The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements
rootsofprogress.org
rootsofprogress.org
Brunel's contention that structural engineers should be qualified to make their own decisions unencumbered by regulation makes sense on the face of it. But then, what qualifies a structural engineer? Licensing, a product of regulation.
Like many things, regulation is, in isolation, neutral. It can serve the common good, or it can serve the interests of an unrepresentative cabal; it can be forward-looking and adaptable, or it can be hastily drafted by unqualified functionaries. Why couldn’t the regulators in Brunel's day have carved out an open-ended “unless otherwise demonstrated” around the use of iron structural members?
"Why couldn’t the regulators in Brunel's day have carved out an open-ended “unless otherwise demonstrated” around the use of iron structural members?"
The answer is partly in your statement: "regulation is, in isolation, neutral." Looking around at regulatory/ bureaucratic bodies, "in isolation" is rarely (never?) achieved. Satisfying ambiguous "unless otherwise demonstrated"-esque clauses that are enforced by unelected paper pushers is very much part of Brunel's concern.
The core of your argument is that regulators are unelected (vs engineers ???) and incompetent, when in reality they either get counsel from people in the field, or are former or partially active members of the profession themselves.
Regulatory capture is a very common theme throughout every agency. Take Ajit Pai, who is and always was very obviously a Verizon stooge, as a textbook example. For that reason I don't blame anyone who would prefer a minimum of detailed, 'implementation-detail-level' government regulation on tech. Best case scenario they're poorly-written and arrest innovation, worst case they're also written to advantage the biggest or most politically-connected companies, who never deserve the help.
Also, looking from a step behing at our exchange, you are arguing that people need skin in the game to be fair and make weighted decisions, pointing at a writer who stopped having any skin in the game to write books and go on interviews and become an influencer.
The engineer, on the other hand, continues playing the iterated game of life, and so their reputation does matter (to themselves at least). Therefore, by making sure that any bridges that collapse has social stigma painted against those who designed and/or built it, it would encourage proper engineering even if there's no third party at the time to certify it.
> for the people who are still alive
The test subjects who are already dead don’t matter. GlaDOS, on the other hand, must continue to make choices in which experiments and test subjects will deliver the best bang for the buck.
No, licensing does not qualify a structural engineer. What qualifies a structural engineer is being willing to sign a legal document when, say, a bridge is completed, that says that they take legal responsibility for the bridge's safe functioning, and agree to be held legally liable if it fails. Licensing just means that, in addition to knowing enough about structural engineering to be willing to make such a legal commitment, they also have to get a piece of paper from the government before they can sign off legally as the structural engineer of record for a project.
During the housing bubble, they'd just hire temps to sign things: https://www.reuters.com/article/robosigning-plea-idUSL1E8ML0...
My estimate is zero. Which makes your comment irrelevant to this discussion.
If you haven't met any that's ok
The person signing the legal documents is the engineer himself, not some "vagabond" retained by a lawyer. Evidently you are not familiar with how signoffs by engineers of record for things like bridges are actually done.
We're not talking about a random person walking into a local bank and asking for a loan. We're talking about someone signing off as engineer of record for a project. The two cases are not at all comparable.
This reasoning is incredibly incredibly dangerous and there are countless very contemporary examples of it leading to a) exploitation and b) those well-to-do being let off the hook.
I challenge you to give one. You evidently are not familiar with how signoffs by engineers of record are made for structures like bridges.
Threat of having your life and career absolutely ruined pretty much does, yes. The key is that the threat has to be believed. For things like signing off as an engineer of record on a project, yes, the threat is believable. For being an investment banker who cooks the books, the threat of being punished might not be so believable, no, particularly if the bank can be portrayed as "too big to fail". But that's not the kind of project we're talking about here.
You evidently are not familiar with how things like bridges get built and how signoffs by engineers of record are made. Yes, you'll get caught, and yes, you'll receive the harshest punishment.
Hardly. As Brunel points out regulation is always biased towards the past rather than the future.
