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Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the forest for a piece of bark on a tree. His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests, and practitioners should do more than just validate that projects meet the required specifications according to accepted standards, but that the industry -- from individuals to institutions -- should also operate with an ethical and moral imperative to learn and improve and grow the discipline at the current edge of its domain of competence. If "accepted standards" are shown to be wrong then it's not good enough to continue using them, as if the legal indemnification provided by standing behind an "accepted standard" is the only thing that matters.

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Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Asbestos turns out to cause cancer, and suddenly it's no longer an allowed building material. Or whatever.

TFA links to a 2014 post by Strong Towns [1] that describes exactly such a failure and espouses frustration at the lack of response. This post, among others, was cited as evidence for harassing the author over a short lapse of license (while it was not in active use), which was blown up into an uncharacteristic, disproportionate, and unwarranted demand to publicly sign documents admitting to dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. The existence of such a document regardless of details would be enough to completely discredit and dismiss all of the author's speech. It's rank protectionism and speech silencing in the guise of following rules and procedures.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-p...

...a drunk driver hits people crossing in sleet (ie, low visibility) and a crosswalk is so certain to have helped that whoever didn't put one there deserves to be sued.

I'm slightly curious to know how closely the actual reason for removing the half-assed crosswalk rather than turning it into a real one matches the clearly editorialized reason he's accusing them of having. I suppose there's no possible way it could have been something like "too many drivers won't respect it and it'll give pedestrians a false sense of safety" or such.

By arguing the validity of the article's points you implicitly admit the space to discuss it and thus we fall directly into free speech. The important debate here is not whether Strong Towns is or is not correct, the debate is whether people can use government bureaucracy and process as a stick to silence speech they dislike. None of the allegations made by the license board have anything to do with the validity of Strong Towns' claims, just that he signed his name with "PE" while being fully qualified as a PE but with a lapsed license.

I don't really agree with the perspective Strong Towns presents, but I'd agree that this is an egregious overstep.

Like what Oregon was doing to a guy several years back.

> Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future.

Do you think it happens automatically or every time? It happens when ethical people make it happen, partly through organizations like Strong Towns.

> His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests

And I explicitly stated how that should be done in my comment. That is not "a piece of bark on the tree". It's the forest. As long as "professions" depend on governments to license them, the problem will continue.

He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity and he paid the requisite late fee and accepted other reprimands, there's nothing left that needs protection here. They don't need a signed statement admitting dishonesty and fraud that can be bandied about in unrelated contexts to cancel his advocacy speech about how the engineering profession needs to make some changes.

> He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity

Yes, I know that. And yet the state licensing board kept after him. In other words, the state licensing board is obviously not applying objective professional standards to his behavior. Why not? Because it's a government organization, i.e., it's political, not professional. So the only way to fix the problem he's having is to not have the licensing organization be a government organization.

> In other words, the state licensing board is obviously not applying objective professional standards to his behavior. Why not? Because it's a government organization, i.e., it's political, not professional.

Please, you have this backwards. It is acting like a private professional guild, which gets to choose its own criteria for who gets to be in the club. Who gets to “define” what HTML is or who defines what is conduct unbecoming of an Elk.

As the strong towns guy is out, as government entity the licensing board is not permitted to do that: it has to follow the public criteria (which are set by statute and litigated by the courts) and, regardless of statute, follow constitutional constraints such as those of the first amendment.

I think it is unhelpful to approach every question with the assumption that every government action is inherently corrupt.

I agree that if the organization is applying rules unfairly or disproportionately then we need to fix it, but I don't see how privatizing it will do anything but push the problem around. Human organizations have a natural tendency towards politicization because humans are inherently political creatures, orgs should be designed to resist abuse regardless of where their roots are planted.

As anyone who has ever dealt with workplace politics knows, "political" acts in professional contexts are not limited to the government.

A private licensing board would be just as liable to do such nasty things.

Plenty of government organizations are not political; that's how most of the civil service works.

They are not political up until the moment an important enough issue comes up to make them political.

That "because" is glossing over a massive leap in logic. "Not applying objective professional standards" is not just a government problem, as pretty much anyone with experience in a large-scale private organization can attest.

This is a conspicuously narrow view on what politics are.

A professional association or licensing board or whatever similar structure, regardless of whether or not it is embedded in government, is textbook political.

That's entirely separate from the issue of whether or not they exercise restraint and engage constructively when their credibility is challenged.

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