An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

― Werner Heisenberg

In today’s world from work to private life to public discourse, experts are receding in importance. They used to be respected voices who added deep knowledge to any discussion, not any more. Time and time again experts are being rejected by the current flow of events. Experts are messy and bring painful reality into focus. With the Internet, Facebook and the manufactured reality they allow, it’s just easier to dispense with the expert. One can replace the expert with a more comforting and simpler narrative. One can provide a politically tuned narrative that is framed to support an objective. One can simply take a page from the legal world and hire their own expert. The expert is a pain to control, and expertise is expensive. Today we can just make shit up and it’s just as credible as the truth, and much less trouble to manage. Today our management culture with its marketing focus has no time for facts and experts to cloud matters. Why deal with the difficulties that reality offers when you can wish them away. The pitch for money is much cleaner without objective reality to make things hard. Since quality really doesn’t matter anyway, no one knows the difference. We live in the age of bullshit and lies. The expert is obsolete.

The more interviews that an expert had done with the press, Tetlock found, the worse his predictions tended to be.

― Nate Silver

I will acknowledge that the problem is somewhat of a modern problem where everyone can feel like an expert. Anyone can publish stuff online whether its Twitter, Facebook or a blog (fingers pointing at myself). There is a lot of self-promotion and institutionalized catfishing going on. As a result, almost, anyone can be a self-identified expert, and as a consequence no one is an expert. Meanwhile our educational system is completely out of date with modernity, and people have no ability to tell shit from shinola. People are not educated to think critically, instead they are indoctrinated to be servile pawns of the management class. As a result, the masses are utterly incapable of judging legitimacy of sources and trusting credible sources. The impact of this illegitimate basis of reality, trust is crumbling, and people increasingly choose to listen to the voice that matches their own biases. This is creating a huge number of problems as the truth of the world begins to diverge from any objective reality. This whole process is leaking over into the technical world although the effects are subtle. Most acutely the tendency to produce marketable results has replaced quality as the focus. Difficult problems and unforeseen results are easily ignored when something more comforting can easily be manufactured. When that comforting creation produces funding for more work, the ruse gets all the validation it needs from our increasingly corrupt system.

Wise people understand the need to consult experts; only fools are confident they know everything.

― Ken Poirot

Listen to the experts. They got that way for a reason.

― Erica Larsen

When leaders lack expertise, nothing else works

― V.S. Parani

Experts are complicated, difficult, hard to control, and bring painful objective reality to the table. When subjects are difficult it is appealing to choose the simpler and cheaper point-of-view. An expert will steer you away from this and keep the conversation from over simplifying things. Experts also tend to be passionate about their topics of interest. As a result of their passion, the expert is hard to control. This is an issue with management who want to control everything. All the realities that the expert brings up only make the work harder. Thus, the expert makes everything less in control, more difficult and expensive. What’s the point of applying expertise if you can massage and manage the results into something nice and marketable. With abysmal standards for quality there is no reason to deal with complex realities any way. Everything is simply a sales pitch. The reality and expertise only make the job of success harder. Experts only matter if you have high standards and want to accomplish something real.

Reality is messy and full of problems. The expert knows this and provides the best way to navigate the mess. Since reality has become optional and the objective is a marketed result, the expert is also optional. Messy reality is also a problem for marketing, which needs to be simple. Problems that are hard to solve are risky too. This is also something to be avoided. The best way to avoid a potential failure is to focus on past success and simply repackage it into something new. Since there aren’t any experts there to digest the results, the ruse will likely work. This sort of cozy relationship is widespread. Repackaged, and marketed results are simply easier to deal with and sell. If your remove experts and their passion for a topic, no one will notice anyway. We simply create a system where no real progress is made. All that is necessary is to keep any experts from being involved and the whole system works like a charm. Increasingly work and education are conspiring to cut off the supply of experts too. We are simply not learning or working in a way that creates deep knowledge and without depth of understanding there aren’t experts.

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

― Glenn Greenwald

All of these horrors have been slowing dawning on me while seeing our broader world begin to go up in flames. The evening news is a cascade of ever more surreal and unbelievable events. The news has become absolutely painful to watch. A big part of this horrible discourse is the chants of “fake news” and the reality of it. The problems with fake news are permeating the discourse across society. Science and scientific experts are no different. A lack of confidence and credibility in the sources of information is a broad problem. Unless the system values integrity, quality and truth it will fade from view. Increasingly, the system values none of these things and we are getting their opposites. For each thing experts acts as gatekeepers of integrity, quality and truth. As such they are to be pushed out the way as impediments to success. The simple politically crafted message that comforts those with a certain point of view is welcomed by the masses. The messy objective reality with its subtle shadings and complexity are something people would rather not examine.