But I think there’s an even stronger and more dangerous bias in regulation, one towards mediocrity. Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power. What is in the interest of the mediocre? To outlaw the outliers (like Brunel). It’s sad, but unfortunately part of human nature.
Prove that, without leaning on an exceptionally bad philosopher (and worse novelist), and without ultimately proving that _all_ people are mediocre, when taken across their entire skill set.
No, most people are not mediocre. Most people are mediocre at any given thing by definition. Individuals can excel at a given thing. Some can even excel at multiple things. But let's not allow our hubris to blind us to our own shortcomings. Picking arbitrary data points to rate people on a scale and discard the majority as "mediocre people" is painfully half-witted pseudoscience.
Much like Interesting Numbers, there really is no such thing as an exceptional person because there is no unexceptional person. When we judge people as "mediocre" or "exceptional" we view them in a given context and we only look at a momentary snapshot of an aspect of them. People are infinitely more complex than you allow yourself to imagine and even if you can find a way to grade them that takes this complexity into account (surely as an intelligent person you don't believe antiquated, unscientific, disproven number games like IQ test scores are a helpful tool for this) you'll find that other than sharing whatever metric you used to declare them mediocre, "the mediocre" don't share much of a meaningful in-group identity as a collective.
The Great Man Myth makes for appealing storytelling but it's such an oversimplification and distortion of reality that it should be considered an insult to any intellectually curious individual. Great Men arise not despite society but because of society. Without society you would wilt, naked and abandoned in a desert.
Just think of it from an evolutionary standpoint: what's the point of evolving such that most individuals are useless or at best capable underlings and the survival of the species hinges on the eventual appearance of a natural leader? That sounds less like science and more like the kind of fairytales we used to justify the Divine Right of Kings.
I'm honestly shocked to see such a reductive and uncurious take on a site like HN which prides itself on the intellectual curiosity of its community.
At any specific thing, most people are mediocre, a few people excel. Saying this is hardly hubris. It's a recognition of an aspect of human nature. The entire world's culture is rich in examples and aphorisms that point to this.
> I'm honestly shocked to see such a reductive and uncurious take on a site like HN which prides itself on the intellectual curiosity of its community.
Now, this qualifies as hubris.
Personally I don’t attach much emotion to the word. I’m mediocre at most things, of course. I tend to think of ability as normally distributed. A spread of three standard distributions covers more than 99% of the probability mass. These I think of as the mediocre. But in any significantly large group there will be outliers at +2, +3, +4 or even +5 standard deviations. This is just how normally distributed abilities (like e.g. IQ) work.
The motte:
- when consensus or even majority is the norm, [the mediocre] have the power
- [to outlaw the outliers] is in the interest of the mediocre
The bailey:
- most people are mediocre
You're defending the bailey but that's not what I was attacking. I very much stated that "[m]ost people are mediocre at any given thing by definition", which is what you're falling back to here as if I disagreed with that.
To paraphrase, your argument was that "the mediocre" share a group interest and that group interest is to suppress ("outlaw") those who are exceptional. Instead of further qualifying that, you refer to it as human nature. You also state that consensus-seeking or "majority rule" enables this suppression. Based on your framing this is not only a thing that happens but also a bad thing.
The logical but unstated conclusion is that any form of democracy or consensus-based rule is bad because it kneecaps exceptional people in their ability to be exceptional. This is why I referred to the Great Man myth, which states that historical advances are the accomplishments of singular exceptional people rather than material realities and social dynamics.
Again, the crux of your argument hinges on "the mediocre" being a meaningful group that has shared interests and that these interests involve suppressing "outliers". You have demonstrated zero evidence for either of these claims.
I’m curious, how do you account for progress in fields like mathematics where the mediocre seldom make any contributions at all?
So let me put this bluntly:
Am I correct in reading your comment as stating that democracy is undesirable because it holds back those who are exceptional?
No.
Taking an inflexible stance that cannot admit that some level of regulation is advantageous is a mistake.
