I have observed that bringing "bad news" to one's management in the corporation is not a career-enhancing move. The "bad news" may be simply the reality that a particular project simply cannot be done with the allocated money, people and time. But this is limited to my experience, and I cannot generalize.

However, reading the New York Times today, in particular, about the New Orleans catastrophe, I was struck by how many times the warnings of engineers and scientists of impending catastrophe were ignored by our leaders, the people in the position to be able to authorize the recommended mitigatory actions.

Then there is the non-reality based Iraq war, the rising debt and vanishing savings of the American family, the possible housing bubble, the burgeoning national debt for which one day we all shall pay; that US Intelligence was aware of the ringleader of the 9/11 plot, and so on.

Is this a problem of the Bush years? Casting my mind back, I can think of at least two examples that show it is not. The first is, in the aftermath of the first Shuttle disaster, physicist Feynman castigating NASA management for evading reality about the real risks of space shuttle flight, what he said can be found here

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The second example has to do with the Internet stock bubble. The bubble was based in part on the utterly unsupported claim that Internet traffic was doubling every three months. This claim was endorsed by, among others, the Chairman of the FCC. The research that showed that there was no basis to this claim was mostly ignored.

Odlyzko's talk

The myth of the Internet explosion led to many disastrous consequences for the United States; its telecom industry is in shambles, and the myth led to e.g., Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom being able to fool a lot of people for a long time.

But people were willing to be fooled. The information was out there. For NASA management, there was what the engineers were saying. For the investors of the bubble years, the lack of evidence for various business plans and results was also apparent.

e.g.,

Second Thoughts on the Information Highway

by Clifford Stoll

Doubleday, 1995

From somewhere comes the hubris that reality can be infinitely manipulated to obtain whatever one wants.