The crux of the problem is the recession of experts from dialog is happening at research institutions too. It is more muted than the trend in the broader public sphere but happening quite surely. The expert is reviled as being harder to control, and generally more expensive. They represent a real threat to the encroachment of the management class and ethos into every leadership role. Expertise supersedes the concerns that the management focuses upon bringing up difficult topics like quality and correctness. These things cannot be managed in the shallow manner we have become accustomed to. Marketing pitches and sales do not lend themselves to the expert. Moreover, the expert will not bend to the politically correct messaging with a tendency to speak uncomfortable truths that managers would just as soon hide away. In today’s world every message is politically crafted, and facts are fungible. The credibility of experts used to transcend these concerns to the benefit of all, but now they are simply nuisances. Today experts are only used when they can be manipulated to the benefit of some vested interest.

At some point this trend must end. Our ability to function at all in the current environment is a testament to our societal largess. If we are to recover the expert needs to return to a more prominent role in providing competence and truth. The adherence to some basic set of facts and truths is necessary to keep our direction focused in a constructive direction. Deep knowledge and experience is invaluable in doing difficult things. The lack of objective reality in our dynamics is evidenced by the chaos we are descending into. Some common ground would assist the orderly solution of problem. Experts provide an objective reality that is sometimes unremittingly unpleasant, and difficult to deal with. It often opposes deeply held beliefs and views. We need this sort of input to our struggles. People need to be challenged and consider their beliefs critically. Some problems need to be confronted head on and viewed in an objective manner. We should welcome this much the same as the doctor’s or dentist’s visit. Unpleasant and uncomfortable, but necessary for our health. As long as we allow ourselves to avoid the painful truth by thrusting experts out of the public life, our problems will grow, and we will continue to tumble into chaos.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

― John F. Kennedy

Ultimately leadership worth believing in and following would tell us some difficult truths. We would be encouraged to confront painful truths and make genuine efforts to overcome these. We would do some difficult things and court failure as a necessity for success. We should be committed to progressing toward a better world as a society through solving our most difficult problems. Experts are among our best sources for defining and solving such problems. As long as they are pushed out of the public sphere by political concerns, our most difficult problems will go undefined and lack solution. I would go so far as to say that our entire society is mostly headed backwards. We are not creating a better world, we are moving into a worse one. Lack of objective truths and basic facts is a big part of the recipe. Valuing, listening and engaging expertise is one way to reverse this worrying trend. Now we need leadership that can recognize how dire the danger is and do something. The rejection of expertise in managing our affairs is widespread and pervasive. We need real leadership to recognize that solving our collective problems needs expertise to be a part of the solution. We need to affirm the fundamental value of experts, facts and truth in managing our affairs. We need leadership with the courage to face reality and make difficult decisions. Expertise is a big part of defining that reality in a comprehensive manner that lends itself to action.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

― John F. Kennedy

 

 

Money is a great servant but a bad master.

― Francis Bacon

One of the clearest characteristics of our current research environment is the dominance of money. This only shadows the role of money is society at large. Money has become the one-size-fits-all measuring stick for science. This includes the view of the quality of science. If something gets a lot of money, it must be good. Quality is defined by budget. This shallow mindset is incredibly corrupting all the way from the sort of Lab’s where I work at to Universities and everything in between. Among the corrupting influences is the tendency for promotion of science to morph into pure marketing. Science is increasingly managed as a marketing problem and quality is equivalent to its potential for being flashy. In the wake of this attitude is a loss of focus on the basics and fundamentals of managing research quality.

Making money isn’t hard in itself… What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.

― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Doing science properly becomes an afterthought, and ultimately a lower priority. Doing the basic fundamental work for high quality research does not bring in money thus becomes optional. More and more the basics simply don’t get done. The core of managing research is talent management and development. It is about hiring, developing and retaining the best people for the work. If one thing is clear about our Universities and Labs, talented people are not important. There are those who might chafe at this, but talent is now the ability to gets lots of money, not do great work. Expertise is something all of these institutions are ceasing to value. Experts are expensive, and complicate things. Marketing is all about simple and experts tend to make things hard. Things are hard because they are. All of this is consistent with the overall diminishing ethics and integrity in public life. Rather than focus on a mission, or high-quality, money becomes the emphasis with mission and quality sacrificed as nuisance, and troublingly made equivalent to financial measures.

Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

― Voltaire

Money is a tool. Just like a screwdriver, or a pencil, or a gun. We have lost sight of this fact. Money has become a thing unto itself and replaced the value it represents as an objective. Along the way the principles that should be attached to the money have also been scuttled. This entire ethos has infected society from top to bottom with the moneyed interests at the top lording over those without money. Our research institutions are properly a focused reflection of these societal trends. They have a similar social stratification and general loss of collective purpose and identity. Managers have become the most important thing superseding science or mission in priority. Our staff are simply necessary details and utterly replaceable especially with quality being an exercise in messaging. Expertise is a nuisance, and expert knowledge something that only creates problems. This environment is tailored to a recession of science, knowledge and intellect from public life. This is exactly what we see in every corner of our society. In its place reigns managers and the money, they control. Quality and excellence are meaningless unless they come with dollars attached. This is our value system, everything is for sale.

What’s measured improves

― Peter F. Drucker

The result of the system we have created is research quality in virtual freefall. The technical class has become part of the general underclass whose well-being is not the priority of this social order. Part of the rise of the management elite as the identity of organizations is driven by this focus on money. Managers look down into organizations for glitzy marketing ammo, to help the money flow. The actual quality and meaning of the research is without value unless it comes with lots of money. Send us your slide decks and especially those beautiful colorful graphics and movies. Those things sell this program and get the money in the door. That is what we are all about, selling to the customer. The customer is always right, even when they are wrong as long as they have the cash. The program’s value is measured in dollars. Truth is measured in dollars, and available for purchase. We are obsessed with metrics, and organizations far and wide work hard to massage them to look good. Things like peer review are to be managed and generally can be politicked into something that makes organizations look good. In the process every bit of ethics and integrity can be squeezed out. These managers have rewritten the rules to make this all kosher. They are clueless about the corrosive and damaging all of this is to the research culture.

Make no mistake our research culture has been undermined systematically. The people at the top are acting in full accordance with the rules designed to make their job better and provide them with “ethical” justification. The pay structure and benefits have been systematically slanted to their advantage. Organizations are defined by their management talent rather than the technical talent. Managers are celebrated and held up as the emblems of organizational identity. Gone is the sense that managers are there to serve their organizations and enable the best work. The issue is the low-quality, low-integrity and low-ethics culture instilled at the top. These attitudes are in lock step with the rest of society. Across the organizations from industry to academia to government we see one set of rules for the management at the top and another set of rules for the peons laboring below. Ethical lapses and low integrity actions by peons are swiftly and mercilessly punished while the same actions by managers receive praise. Our management is creating a culture of hypocrisy and privilege then acting utterly oblivious to the consequences. We are a society where as the saying goes “the fish rots from the head”.  Our leaders lack ethical fiber and integrity while celebrating incompetence all while being compensated handsomely. They will all simply claim to be acting within the written rules and avoid any discussion of the moral, ethical and culturally corrosive implications of their actions. The new cultural norm is that the top of society rules with a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality. Our leadership is morally bankrupt and ethically corrupt; yet operating fully within the parameters of the rules or laws.

On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.

– Jack Welch

Once upon a time we had incredible research organizations across our society including industry, academia, and government. We have allowed a number of forces loose to destroy these societal treasures. One of the biggest forces undermining the quality and competence of our research is lack of trust. This lack of trust has manifested itself as an inability to take risks necessary for research quality. The lack of trust has also produced an immense administrative load that our management class delivers to make society happy. This is only one of the forces undermining research albeit a powerfully destructive one. The second force is equally harmful. This is the topic today, the dominance of money in managing and measuring science. Money has become the great measure of what is good and bad.  Rich is good, poor is bad.  If you are poor, you are a bad person. It is your fault. A big part of this force is related to the dominant business principle of today. Profit is king, and everything is OK if it benefits stockholders. This principle is undermining society as a whole and making life awful for the vast majority of people while enriching the upper class and powering inequality to record levels. The same poisonous principles have been adopted by research institutions almost reflexively. The impact on organization structure mirrors society. In addition to managing society’s lack of trust, the adoption of “business” principles to research have powered the management class. Along with these principles has come a redefinition of integrity, ethics and quality to be strongly associated with money. Simply having money makes things high integrity, ethical and high quality. Without money you have the opposite without regard to other facts (which are optional today anyway). Culture has followed suit.

Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society.”