(Also, reading this article has inadvertently made my writing style more 19th century apparently.)
in the ideal case, they coincide, but that ideal is always far from reality
by proposing that licensing is what qualifies a structural engineer you are engaging in petitio principii: asking us to stipulate a premise which is in reality just a disguised version of your (incorrect) thesis, and from which you can then easily prove it
Only to other structural engineers of similar or higher competence. How does a property developer know their engineer has sufficient "knowledge"?
pg wrote a whole essay on this problem: you can't hire good people unless you start with good people doing the hiring. But that doesn't scale to problems like "all the buildings society needs" because of the chicken and egg problem.
Someone needs to have a way to (1) identify sufficiently knowledgeable engineers and (2) ensure that only sufficiently knowledgeable engineers are designing buildings.
Call it whatever you want, but any such regulatory regime is going to be isomorphic to "licensing".
well, they can study engineering just like anybody else; we don't need to structure society for the benefit of the stereotypical clueless pointy-haired mba, particularly if it means improvements in structural engineering slow down to medieval levels
it's perfectly okay if people who are ignorant of structural engineering are unable to found a successful railroad
Seems to me like building codes and other such regulation is for the for the benefit of the people living in those homes, precisely so that they don't get built by stereotypical clueless pointy-haired MBAs.
and bad buildings can and do kill people accidentally, including people who don't live there; i've had a chunk of concrete the size of my foot plummet from a skyscraper and land on the sidewalk next to me, presumably due to poor maintenance
on the other hand, at least in the last century or so, the major disasters from engineering failures have not been from insufficiently centralized state control over what gets built (not enough regulation), but rather from too much centralized state control over what gets built (too much regulation): the banqiao dam failure, chernobyl, the beirut explosion, the levees in new orleans, the st. francis dam, the collapse of the morbi bridge last year, etc.
there are some exceptions, like the bhopal disaster, the hyatt regency walkway collapse, minamata disease, and the great smog of 01952
but the balance is clearly strongly in favor of strong regulation of engineering causing disasters (by reducing both the technical competence and the accountability of the decision-makers on large engineering projects), not preventing them. it would take thousands of collapsed railway bridges to equal the death toll of the banqiao dam failure
(and this is without taking into account the safety improvements that would have resulted from faster progress due to greater freedom to experiment, which was brunel's concern here)
but i was addressing a narrower question, which was how a property developer can know which structural engineers are competent to design skyscrapers and bridges and the like. even if government licensing of engineers were the best way to ensure that ordinary people don't get suckered into buying a deathtrap house or a money-pit house, that wouldn't imply that it's the best way for property developers to avoid hiring incompetent structural engineers who will build them deathtrap bridges
managing the construction of a bridge is a full-time job for years, if not decades; it hardly seems unreasonable to expect the person entrusted with this job to possess sufficient engineering knowledge to evaluate candidate structural engineering hires, nor will a government licensing regime for engineers be enough to save them from disaster if they do not, as amply demonstrated by the horrific litany above of engineering disasters caused by incompetently-run government projects
Yikes. This is TEXTBOOK survivorship bias. You're saying that all the issues you can cite are from situations with regulated engineering, but that's just because the world pervasively moved to heavily regulated construction, because too many people die otherwise.
And in any case you're flat wrong, regardless. Literally fifty thousand people just died in Turkey because they were living in earthquake-unsafe homes. There was a story on the front page right here about the lack of reinforced concrete and the failure of the regulatory apparatus. (Compare to the much larger Japan quake, for example).
