Challenger Disaster

Dombrowski - Challenger Disaster

The background of the story is that the O-rings sealing the joints in the rocket were charred causing the rocket to tear apart and lead to the disaster. The decision to launch was an ethical consideration because the information about the o-rings was known beforehand. After the disaster there were two reports, one presidential and one congressional comity. There are also ethical dilemmas in these reports as to how they were written.

The first thing we learn about ethical considerations in writing is that the audience has a responsibility too. One must question and scrutinize the things that you read and not always take them for what they are. This does not take away any responsibility from the writer, who also needs to think about what they are doing, but places some responsibility on both ends.

The next big topic for writing ethically is the idea of misproportion. The things that are given the most attention should be the most relevant material. Order is also important. You don't want to hide your most crucial facts in some small section in the middle of a different topic. This can mislead the reader and sometimes people do it on purpose.

The next thing the author advises staying away from is writing as a memory dump. This means writing tons and tons of material just to put it all out there on the record. Writing, especially communicating, should be edited and consolidated to get the point across as effectively as possible.

More good advice is to use consistent language. Once you have used a term to define something don't use different ones even if they are synonyms. It will only lead to confusion in the reader. Precise language is also preferred over ambiguous for obvious reasons of not trying to confuse your reader.

An interesting topic the author brought up was the inherent nature of any information. Are we to believe that all information is inately problematic and when any two people look at it they could come to different conclusions? Or is there only one true and correct conclusion from and one set of data? The author also mentions that it is unlikely but possible that there is no correct conclusion. I think that it happens a lot that people come to different conclusions so data must be problematic to begin with.

Another interesting discussions is that of the change in perspective. This is what lead the management to go ahead with the decision to launch even though the engineers did not want to. They were affected by different concerns such as reputation and scheduling. An interesting way to think about it is what if the assumption of our legal system was guilty until proven innocent instead of innocent until proven guilty.


Harty Part 6

overview: Yes, ethics applies even to strictly technical writing. This is something the author thinks is being forgotten today.

Winsor - Challenger

-Differing perspectives looking at same data
-Passing bad news(especially upwards)
-Bad news not being believed
-stress the seriousness in your writing

Are we not allowed to be optimistic?

Darrell Huff - How to lie with statistics

-statistics as semantic nonsense
-one problem can be a bias in the selection sample (ex. yale survey)
-truncating graphs leads to false visuals
if it is labeled then the reader should be able to tell
he mentions that the difference is like that of writing "a rise of 7%" and changing to "a rise of a whopping 7%"

-know the difference between mean and median (if you are not sure which one was used or how the data was collected then dont even bother with it)
-Beware of cause-effect issues
if they say that smokers make worse grades because 99% scored lower on a test it could be that the low scorers all began smoking after they found out their grade)

Dan Jones - Ethics of Style

Ethics is a person making choices of behavior

Many different professions have their own code. Does this mean that ethics can be tweeked or that there is no general set of ethics. I think this simply gives a base that can be agreed on and gives them something to follow. Many things are present in most, such as honesty and fairness.