Dead quick decision making

I’ve been reading Stuff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Its actually a really intriguing book; Its written with enough humor to prevent a depressive mood from enveloping its reader.

In attempting to calibrate human bone stimulant Rick Lowden, a DOE researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, needed to shoot actual bone to calibrate the stimulant. He stated that “I was offered sixteen cadaver legs to shoot at. DOE told me they would terminate my project if I did that. We had to shoot pig femurs instead.” (p. 143)

This is bureaucratic politically correct bullshit at its worst. What the DOE is stating that they rather restrict a legitimate researcher from designing their experiment in a way that would most accurately represent what they are trying to determine than face political pressure for performing legitimate research.

Here is the political system at its worst. Bureaucrats are rightfully fearful of political reprisals for doing their job, even if it has unseemly aspects. This is akin to instructing the military to win a war but not to kill any people on the enemy’s side. Such a request is ludicrous and would be quickly dismissed as such. (Notably we do try to reduce casualties of non-combatants as much as possible.)

But here is the crux. If politicians do not want specific types of research to be performed they should state that in the laws authorizing the research. Don’t tell bureaucrats to do research and then chide them for the scientifically justifiable way to perform that research.

this is just a symptom of excessive scrutiny and criticism of people who have to make many decisions based on vast amounts of information in short periods of time. This happens to many professionals including medical professionals, police officers, military personnel, and communications assistants.

Medical professionals are asked to have volumes of Journal articles to compare, police officers are expected to follow multiple and arcane legal presidents, military personnel must consider political dispositions, their orders, and international law, communications assistants must apply a 2,000 page procedure manual. It is unreasonable to cause significant harm to those who make decisions on large amounts of information that in hindsight were incorrect, if they made the decision honestly in good faith.

Of course if it weren’t for excessive litigation this wouldn’t be an issue.