All your examples together aren't worth that one earthquake.
i think i was adequately clear above that i think the case for government regulation of house construction to prevent ordinary people from buying deathtraps is potentially much stronger than the case for government licensing of civil engineers who property developers hire to build bridges; quoting a part of my comment you were replying to:
> so on one hand building codes make a huge difference in cases like earthquakes and fires, where places with reasonable and enforced building codes have orders of magnitude lower mortality than places like iran, turkey, and haiti ... but ... even if government licensing of engineers were the best way to ensure that ordinary people don't get suckered into buying a deathtrap house or a money-pit house, that wouldn't imply that it's the best way for property developers to avoid hiring incompetent structural engineers who will build them deathtrap bridges
but i note that you seem to have retreated to defending the motte of protecting people from living in deathtrap houses, which i wasn't trying to attack. should i thus conclude that you concede that it's a terrible idea to extend such regulation any further than mass-market houses to be sold to the general public?
as for the survivorship-bias thing, you seem to have misunderstood. i'm saying that, among the recent engineering disasters (not 'issues') i can cite, while all of them are from situations with regulated engineering, many more of them, and all of the most severe ones, were caused by government regulation (my first list) than caused by freedom from government regulation (my second list). this doesn't necessarily imply that the disasters in the second list were less heavily regulated (bhopal, for example, was notoriously heavily regulated) but we are still trading off disasters of the first type against disasters of the second type by our degree of government regulation
this wouldn't justify the claim that the optimal degree of government regulation to prevent disasters is zero, but it clearly does justify the claim that the optimal degree of government regulation of civil engineering is less than at present, rather than more, which was the claim i intended to make. i'm sorry that was unclear
in the case of many projects in the first list, similar projects proceeded in other countries with less regulation, but have not resulted in similar disasters; compare, for example, banqiao with the hydroelectric dam system in the us, or chernobyl with fukushima daiichi, or the beirut blast with the innumerable safely delivered fertilizer shipments around the world every day
it's true that heavily regulated construction has become much more prevalent over the last century, but contrary to your assertion, this has not been associated with smaller death tolls in the resulting disasters; it has been associated with larger ones, as well as a near halt to progress in finding safer and cheaper designs for infrastructure projects, progress which was quite dramatic over the previous century in the countries where it was minimally impeded by regulation
not only was this what brunel predicted, it is more or less what you'd expect from observing the incentives at play. 'regulation' is a sort of petitio principii in a word, like 'structured programming' or 'responsible disclosure', because it's never a question of whether a bridge is built by accident or by deliberate planning; bridges more advanced than a fallen tree do not get built by accident. rather, the question is who are the decisionmakers deciding what the plan will be, how competent are they, and what are their incentives?
shifting the decisionmaking from cigar-chomping investors to civil servants and politicians could in theory make it either worse or better, but generally it tends to make it worse, because however poorly the investors' incentives align with the public's, the civil servants' and politicians' incentives are even more poorly aligned, and their competence is lower
What are some frameworks for how to think about navigating this tension in emerging scientific or engineering fields?
Some ones I'm mulling over:
1. Rate of innovation: In rapidly evolving fields, imposing strict regulations too early can hinder innovation and progress. In such cases, it might be better to minimize restrictions early on to allow practitioners to explore new ideas. Then, as the field matures, regulations and standards can be gradually introduced.
2. Adaptive regulation: Implement a flexible regulatory framework that can be updated as new information becomes available.
3. Self-regulation: In some cases, maybe we should expect and encourage the industry to use self-regulation via developing guidelines and codes of conduct. This may be one way to try and strike a balance between responsible innovation while minimizing bureaucratic obstacles.
What do others think?
In other words, the harm of regulation is not that it trades progress for safety, but that it stifles both. See also Frederic Bastiat, The Seen and the Unseen.
The modern counterargument might be that engineered systems have become so dense and complex, and in some cases capable of catastrophic consequences for failure, that we simply can’t afford to let practitioners figure it out on their own.
The larger the authority, the slower they move, and the less sophisticated the technical understanding they have (because in a large bureaucratic authority, many non-experts have to be convinced of a change in addition to the experts).
It’s also not something that only impacts laissez faire capitalists. Information Security experts understood for decades that conventional password complexity requirements produced harmful outcomes. How long did it take an authority to produce an alternative standard? How much reputational risk did they take on by depreciating a security standard? Thank god NIST and the NCSC had the courage and competence to adopt this change, but how many lesser authorities have failed to keep pace with it? How many individual organisations?
