottom of the ocean however is an entirely alien environment, with (for all intents and purposes) different physics. The only people with an intuition for this are the ones working on the solution professionally.
wlievens 16y ago
Because nobody here knows anything about how stuff works at that depth. And a million other reasons. You can't "hack" this can you?

mkramlich 16y ago

The "experts" have let this go unstopped for 5 weeks now.

potatolicious 16y ago
Correction: The "experts" have tried in vain for 5 weeks to stop this, and have thus far failed. Even the most cynical of minds cannot possibly conjure up the conspiracy theory that everyone is just sitting around doing nothing. It is in BP's own best interests to fix this ASAP - the magnitude of fallout this creates for them increases as the problem drags on. One of the less impressive aspects of our new information culture is that every Joe Schmoe now thinks he is an expert materials engineer, rocket scientist, political expert, economist, sociologist, historian, physicist, chemist, biologist, medical professional, and general. As a trained mechanical engineer turned software guy, I find it ironic that we softies bitch about laymen's assumptions about our field, and we are aggravated constantly by other people who assume that everything just takes "a couple of days" to build... yet we are so quickly to leap to the same conclusion when it concerns a field that is not our own.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  On the conspiracy point, I disagree. Oil companies are mostly aligned with the Republican Party, and we have a Democratic president and Congress, Bush had a Katrina black eye, so one theory is that BP is "taking one for the team" in order to give Obama a black eye. Even Halliburton is involved, which Cheney led at one point and likely still has strong connections to behind the scenes. I'm not saying I 100% think that is what happening, or that they even caused the original accident in the first place, but there is political benefit at play here, which gives somebody a motive, somewhere. Just a theory, but I can't rule it out yet. Especially given what appears to me to be dangerous incompetence and/or a lack of planning, preparation beforehand, and a lack of hustle and applied common sense after the incident began. I have to wonder how much is due to incompetence and how much to evil/intent. Also, I'm not sure these experts have really "tried". If someone's hair catches on fire on Monday at 3pm, then BP's first attempt to put out that person's hair fire is at 8pm, then next on Wednesday, then next about 2 weeks later (failing again), then 2 weeks later the next attempt, etc. -- it makes one wonder whether there could have been more attempts made earlier -- I mean, afterall, this person's hair is on fire. And whether they could have had more backup/failover techniques sitting on the sidelines ready-to-go quickly during the first few hours and days after the leak began. All the talk about the challenges of having the depth and pressure constraints are legitimate, but what should also be obvious to any reasonably intelligent person is that another constraint is time. Regardless of what particular technique is use to stop/reduce the leak, the most effective thing you can do is to implement it very early. The total damage to the environment will be proportional to how many hours/days/weeks the oil is left to leak into the sea. So making the investment in process and equipment and people and training to be able to stop this very early will pay off. Since a decent engineer could probably have told them there was a chance the blowout preventer could fail (for a variety of reasons) they should have had several alternate/backup plans to execute very soon afterward. Given that the magnitude of the downside impact could be so obviously huge. Also, this is one of the cases where the fundamental elements of the problem are actually pretty simple: oil leaking into water. Just stop that flow from happening. Lots of ways to do that. Yes it is deep. Yes high pressure. With a decent background in physics and engineering I think one can come up with lots of solutions and tactics that would work. But they all need to be tested (at 5000 foot depths) and fine-tuned and resourced and have people trained on before a real accident occurs. What angers a lot of people in this case is the sense that BP and friends did not do this. Also there have been big oil spills in the past and the companies involved almost always live to fight another day. Exxon Valdez was one of the biggest spills in US history. In the recent news about Apple overtaking Microsoft in market cap, that still only brought them up to #2. Know who was #1? Exxon. All costs/penalties/grief BP will get from this is really just going to turn into a dollar charge against their balance sheet. And they already have billions in cash. The negative PR/psych effect will slowly fade away. And if they have to raise prices, they just pass it on as a cost-of-doing-business to the folks who buy their product. Us.