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.CB SUN DAY AND THE ETHICAL PROBLEMS OF ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS

[These remarks are adapted from an article "RESERVATIONS ABOUT
SUN DAY" not printed by the %2Stanford Daily%1.  The original
emphasis was not on engineering ethics but on the dangers of
deciding engineering issues by choosing up political sides,
and I apologize for the not having time to revise it enough].


	Sun Day is an attempt to get greater emphasis put on solar
energy by the technique of political demonstration.  Its premise
is that the country devotes insufficient resources to developing and
using solar energy.

	The country is already putting a certain amount of effort into
solar energy, and there is nothing wrong with advocating that it should
increase these efforts.  However, some aspects of the Sun Day promotion
are probably harmful.
.item←0

	#. Some of the promoters of Sun Day, including
its leader Denis Hayes, have explicitly declared their intention of using
.<<Denis is how he spells it>>
Sun Day to recruit support for the anti-nuclear movement.
Other sponsors of Sun Day, such as Mayor Bradley of Los Angeles,
are also supporters of nuclear energy.  One can bet that Hayes and
his 26 paid organizers (according to the %2New York Times%1) will
succeed in giving Sun Day an anti-nuclear tone, and that Mayor Bradley
will end up surprised at the use made of his support.

	#. "Putting politics in command" of scientific and technological
issues has been disastrous in the past.  One example is the
Lysenko movement in the Soviet Union in which enthusiasm for the
idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited led to
misinterpreting the evidence, ascribing bad motives to people who
disagreed and putting them in concentration camps, to many years
of optimistic claims for imminent success, and finally to a collapse
of the whole effort with no result whatsoever.  The point is that
political enthusiasm can sustain losing science and technology for
many years.  Substantial resources were wasted on Lysenkoism from
1939 to 1965, and scientific genetics was completely suppressed
from 1948 to 1953.
Soviet recovery from Lysenko took place in two stages.  With the
death of Stalin, putting people in camps for wrong views in genetics
stopped, but Kruschev retained some enthusiasm for Lysenko.  When
Krushchev was ousted in 1965, all support for Lysenko stopped.
Soviet recovery from Lysenko would have been much more difficult if
the suppression had been worldwide.
Some of the solar power enthusiasts are also ready to ascribe bad
motives to anyone who is insufficiently enthusiastic.

	Medvedev's book on Lysenkoism (of which I have only read
reviews) gives examples of how scientists and agricultural
engineers were corrupted by the political support of bad science.

	A second example is the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" with
its call for back yard steel plants.
Ideology said that each commune should make its own steel and that
all efforts should be devoted to the task.  Nature said that good
quality steel cannot be made (with then available technology) in
small plants with acceptable inputs of labor and materials.
The Chinese had to abandon the effort, and it took them many years
to recover from the misdirection of resources.
No matter how much political
enthusiasm backs it, a really bad technological policy will
eventually lose.  The laws of nature cannot be violated, and the only way to
understand nature is with all the objectivity that can be mustered.

	Some of the American solar enthusiasm is based on a similar
idea - that electricity should be generated house by house, or block
by block.  It doesn't follow that the idea is bad, just because it
is analogous to the Chinese idea, but much of the enthusiasm for
it comes from the same source.  My own look at the technological
possibilities convinces me that the present ideas for local energy
generation are bad.  I will bet that they cannot achieve the costs
or the reliability of the present electric system.

	One of the advantages cited by enthusiasts is that it would
force the people on each block to co-operate in the installation,
operation and maintenance of their solar system.  In me, and I
suspect most people, the prospect arouses dread at the thought of
attending endless block meetings occupied with the question of whose
fault it was that the leaves aren't being kept swept off the solar
collectors.

	Since the American political system does not allow the
suppression of scientific and technological points of view, and anyway
the Sun Day promoters are not demanding that rival views be suppressed,
we are unlikely to suffer the technological disasters of Lysenkoism
and the Great Leap.

	#. The Government's promotion of solar energy has
already resulted in a certain amount of intellectual corruption
among scientists and engineers.  This corruption takes the form
of carrying out demonstration projects when there is no idea that
the project will lead to an econmically viable result.  Consider
the Livermore "solar powered surrey" with its roof of solar
cells.  I will bet that the people who built it don't seriously
consider it as a prototype of anything useful.  When money becomes
available to satisfy a politically generated enthusiasm, then
engineers and scientists sometimes abdicate their responsibility
to undertake only projects which they believe can lead to
scientific knowledge or a useful device.  They feel that the
politicians have taken this responsibility off their hands.

	One foolish demonstration project on the Peninsula was Dial-a-Bus.
It demonstrated that people would buy 50 cent taxi rides if the bus would
really come when called - otherwise not.  When the Federal Government
stopped subsidizing the cost, the project collapsed.

	I will bet that some of the Stanford solar projects are
equally irresponsible.

	#. The Government is already supporting at some level
almost all the potentially good
ways of generating solar energy - such as the attempts to bring down the
costs of solar cells and the use of solar energy for space heating in some
areas of the country.  Unfortunately, it is also supporting projects that
demonstrably have much greater costs than nuclear or coal energy.  (The solar
boiler is such a project, because the boiler and generator which use
essentially the same technology as in a nuclear or coal burning plant and
which constitute most of the cost of such plants has a duty cycle of less
than thirty percent, because a solar plant generates electricity at full
power when the sun is well above the horizon and not obscured by clouds).

	Even in the solar cell area which has real possibilities, the
Government has been less than honest in setting target costs for
solar cells that are unrealistically high.  It is wrong to assume that
solar cells can go into general use for electric power when the costs
per peak watt equal the total cost of a nuclear or coal system - making
no allowance for storage or the other parts of the system.
There are also unjustified assumptions about the continued escalation
of coal and nuclear costs.

	I fear that the political muscle generated by the Sun Day
promotion will have the effect of postponing the solution of America's
energy problems.  It reinforces the Carter Administration's tendency
to decide technological issues on the basis of which group of political
supporters deserves to be rewarded, and which group of potential opponents
needs to be bought off.

.bb Addendum on ethical problems for engineers

	Engineers and scientists face ethical problems when the
the government or their employers become enthusiastic about
technologically doubtful or even downright bad approaches to problems.
The right thing to do is not always clear.  Hear are some of the
situations than can arise:
.item←0

	#. The most obvious occurs when the engineer is asked to
work on something where he is sure the benefits are illusory and
the effects harmful.

	#. Next we have the case where he merely neglects to consider
whether the project is soundly based.  Clearly someone could work
for ten years on solar towers without being forced to consider the
Bethe argument on why they cannot be as cost effective as nuclear
energy.  Can he merely say that is his bosses' job to make such
comparisons?

	#. The issues that arise most sharply at Stanford concern
making proposals for government support of research aimed at solar
energy or some other government enthusiasm.  If the faculty member
doesn't really share the government's belief that the project is
likely to be useful or that good science is being done, he shouldn't
make the proposal.  Fortunately, his own long term self-interest
will motivate him to stay away from dead end projects.  He
must consider that his reputation 10 years later will not benefit
from projects subsequently abandoned.
.begin verbatim

John McCarthy
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
.end