Alternatively, how much do you think the European Parliament has slowed development of new USB connectors? Are we all going to love USB-C as much in 20 years as we do today? How could a new and improved connector even distinguish itself for consideration? Experimenting with improvements in the market is prohibited by law. If an improved connector became popular in an outside market, how long would it take the European Parliament to notice? How long would it take them to make a change?
Before USB-C, EU had already standardized Micro-USB for phones. Yet there was no difficulty in transitioning to USB-C.
https://www.engadget.com/2010-12-29-european-standardization...
No it hadn’t. The standard you’re referencing is simply an agreement between manufacturers, and was organised by independent standards organisations. It was not a regulation, and had nothing to do with the EU government.
Next year an actual regulation will come into effect, with the force of law, that will explicitly prohibit the forms of innovation and self-organisation that led to those industry bodies coming to that agreement in the first place.
Please tell me which authority is in charge of password complexity. The only one I could name is the NIST, and you mentioned them.
> Alternatively, how much do you think the European Parliament has slowed development of new USB connectors?
What makes you think that the USB standards committee didn't create the USB-C standard in anticipation of this and are happy that their connector became standard? The connector itself was designed to be configurable in software standards. Power is negotiated independent of the connector, as are data rates. The PD standard has already undergone multiple revisions as have the data standards and other uses for the connector. The connector is independent of its uses and standardizing it was the plan all along. Why do we need another one when the USB committee doesn't think we do?
There are numerous authorities around the world who mandate this. Last time I checked, the PCI DSS required conventional password complexity, and if you want to process credit cards, then you must comply with the PCI SSC’s standards. Central banks all around the world impose security standards on retail banks. Governments all over the world impose security standards on their vendors, and upon other industries that they regulate. NIST and the NCSC should be applauded for their innovation here, but they’re absolutely not the only regulating authorities in the world, and it took them a shockingly long time to adopt this incredibly simple change.
> What makes you think that the USB standards committee didn't create the USB-C standard in anticipation of this and are happy that their connector became standard?
I’m sure there’s not a standards committee in the world that would be unhappy about being enshrined into the law. But that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to regulate this with legislation, and doesn’t change the fact that legislation like this stifles innovation. Innovation is a bottom up process. Innovation happens when small groups of people come up with something new, and gradually convince other people to adopt it by demonstrating its value to them. Changes to regulation can only happen top down. Any attempt to innovate in a regulated context eventually hits a wall where innovative experimentation must gain the blessing of the regulating authority before it progresses any further.
It’s easy to advocate for this trade off when safety is involved. It’s no less stifling, in fact when a regulation is created to prevent a serious harm, it’s substantially more stifling and difficult to change. But the benefit of that trade off is very simple to understand. Regulating cellphone charging cables however, does not fall into that category, and the costs imposed by the regulation are of a highly dubious value. How many cables did you use 20 years ago, that you’re still happy using today? I can’t think of a single example in my personal life. I can only think of one that I begrudgingly use. The USB C connector will be 14 years old by the time the EU’s regulations are done rolling out.
Just off the top of my head...
* SATA
* USB-A
* 1/8" / 3.5mm
* 2.1/2.5mm DC barrel jack
* RCA
* RJ-45
* Molex
* Phono / 1/4"
* BNC
USB-A: The fact that connectors can coexist seems obvious to me.
RJ45: Sorry you hate it -- it works well for its purpose.
> Why do we need another one when the USB committee doesn't think we do?
Answer: maybe ask the people with alternative tech? They presumably have answers. It's nonsense to assume the USB Consortium are the only people who can design cables and connectors, there are other companies that have done so.
Sure. There are plenty of people who can design power delivery systems to residences, and plenty of people who can design radio transmitters, and plenty of people who can make road signs... I shall weep for all of them who have the boot placed upon their necks by those dastardly regulators.