–Peter Drucker

This discussion cannot be approached in a rational way without addressing the nature of our highest leadership today. We are not led by people with integrity, ethics or basic competence. The United States has installed a rampant symptom of corruption and incompetence in its highest office. Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom of the issue. He may become a bigger problem if allowed to reign too long, he can become a secondary infection. He exemplified every single issue we have with ethics, integrity and competence to an almost cartoonish magnitude. Donald Trump is the embodiment of every horrible boss you’ve ever had, then amplified to an unimaginable degree. He is completely and utterly unfit for the job of President whether measured by intellect, demeanor, ethics, integrity or philosophy. He is pathologically incurious. He is a rampant narcissist whose only concern is himself. He is lazy and incompetent. He is likely a career white color criminal who has used money and privilege to escape legal consequences. He is a gifted grifter and conman (whose greatest con is getting this office). He has no governing philosophy or moral compass. He is a racist, bigot and serial abuser of women.

He is a fucking moron.

– Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State under President Trump

In a nutshell Donald Trump is someone you never want to meet and someone who should never wield the power of his current office. You don’t want him to be your boss, he will make your life miserable and throw you under the bus if it suits him. He is a threat to our future both physically and morally. In the context of this discussion he is the exemplar of what ills the United States including organizations that conduct research. He stands as the symbol of what the management class represents. He is decay. He is incompetence. He is a pathological liar. He is worthy of no respect or admiration save his ability to fool millions. He is the supremacy of marketing over substance. He is someone who has no idea how ironic his mantra “make America great again” is completely undermined by his every breath. His rise to power is the most clear and evident example of how our greatness as a nation has been lost and his every action accelerates our decline. People across the World have lost faith in the United States for the good reason. Any country that elected this moronic, unethical con man as leader is completely untrustworthy. No one symbolizes our fall from greatness more completely than Donald Trump as President.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

― Peter F. Drucker

The deeper worry is that all of these problems will ultimately result in very real consequences. The signs are all around us and our leaders at every level act do nothing. We cannot violate the fundamentals of competence and quality for so long and not suffer ill effects. Reality will descend upon us and it will not be pretty. Just as the research in the United States is falling from its summit, the effects will be felt in other areas of life. The long-term impact could well be catastrophic. We can only fake it for so long before it catches up with us. We can allow our leadership to demonstrate such radical disregard for those they lead for so long. The lack of integrity, ethics and morality from our leadership even when approved by society will create damage that our culture cannot sustain. Even if we measure things in the faulty lens of money, the problems are obvious. Money has been flowing steadily into the pockets of the very rich and the management class and away from societal investment. We have been starving our infrastructure for decades. Our roads are awful, and bridges will collapse. 21^st Century infrastructure is a pipe dream. Our investments in research and development have been declining in the same time frame scarified for short term profit. At the same time the wealth of the rich has grown, and inequality has become profound and historically unprecedented. These figures are completely correlated. This correlation is not incidental, it is a change in the priorities of society to favor wealth accumulation. The decline of research is simply another symptom.

Money is not quality, money is not the objective. Money does not replace ethics and integrity. Reality matters and marketing does not replace quality and focus on the fundamentals. We need to prize people and prioritize talent and expertise if we want to succeed. Who we choose to lead us matters and the values they represent. It is time to choose differently.

Top 15 Things Money Can’t Buy

Time. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity.

― Roy T. Bennett

 

 

 

 

 

 

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

― Auguste Comte

After monotonicity-preserving methods came along and revolutionized the numerical solution of hyperbolic conservation laws, people began pursuing follow-on breakthroughs.  Heretofore nothing has appeared as a real breakthrough although progress has been made. There are some very good reasons for this and understanding them helps us see how and where progress might be made and how. As I noted several weeks ago in the blog post about Total Variation Diminishing methods, the breakthrough with monotonicity preserving came in several stages. The methods were invented by practitioners who were solving difficult practical problems. This process drove the innovation in the methods. Once the methods received significantly notice as a breakthrough, the math came along to bring the methodology into rigor and explanation. The math produced a series of wonderful connections to theory that gave results legitimacy, and the theory also connected the methods to earlier methods dominating the codes at that time. People were very confident about the methods once math theory was present to provide structural explanations. With essential non-oscillatory (ENO) methods, the math came first. This is the very heart of the problem.

Later I will elaborate on some of the technical challenges with ENO methods, but their first problem was related to their origin. Real progress is made by solving difficult problems in impossible ways. The methods preceding ENO were created to deal with real problems that could not be successfully solved. The innovation arose to solve the problems, not create better methods. The solution to the problems was allowed by better methods. This is key. Solving the problem is the thing to focus on without prejudice toward the means. Today’s research tends to define the means of progress a priori and results in an unnatural process. In addition, we need to be open to a multitude of means to solution. Progress and breakthroughs often come via serendipity and from places unexpected. ENO was a solution looking for a problem. This is why it hasn’t meant the level of success we had hoped for.

