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water · epistemics · karachi · measurement
A hydrologist in Karachi repeated herself word for word this week, and that unchanged sentence is the most informative thing published in six months
CB
coldlens_bramOP2124-08-05
Farida Qadeer gave a reporter the same sentence she gave one in the spring — one dry monsoon from being back where we started — and she gave it, by her own account, because nothing had happened to change it. I want to explain why that is the most useful paragraph in this week's paper, because our profession has trained the public to read repetition as senility and novelty as knowledge, and it is exactly backwards. A scientist repeating herself is doing one of two things. She is a fossil, holding a sentence she formed before the evidence moved and defending it out of vanity. Or she is reporting an unchanged measurement, which is a result, and a harder one to publish than a new number because no editor has ever cleared a front page for the phrase 'as previously stated.' You can tell the two apart and it takes about four minutes. Ask her what would change the sentence. The fossil cannot answer, or answers with conditions that can never be met. Qadeer answered in the same breath, unprompted: a monsoon, aquifer recovery, throughput above the draw. She has named her own falsifier in public. That is not stubbornness, it is a woman keeping a promise to the record. The second sentence is the one I would have framed and hung in every newsroom on the planet: do not write that Karachi has solved its water, write that the corridor held, those are different sentences. Six words of difference and about four million people of consequence. She was not correcting a reporter. She was correcting a whole grammar of relief, in which a system that survives its test is described as having passed rather than as having spent everything it had.
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ coldlens_bram2124-08-05
coldlens_bram, you have written a defence of the sentence and I would like to say something about it as a sentence, which is the only expertise I have here. 'Do not write that Karachi has solved its water. Write that the corridor held. Those are different sentences.' She uses the imperative twice and then, instead of explaining, she simply names the fact of the difference and stops. That last clause is doing something quite ruthless: it hands the distinction back to the reporter and makes him the person who chose. Anyone who prints the wrong one afterwards has not been misled, he has decided. That is the rhetoric of somebody who has been misquoted before and has stopped complaining about it and started engineering against it. There is an 1890s pamphlet by a canal inspector — the kind of thing that survives only because someone bound it with something else — whose whole argument is that a report should be written so that its abuse requires effort. He lost that argument in his own century. Qadeer is winning it in ours, one clause at a time. And bram, since you are being generous today: your own posts have used that construction three times this year, so either you read the same pamphlet or the trade teaches it.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ coldlens_bram2124-08-05
I have written the engineer's version of that sentence eleven times and it has never once made a paper. My section inspection reports have said the same three things about the eastern culvert since 2119: joint movement within tolerance, cathodic protection degraded, backlog unfunded. Same three lines, three years, because nothing changed and I am not going to invent a change so the file looks alive. What happens is that unchanged text gets read as a form letter and filed by somebody who has decided nothing is happening there. So Qadeer is not just being rigorous, she is fighting the filing system, and the filing system usually wins. bram, while you are in this register and everyone is admiring your restraint: I asked you a fortnight ago for the widening as a rate and you gave me a shrug in three paragraphs. A hair more extreme sizes nothing. I cannot pour a hair. I have two barrier sections going to design review and I would rather build to your honest error bar than to a committee's optimism, but I need a number with units on it, and I need it this month, not in the next bulletin cycle.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ tidewrench_oksana2124-08-05
Pinning this one, and stating the reason as always: I have had four reports this week about reposts of the Karachi piece running under the headline that the city has solved its water, which is precisely the sentence the hydrologist asked people not to write. That is not a rule violation and I am not removing anything — it is happening off the board — but it is a live demonstration of bram's point and it belongs in the resources shelf next to the Ward 12 audit reply. House standard from here, and it is a request rather than a ruling: when you quote a source in these threads, quote the qualification in the same post as the claim. Not the following post. The same post. Half the fights I moderate are between two people holding opposite halves of one accurate sentence. — pax, mod.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ coldlens_bram2124-08-05
corridor held. my block also held. we have one pump for four buildings and it held. if pump goes we hold nothing, so is the pump that held or is it us. anyway they are different sentences like she says.