-- Effective Altruism
There is a hint of how he would prefer to solve the problem:
> the free exercise of engineering skill in this country, subjected as it ever is, under the present system, to the severe and unerring control and test of competing skill and of public opinion.
The ultimate goal should not be solely "never let X happen ever again" because that would ignore any harmful effects of prioritizing that goal over everything else. In the limit, the most effective approach would be to build no more bridges. (Lest you think I am being extreme, how many nuclear power plants do you see being built outside of China?)
With the commission in the article, would it have been better or worse if they had then produced no regulations? We can't really know. Presumably the engineers of the time weren't stupid, so they would take steps to avoid repeating the mistake. How well would that information be disseminated and internalized by the profession? I don't know, but I also don't know the effect of regulations and red tape.
It was a different time and with a vastly different scale of things happening (and poorer communications mechanisms too, but also a smaller community to communicate within). I wouldn't want to just abandon regulations today, but I also think that regulations have stifled a lot of potential progress and cost a lot of lives. We did not find an optimal path, sadly, and we seem to stray further from the optimal every day.
External regulation helps except in the ways it doesn't. Self-regulation works until it doesn't. I don't think there's a simple "just do X" fix to this sort of thing.
I can’t help but think that aviation safety is a counter example to this. The 737 Max disasters were almost entirely a failure or regulation in an industry which has otherwise produced a huge amount of both innovation and safety improvements over the last 50 years - leading to the recent launch of the worlds largest rocket just a few days ago.
This rocket was launched with regulatory approval - and still went kaboom! - demonstrating at least that innovation and rism is still possible within a regulatory framework that prioritises safety.
SpaceX has blown up 7 rockets and advanced ridiculously quickly. On the other hand we are aggressively safety conscious in aviation and that’s great but in the first 60 years of flight we went from the Wright brothers to the 737 and in the next 60 years we went from the 737 to the 737 Max.
As much as people hate to hear you can’t have it both ways, I think the evidence we can take from this is that innovation basically isn’t possible within an aggressively safety optimizing regime.
I must say, suggesting that the only progress we've seen in aviation is from the 737 to the 737 Max is very disingenuous. Since the first flight of the original 737 in 1967, we've seen - this is just a tiny and obvious sample - the 747, 767, 777, A300, A380, A350... composite wings and fuselages, glass cockpits, fly-by-wire, high-bypass turbofans, TCAS, GPS, ETOPS, ADS-B... it's a very long list of innovations. It's incredible that you think the last 60 years has been static.
What? Spacex is innovating in an aggressively safety optimizing regime. Their rocket blown up and nobody got hurt. Nobody was even in danger.
There were a few regretable accidents and deaths during construction, but it is not like that is the secret to their success.
So how do you square that with your assertion that you can’t have both innovation and safety?
Have you thought about why SpaceX a company headquartered in Hawthorne, California is testing their rockets from Boca Chica, Texas? Wouldn’t it be so much simpler to just wheel the rocket out from their HQ and launch it right from there? Of course it would be, but when things predictably go wrong they would rain metal shrapnel on lovely Californian suburbs. The whole reason why they built a launch pad on a coast is safety. Not safety by not exploding things, but safety by making sure that when things explode people and other people’s property will be unharmed.
Well, if engineers aren't allowed to design new types of bridges (which, in the nature of things, will occasionally fall down) society would never advance past the "rough-hewn log over the stream" stage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dee_Bridge_disaster
it’s apparent the commission report didn’t stop people dying in similar rail bridge collapses.
The designer, Robert Stephenson, and bridge inspector, Major-General Paisley, were not found liable at the inquest. It seems this may have been partly due to expert testimony in an early case of “alternative facts”. Stephenson himself was apparently ready to admit liability, but was “persuaded” to claim a derailment was the cause. [1]
Similar bridge collapses occurred in the late 19th century. Only after the 1891 Norwood Junction accident was inspection of all bridges mandated. [2]
Some cast iron deployed in bridges built in that period is still in place. Weak bridges have weight restrictions where needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stephenson#cite_note-14...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwood_Junction_rail_accident
But on the other hand I don't think the sensible solution is to leave everything unregulated! I am very glad that building regulations exist!