As I noted the monotonicity preserving methods came along and total variation theory to make it feel rigorous and tie it to solid mathematical expectations. Before this the monotonicity preserving methods felt sort of magical and unreliable. The math solidified the hold of these methods and allowed people to trust the results they were seeing. With ENO, the math came first with a specific mathematical intent expressed by the methods. The methods were not created to solve hard problems although they had some advantages for some hard problems. This created a number of issues that these methods could not overcome. First and foremost was fragility, followed by a lack of genuine efficacy. The methods would tend to fail when confronted with real problems and didn’t give better results for the same cost. More deeply, the methods didn’t have the pedigree of doing something amazing that no one had seen before. ENO methods had no pull.

A bit of deeper dive is needed here. Originally, the monotone methods were low accuracy, but exceedingly reliable (monotonicity is the feature of producing physical solutions without unphysical artifacts, i.e. oscillations). These low-order methods had their own artifacts, extreme dissipation making solutions to every problem essentially laminar and unenergetic. These solutions did not replicate what we seen naturally. Conversely, high accuracy methods came with oscillations and unreliability. To solve real problems with high-order methods seemingly ad hoc methods like artificial viscosity could provide greater reliability. Innovation came along and produced a solution where you could blend the high order methods with the original monotone low-order methods in an adaptive manner. All of a sudden you could get reliability along with most of the accuracy. Most importantly the complex energetic flows seen in nature could be simulated practically. Flows that are turbulent suddenly looked and acted turbulent. As if almost by magic the results were regarded. This magic caught people’s attention and drove almost complete adoption of these methods by the community.

Don’t mistake activity with achievement.

― John Wooden

Only after the interest in the community came along did the mathematical rigor join the fray. I’ll note that the preceding state of affairs had a good mathematical ground itself providing the foundation for progress. Most notably the barrier theorem by Godunov provided a clear challenge that the innovators needed to overcome. Godunov’s theorem told us that a linear second-order method could not be monotone (non-oscillatory). The key to overcoming the theorem was to move to nonlinear second-order methods where the discrete representation is a function of the solution itself. The new mathematics tied admissibility conditions for solutions together with the new nonlinear methods. We overcame existing mathematical limits by changing the rule and tied ourselves to modest and minimal requirements for the validity of the results.

ENO methods were devised to move the methods ahead. ENO took the adaptive discrete representation to new heights. Aside from the “adaptive” aspect the new method was a radical departure from those it preceded. The math itself was mostly notional and fuzzy lacking a firm connection to the same preceding work. If you had invested in TVD methods, the basic machinery you used had to be completely overhauled for ENO. The method also came with very few guarantees of success. Finally, it was expensive, and suffered from numerous frailties. It was a postulated exploration of interesting ideas, but in the mathematical frame, not the application frame. Its development also happened at the time when applied mathematics began to abandon applications in favor of a more abstract and remote connection via packaged software.

80% of results come from 20% of effort/time

― Vilfredo Pareto

In spite of this, the intrinsic weaknesses of ENO were exposed and have certainly improved over time. The adaptive stencil selection in the original ENO could produce genuinely pathological results including instabilities. The answer to this issue has canonically been provided by weighted ENO (WENO) methods. The methods were constructed to be intrinsically numerically stable. WENO also provided another benefit albeit only partially. If a solution is sufficiently smooth locally, the domain of dependence for the discrete representation can support a higher order method. WENO automatically selects this method. This was another decrement of ENO, the wastefulness of the method’s adaptively in places where is was unnecessary. The original ENO also could produce extreme sensitivity to small changes in the solution. An infinitesimal change in the solution can result in a completely different discrete method, and WENO cured this issue. Nonetheless, WENO was not a complete answer because of its intrinsic expense, and its modification of the high-order stencil when linear and nonlinear stability did not require it. Robustness of solutions could be compromised by unphysical solutions (often with negative densities, pressure or energies).  New limiters were devised to provide protection from these problems and improved the methods. In spite of all this progress, for difficult problems, WENO was still less accurate and more expensive than high quality second-order methods.

ENO and WENO methods were advantageous for a narrow class of problems usually having a great deal of fine scale structure. At the same time, they were not a significant (or any) improvement over the second-order accurate methods that dominate the production codes for the broadest class of important application problems. It’s reasonable to ask what might have been done differently to product a more effective outcome? One of the things that hurt the broader adoption of ENO and WENO methods is an increasingly impenetrable codes where large modification is nearly impossible as we create a new generation of legacy codes (retaining the code base).

