To Lessen War

What's my mission? My mission is to encourage engineers to reflect on their impacts on society . I've been thinking about missions because they accomplish a few things . They narrow down our pursuits - I find that my pursuits have been very broad and have seemingly only broadened since I started graduate school. I would like to investigate the neurology of engineering and the intersection of innovation and humanitarian design and do my own design for charitable causes, but I cannot do them all, and keeping them all in mind hinders me. Missions also give us purpose, as opposed to jobs - they motivate us, and I find I have been lacking in motivation, recently. What my mission means:  When I say engineers , I don’t limit that to engineering students. I would like to expand the definition beyond those who have degrees, but that might be too broad of a mission, so I narrow it back down. In particular I am interested in engineers that are on the job. This means that my wor...

I've been thinking about this principle for a while, and I wanted to talk about it in the context of research. "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." - George Bernard Shaw It is obviously relevant because research is about discovering the truth and telling it to people. However, as the quote claims, just telling the truth is not enough. Take the example of climate change. There are whole centers created in order to communicate climate change in such a way that it changes people's behavior. Telling people that they are making the world a worse place for themselves and their children, building the mounting evidence of the truth that climate change is caused by human activity, it is not enough. It is not enough, to tell the logical truth. It is either eclipsed by some other more attractive idea (regaining your coal jobs), or it is easy to ignore. People don't want to be scolded, and just flat out telling someo...