They might also work better if they say “you can't do it that way, which is known to be unsafe,” as opposed to “you must do it this way, which is the only safe thing.”
Note also that regulatory standards are not the only mechanism in the law to create safety. Liability law can be very effective at creating safety, by giving the right incentives to the right parties, but liability law doesn't tell anyone what to do—only what will happen to you if you cause harm.
A long those lines, governance power should not require being a celebrity either.
Applying this post to the topic of AI alignment, I'd like a democratic option for large entitlements of tax funds to be applied as Yudkowsky sees fit, if enough people vote to appoint him as AI Minister, and vote to give him governance teeth against big tech and the thousands of startups driving Moloch via the standard economic paradigm.
This isn't an option at all because our institutions don't adapt to the territory we often find ourselves in. We have a political alignment problem that exacerbates the technical alignment problems.
I would like to have something like the concept of senators, but not as location-based representatives, who are strictly assigned nothing more than to lead senate committees related to issues that we separately apportion funds and power to via direct democracy.
It is perhaps not as simple as any of us might like.
I don’t think Brunel would have much liked SOC2.
Of course that proved true - we call it steel - and if you go by the date of Bessemer's patent (after which steel became cheap enough to use on structures), they only had to wait 9 years.
ductile cast iron does now exist but bessemer didn't invent it
it is true that some castings are now indeed made of steel, but bridge girders are not among them, and the casting steels used today postdate the bessemer process by generations. chrome wasn't used in steel until 01865 (except, to everyone's great surprise three years ago, in medieval persia), nickel until 01889
(you can roll them as much as you want without cracking, and in fact they're dramatically more ductile than actual structural steel alloys like a36, but generally people don't because they're far too expensive and not at all easy to roll)
this is not, as you falsely claim, a quibble about nomenclature, in which bridge girders are made of mostly iron and are made by casting but are just not called 'cast iron'. they aren't cast at all
as for 'improvements', bessemer's steel was not an improvement over cast iron in every way (it's softer, has a higher thermal coefficient, and can't be practically cast) but in any case brunel did not make the claim you falsely imply he does:
> At present cast iron is looked upon, to a certain extent, as a friable, treacherous, and uncertain material; castings of a limited size only can be safely depended upon; wrought iron is considered comparatively trustworthy, and by riveting, or welding, there is no limit to the size of the parts to be used. Yet, who will venture to say, if the direction of improvement is left free, that means may not be found of ensuring sound castings of almost any form, and of twenty or thirty tons weight, and of a perfectly homogeneous mixture of the best metal? Who will say that beams of great size of such a material, either in single pieces or built, may not prove stronger, safer, less exposed to change of texture or to injury from vibration, than wrought-iron, which in large masses cannot be so homogeneous as a fused mass may be made and which when welded is liable to sudden fracture at the welds?
(https://ia801404.us.archive.org/3/items/brunel-isambard.-the... p. 192 (224/603), letter of 01848-03-13)
this is clearly not at all what happened. i don't fault brunel for failing to predict the future; i fault you for claiming he did
you're wrong, you made a mistake, what you said isn't true, it's false, and by continuing to dance around that and play word games instead of admitting it, not to mention flagging my rebuttals so people can't see them, you're leaving traps for people in the future who read this thread to try to understand the historical development of metallurgy
and please leave the 'my dude' shit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664138) on twitter or wherever you picked it up, that kind of bullshit isn't welcome here. likewise the claim to be an authority on a subject because you took a class on it in college. a degree is not a substitute for knowing what you're talking about
in fact that is much of brunel's point in these letters
And is steel mostly iron, or isn't it?
How many different ways can you ignore the obvious? I would think we could dispense with all this, see the big picture, talk in broad terms, but apparently not.