Part of the adoption of the monotonicity preserving methods was the quantum leap in solution quality. This may not be achievable with other methods, or ENO & WENO. Part of the quantum leap derived its origin from the place the methods came from: innovative application solutions. Part was simply an incredibly valuable low hanging fruit that was harvested in the process of invention. A second part of the rapid adoption was a firm tie to the past where a hybridization of legacy methods could produce a fantastically more powerful method. ENO and WENO broke from this connection and was expressed as a completely different method that can’t be melded in. On the other hand, if ENO had started as a more incremental evolution from TVD methods, the methods could have been implemented as an extension of an existing code. This would have made the success of the methods more inevitable than difficult. Perhaps backing away from the path, we have been on and seeking a method that steps incrementally forward could stir real progress in methods.

Stark truth, is seldom met with open arms.

― Justin K. McFarlane Beau

Harten, Ami, Bjorn Engquist, Stanley Osher, and Sukumar R. Chakravarthy. “Uniformly high order accurate essentially non-oscillatory schemes, III.” In Upwind and high-resolution schemes, pp. 218-290. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1987.

Shu, Chi-Wang. “Numerical experiments on the accuracy of ENO and modified ENO schemes.” Journal of Scientific Computing 5, no. 2 (1990): 127-149.

Liu, Xu-Dong, Stanley Osher, and Tony Chan. “Weighted essentially non-oscillatory schemes.” Journal of computational physics 115, no. 1 (1994): 200-212.

Jiang, Guang-Shan, and Chi-Wang Shu. “Efficient implementation of weighted ENO schemes.” Journal of computational physics 126, no. 1 (1996): 202-228.

Rider, William J., and Len G. Margolin. “Simple modifications of monotonicity-preserving limiter.” Journal of Computational Physics 174, no. 1 (2001): 473-488.

Zhang, Xiangxiong, and Chi-Wang Shu. “Maximum-principle-satisfying and positivity-preserving high-order schemes for conservation laws: survey and new developments.” In Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 467, no. 2134, pp. 2752-2776. The Royal Society, 2011.

Greenough, J. A., and W. J. Rider. “A quantitative comparison of numerical methods for the compressible Euler equations: fifth-order WENO and piecewise-linear Godunov.” Journal of Computational Physics 196, no. 1 (2004): 259-281.

 

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

― Richard Feynman

When I got my first job out of school it was in Los Alamos home of one of the greatest scientific institutions in the World. This Lab birthed the Atomic Age and changed the World. I went there to work, but also learn and grow in a place where science reigned supreme and technical credibility really and truly mattered. Los Alamos did not disappoint at all. The place lived and breathed science, and I was bathed in knowledge and expertise. I can’t think of a better place to be a young scientist. Little did I know that the era of great science and technical superiority was drawing to a close. The place that welcomed me with so much generosity of spirit was dying. Today it is a mere shell of its former self along with Laboratories strewn across the country whose former greatness has been replaced by rampant mediocrity, pathetic leadership and a management class that rules this decline. Money has replaced achievement, integrity and quality as the lifeblood of science. Starting with a quote by Feynman is apt because the spirit he represents so well is the very thing we have completely beat out of the system.

Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

― Voltaire

If one takes a look at the people who get celebrated by organizations today, it is almost invariably managers. This happens internally to organizations, their external face and alumni recognition by universities. In almost every case the people who are highlighted to represent achievement are managers. One explanation is managers have a direct connection to money. One of the key characteristics of the modern age is the centrality of money to organizational success. Money is connected to management, and increasingly disconnected from technical achievement. This is true in industry, government and university worlds, the entire scientific universe. The whole post could have replaced “the rise of management” with the “rise of money”. We increasingly look at aggregate budget as coequal to quality. The more money an organization has, the better it is, and more important it is. A few organizations still struggle to hang on to celebrating technical achievers, Los Alamos among them. These celebrations weaken with each passing year. The real celebration is how much budget the Lab has, and how many employees that can support.

 People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

― Peter F. Drucker

The days of technical competence and scientific accomplishment are over. This foundation for American greatness has been overrun by risk aversion, fear and compliance with a spirit of commonness. I use the word “greatness” with gritted teeth because of the perversion of its meaning by the current President. This perversion is acute in the context of science because he represents everything that is destroying the greatness of the United States. Rather than “making America great again” he is accelerating every trend that has been eroding the foundation of American achievement. The management he epitomizes is the very thing that is the blunt tool bludgeoning American greatness into a bloody pulp. Trump’s pervasive incompetence masquerading as management expertise will surely push numerous American institutions further over the edge into mediocrity. His brand of management is all to prevalent today and utterly toxic to quality and integrity.

