CEE 454: Sustainable Small-Scale Water Supplies

1. CEE 454: Sustainable Small-Scale Water Supplies School of Civil and Environmental Engineering 1 Monroe L. Weber-Shirk

2. Why am I teaching this course? • Experience in refugee camps in Honduras in 1982-83 • The spark of interest: What makes slow sand filters work? • Engineers for a Sustainable World • The unevenly expanding human knowledge space • Groupthink • The myth that the environmental engineering challenge of providing safe drinking water has already been solved

3. nanotechnology Water purification pharmaceuticals Uneven Knowledge Space WMD Learn from adjacent knowledge spaces!

4. You should be taking a course in business or information technology • Environmental Engineering is a dead profession • The science behind environmental engineering is already well understood • Environmental engineers have been applying the same solutions for the past 80 years • Providing everyone on the planet with safe drinking water only requires the money and political will to apply known technologies Discussion time! Do you agree?

5. Groupthink • Groupthink refers to faulty decision-making in a group (coined by Irving Janis, 1972) • Groups experiencing groupthink do not consider all alternatives and they desire unanimity at the expense of quality decisions • Irving, Janis. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Irving, Janis. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

6. Results of Groupthink True, true, true! • Examining few alternatives • Not being critical of each other's ideas • Not examining early alternatives • Not seeking expert opinion • Being highly selective in gathering information • Not having contingency plans Why would a group adopt these behaviors?

7. Some Symptoms of Groupthink • Having an illusion of invulnerability • Rationalizing poor decisions • Believing in the group's morality • Sharing stereotypes which guide the decision • Exercising direct pressure on others • Not expressing your true feelings • Maintaining an illusion of unanimity • Using mindguards to protect the group from negative information These are the people who filter the information coming to the group. They make sure that outside information is suppressed or reinterpreted if it fails to support the cherished assumptions of the group. As a result of this process, the group makes its decision only upon information that is supportive of that decision. This builds up a self-fulfilling cycle of correctness. The illusion of rightness and unanimity is preserved; no disruptive questioning or information is admitted by the group.

8. Some Solutions to Groupthink • Using a policy-forming group which reports to the larger group • Having leaders remain impartial • Using different policy groups for different tasks • Dividing into groups and then discuss differences • Discussing within sub-groups and then report back • Using outside experts • Using a Devil's advocate to question all the group's ideas • Holding a "second-chance meeting" to offer one last opportunity to choose another course of action

9. Groupthink? Who me? • The Emperors new clothes, WMD, Space shuttle Columbia • How might Environmental Engineers fall into the trap of groupthink? • I have my favorite technology. I don’t want to discover that it is obsolete and that the years of effort that I put into improving that technology have been a waste • We all know this technology is responsible for saving us from disease. What do you mean, “Where is the proof?” Compare the incidence of waterborne disease in the US with that of the developing world. • How are you encouraged to “groupthink” by your Cornell Education? • What can we do to reduce “groupthink” in this course? Unwilling to explore alternatives How is pressure against dissent exerted? How is denial more pleasant than reality?

10. Engineers are more susceptible to groupthink than mathematicians • The data isn’t always easy to interpret • We are forced to make decisions with insufficient data • We deal with complex systems that can’t easily be modeled • We quote each other’s hypotheses so often that we begin to accept them as theory • Is anyone going to disagree with me? Jeffrey S. Lehman

11. Role of Myth in Environmental Engineering • Myth can be a useful way of understanding a complex reality • creation stories • Myth can also be used to describe generally accepted but unproven hypotheses (my usage here) • Myth #1: Science and engineering aren’t influenced by myth because they are based on the scientific method

12. Historic Examples of Myth • Malaria (bad air disease hypothesis) • Streams purify themselves in 1 mile • The air coming out of the ground under conditions of low or sinking groundwater causes typhoid

13. Current Environmental Engineering Myths (or suspects!) • Slow sand filters ripen because of biological growth in the filter bed • Chlorine disinfects dirty water • Chlorine eliminated typhoid fever from the US • We already know how to solve the environmental engineering problem of 1 billion people not having access to safe drinking water

14. Expose the Myth • Let’s expose some more environmental engineering myths • Don’t believe everything I say • You should always be asking, “How do we know that?” • I am not immune from the impulse to create simply explanations • Beware of groupthink

15. The Challenge: Sustainable Small-Scale Water Supplies • We need the brightest and the best to create new and better solutions so we can meet the goal of providing everyone with safe drinking water • This challenge is apparently more difficult than building a space station, designing a fuel cell, or inventing the world wide web • So let’s role up our sleeves and begin…

16. Ways to Get Involved • Engineers for a Sustainable World • http://www.esustainableworld.org • Conference at Stanford (Sep 29 – Oct 2, 2004) • Internship program • CEE 492 Engineers for a Sustainable World: Engineering in International Development • CEE 454 – a design project that matters • Design That Matters (DtM) • DtM acts as bridge to bring problems identified by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the communities into the classroom for university engineering and business students to tackle in their courses and research. • http://www.designthatmatters.org

17. Course Organization • Website: home to everything • Homework (teams) • Oral reports (teams) • Project (teams) • Exams (individuals… sorry!) • Graduate students can take the course as CEE 759 (if the course number matters to you)

18. Introductions • Name • Something you did this summer • What do you hope to learn in this course?

19. First Assignment • Public Health, Environmental Engineers, and Typhoid

22. Mesa Grande: Waiting for water

23. Water in Colomoncagua

24. Respectful Engagement • At Cornell, the aspiration is for a different norm. Instead of respectful disengagement, the goal is respectful engagement. A willingness to stay engaged with problems and arguments, to keep pushing for a shared vocabulary and a shared understanding. You will encounter on this campus a post-Enlightenment sensibility, under which more and more corners of human experience are susceptible to critical analysis and debate. Fewer and fewer domains of life will feel like matters of purely personal taste. And you will find yourself spending many hours late at night and early in the morning searching for that shared understanding. There is, indeed, a lot to ponder. Jeffrey S. Lehman New Student Convocation Address August 21, 2004

25. Negative Capability • And here is where you will begin to master a quality that the poet John Keats called "negative capability." Keats appreciated that whenever people are facing two conflicting arguments, they naturally seek rapid closure. They try to figure out which argument is right and which is wrong. Which is stronger and which is weaker. And Keats wrote admiringly of how William Shakespeare could resist the impulse for closure, how he could "luxuriate in uncertainties and doubts, entertaining two opposing ideas without irritable reaching after fact and reason." This Zen-like ability to entertain two opposing ideas without irritable reaching after fact and reason is called "negative capability." Jeffrey S. Lehman New Student Convocation Address August 21, 2004