It's not me flagging your posts, it's someone or someones else. Sounds like you have a different and inaccurate idea of what's "welcome here" - who exactly do you think you're speaking for? I'm perfectly welcome here. YOU leave. And I'm not wrong either, hell I'm barely even stating anything; even the thing you contradicted, I never said, so it's rather tragicomic.
"Rebuttals" is a generous term indeed for your childish rage my dude. And shallow wordplay is exactly the thing you've been doing from the getgo with "no, steel is not cast iron," which, again, I never said in the first place, although I see why you thought I meant that, and again, there is an ironic, no pun intended, and mostly unrelated fact here, which is that steel is mostly iron and goes through casting as part of its process. No dancing needed, I'm just repeating the same thing.
Never been on Twitter, for the record, my dude, but from what I hear, you would fit right in. My dude.
The initial disconnect here seems to be that I'm deliberately eliding a lot of details in order to see all iron products as part of a unified whole, with improvements on a continuum over time. Whereas you seem to see this as an egregious violation of terminology and facts. It's really just a question of which level of detail you want to work at. That kind of objection wouldn't be a problem, except... The problem I have with it, and the reason I will now most likely never be won over to anything you have to say, is because while missing my point (which mind you is small and not that interesting), you jumped right into not only correcting details I left out intentionally, but also asserting that that must mean I'm ignorant of them. Do we need to always say everything we know about metallurgy? I guess it's a dick-waving contest... shoot, I would've brought my whole dick if I'd known. Saying I studied it in college - that wasn't an appeal to authority, it was a hint to you that your lecturing about basics is unneeded, in the hope of changing the context back away from the minutiae.
All iron products are made of iron and are cast at some point. Cast iron is the only one we call "cast iron," and that is an arbitrary, happenstance artifact of history. Terminology is arbitrary symbology, always, and deserves the appropriate skepticism or at least the ability to imagine a world with different symbols. Not even a world... go to a country where they speak another language. They might not even have separate words for "sky" and "heaven." If that feels like a "word game" you need to realize all words are games and are non-deterministic. I don't need to dance around to evade your amazing laserlike prowess at calling out my errors because again, you're arguing minutiae while missing my pretty modest point.
RE Bessemer I left you a giant implicit 'else' clause by saying IF you want to take his patent as a milestone, then it's 9 years. Obviously there are reasons not to particularly take it as a relevant milestone.
You know what, I'll go all the way and actually say the thing you accused me of saying: steel is cast iron. With a bunch of ingredients and processing steps added. I know, I know, it's ridiculous, and bordering on meaningless, because look, a microprocessor is just a rock with a bunch of ingredients and steps added. The point is not to take it to extremes of ridiculousness, the point is to see the similarities and see how processes were added and changed to improve and transform the final product.
it would certainly chnage the nature of software developement
Not sure it's a win. But it is interesting
Edit: I think it is as simple (?) as a law saying software warranties are unenforceable ?
It is frustrating that common action often precludes such common sense sentiments due to the friction of interests or bad actors.
(And it’s been amended a half dozen times so it’s not really trapped in amber.)
Especially corporations or other large groups that specialize in X, where X is the currently mandated thing to do.
Reminds me of Elon Musk. Just because you are a genius does not mean others are idiots, or that your opinion is worth more. Elon proves this every day with his idiotic pronouncements and hie genius results
Reminds me of the old saying: A camel is a horse designed by a committee. Meaning committees are idiotic. But a camel goes further, carrying more, on less food and less water. Yes.
probably just some loser trying to cut corners on his highway offramp planning
huh what's this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunel
or uhhh maybe not
who is considered "one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history,"[3] "one of the 19th-century engineering giants",[4] and "one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, [who] changed the face of the English landscape with his groundbreaking designs and ingenious constructions".[5] Brunel built dockyards, the Great Western Railway (GWR), a series of steamships including the first purpose-built transatlantic steamship, and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering.
yeah what a fucking tosser
Brunel is a nineteenth century example, Elon Must is a twenty first century example....