In my life, the erosion of American greatness in science is profound, evident and continual. I had a good decade of basking in the greatness of Los Alamos before the forces of mediocrity descended upon the Lab and proceeded to spoil, distort and destroy every bit of greatness in sight. A large part of the destruction was the replacement of technical excellence with management. The management is there to control the “butthead cowboys” and keep them from fucking up. Put differently, the management is there to destroy any individuality and make sure no one ever achieves anything great because no one can take a risk sufficient to achieve something miraculous. Anyone expressing individuality is a threat and needs to be chained up. We replaced stunning World class technical achievement with controlled staff, copious reporting, milestone setting, project management and compliance all delivered with mediocrity. This is bad enough by itself, but for an institution responsible for maintaining our nuclear weapons stockpile, the consequences are dire. Los Alamos isn’t remotely alone. Everything in the United States is being assaulted by the arrayed forces of mediocrity. It is reasonable to ask whether the responsibilities the Labs are charged with continue to be competently achieved.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

― Peter F. Drucker

The march of the United States toward a squalid mediocrity had already begun years earlier. Management has led the way at every stage of the transformation. For scientific institutions, the decline began in the 1970’s with the Department of Defense Labs. Once these Labs were shining beacons of achievement, but management unleashed on them put a stop to this. Since then we have seen NASA, Universities, and the DOE Labs all brought under the jack boots of management. All of this management was brought in to enforce a formality of operations, provide a safe or secure workplace, and keep scandals at bay. The Nation has decided that phenomenal success and great achievements aren’t worth the risks or side-effects of being successful. The management is the delivery vehicle for the mediocrity inducing control. The power and achievement of the technical class is the causality. Management is necessary, but today the precious balance between control and achievement is completely lost.

The managers aren’t evil, but neither are most of the people who simply carry out the orders of their superiors. Most managers are good people who simply carry out awful things because they are expected to do so. We now put everything except technical achievement as a priority. Doing great technical work is always the last priority. It can always get pushed out by something else. The most important thing is compliance with all the rules and regulations. Management stands there to make sure it all gets done. This involves lots of really horrible training designed to show compliance but teach people almost nothing. We have project management to make sure we are on time and budget. Since the biggest maxim of our pathetic management culture is never making a mistake, risks are the last thing you can take. It helps a lot when we really aren’t accomplishing anything worthwhile. When the fix is in and technical standards disappear, it doesn’t matter how terrible the work is. All work is World class by definition. Eventually everyone starts to believe the bullshit. The work is great, right, of course it is.

All of this is now blazoned across the political landscape with an inescapable sense that America’s best days are behind us. The deeply perverse outcome of the latest National election is a president who is a cartoonish version of a successful manager. We have put our abuser and a representative of the class that has undermined our Nation’s true greatness in the position of restoring that greatness. What a grand farce! Every day produces evidence that the current efforts toward restoring greatness are using the very things undermining it. The level of irony is so great as to defy credulity. The current administration’s efforts are the end point of a process that started over 20 years ago, obliterating professional government service and hollowing out technical expertise in every corner. The management class that has arisen in their place cannot achieve anything but moving money and people. Their ability to create the new and wonderful foundation of technical achievement is absent.

Greatness is a product of hard work, luck and taking appropriate risks. In science it is grounded upon technical achievements arising from intellectual labors along with a lot of failures, false starts and mistakes. Today’s highly managed World everything that leads to greatness is undermined. Hard work is taxed by a variety of non-productive actions that compliance demands. Appropriate risks are avoided as a matter of course because risks court failure and failure of any sort is virtually outlawed. False starts never happening any more in today’s project managed reality. Mistakes are fatal for careers. Risk, failure and mistakes are all necessary for learning, and ultimately producing unique and advanced ideas come from the intellectual product of a healthy environment. An environment that cannot tolerate failure and risk is unhealthy. It is stagnant and unproductive. This is exactly where today’s workplace has arrived.

Money is a great servant but a bad master.

― Francis Bacon

With the twin pillars of destruction coming from money’s stranglehold on science and the inability to take risks, peer review has been undermined. Our current standards of peer review lack any integrity whatsoever. Success by definition is the rule of the day. A peer review cannot point out flaws without threatening the reviewers with dire consequences. This has fueled a massive downward spiral in the quality of technical work. Why take risks necessary for progress, when success can be so much more easily faked. Today peer review is so weak that bullshitting your way to success has become the norm. To point out real shortcomings in work has become unacceptable and courts scandal. It puts monetary issues at risk and potentially produces consequences for the work that management cannot accept. In the current environment scientific achievement does not happen because achievement is invariably risk prone. Such risks cannot be taken because of the hostile environment toward any problems or failures. Without failure, we are not learning, and learning at its apex is essentially research. Weak peer review is a large contributor to the decline in technical achievement and the loss of importance for the technical contributor.

Perhaps the greatest blow to science was the end of the Cold War. The Soviet bloc represented a genuine threat to the West and a worthy adversary.  Technical and scientific competence and achievement was a key aspect in the defense of the West. Good work couldn’t be faked, and everyone knew that the West needed to bring their “A” game, or risk losing. When the Soviet bloc crumbled, so did a great deal of the unfettered support for science. Society lost its taste for the sorts of risks necessary for high levels of achievement. To some extent, the loss of ability to take risks and accept failures was already underway with the end of the Cold War simply providing a hammer blow to support for science. It ended the primacy of true achievement as a route to National security. It might be useful to note that the science behind “Star Wars” was specious from the beginning. In a very real way the bullshit science of Star Wars was a trail blazer for today’s rampant scientific charlatans. Rather than give science a free reign to seek breakthroughs along with the inevitable failure, society suddenly sought guaranteed achievement at a reduced cost. In reality it got neither achievement or economized results. With the flow of money being equated to quality as opposed to results, the combination has poisoned science.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

― Salman Rushdie

This transformation was already bad enough then the war on terror erupted to further complicate matters. The war on terror was a new cash cow for the broader defense establishment but came with all the trappings of guaranteed safety and assured results. It solidified the hold of money as the medium for science. Since terrorists represent no actual threat to society, technical success was unnecessary for victory. The only risk to society from terrorism is the self-inflicted damage we do to ourselves, and we’ve done the terrorists work for them masterfully. In most respects the only thing that matters at the Labs is funding. Quality, duty, integrity and virtually anything is up for sale for money. Money has become the sole determining factor for quality and the dominant factor in every decision. Since the managers are the gate keepers for funding they have uprooted technical achievement and progress as the core of organizational identity. It is no understatement to say that the dominance of financial concerns is tied to the ascendency of management and the decline of technical work. At the same time the desire for assured results produced a legion of charlatans who began to infest the research establishment. This combination has produced the corrosive effect of reducing the integrity of the entire system where money rules and results can be finessed to outright fabricated. Standards are so low now that it doesn’t really matter.

Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government– in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.

― Milton Friedman

One of the key trends impacting our government funded Labs and research is the languid approach to science by the government. Spearheading this systematic decline in support is the long-term Republican approach to starving government that really took the stage in 1994 with the “Contract with America”. Since that time the funding for science has declined in real dollars along with a decrease in the support for professionalism by those in government. Over time the salaries and level of professional management has been under siege as part of an overall assault on governing. A compounding effect has been an ever-present squeeze on the rules related to conducting science. On the one hand we are told that the best business practices will be utilized to make science more efficient. Simultaneously, best practices in support for science have denied us. The result is no efficiency along with no best practices and simply a decline in overall professionalism for the Labs. All of this is deeply compounding the overall decline in support for research.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

― Peter F. Drucker

What can be done to fix all this?

Sometimes the road back to effective and productive technical work seems so daunting as to defy description. I’d say that a couple of important things are needed to pave the road. Mostly importantly, the purpose and importance of the work needs centrality to the identity of science. Purpose and service needs to replace money as the key organizing principle. A high-quality product needs to replace financial interests as the driving force in managing efforts. This step alone would make a huge difference and drive most of the rest of the necessary elements for a return to technical focus. First and foremost, among these elements is an embrace of risk. We need to take risks and concomitantly accept failures as an essential element in success. We must let ourselves fail in attempting to achieve great progress through thoughtful risks. Learning, progress and genuine expertise need to become the measure of success and the lifeblood for our scientific and technical worlds. Management needs to shrink into the background where it becomes a service to technical achievement and an enabler for those producing the work. The organizations need to celebrate the science and technical achievements as the zenith of their collective identity. As part of this we need to have enough integrity to hold ourselves to high standards, welcoming and demanding hard hitting critiques.

In a nutshell we need to do almost the complete opposite of everything we do today.

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

― Richard Feynman