Fed court rules for retired engineer told by state to not talk about math
wect.com
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The suit is about licensing requirements for expert testimony in a lawsuit. Not about talking about math in public.
The opinion is here: https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Nutt-v.-Ritter-opi...
The understatement of the century. It would be like calling someone trying to practice law without a license to be 'A restriction by the state from talking about words.'
The reason this was upheld by the court was because he was giving public testimony, as opposed to rendering a professional opinion for a client (Which would have been absolutely been under the purview of the relevant licensing board).
> The reason this was upheld by the court was because he was giving public testimony, as opposed to rendering a professional opinion for a client (Which would have been absolutely been under the purview of the relevant licensing board).
If he was was giving testimony that was protected by the first amendment and not attempting to work as an engineer, saying "It would be like calling someone trying to practice law without a license to be 'A restriction by the state from talking about words.'" seems even more misleading than the headline since he wasn't actually attempting to do something analogous to unauthorized practice of law
I don't quite understand why this is a problem? If a parrot is able to perfectly defend someone in the court of law then does it really matter if it never had a license to do so?
There's a problem, for the same reason that you can't do surgery on people without being a doctor.
We've tried letting parrots practice, and it has turned out poorly for everyone involved.
Seems like the money gets sent to people who know how to talk, not on their abilities.
Unlike engineering, or medicine, the overwhelming majority of software projects are not life-critical.
I wouldn't build a bridge the way I build software. I don't work that way because I can't be trusted, I work that way because the stakes of failure are low.
There was no motion (AFAIK) to block his testimony through legal means.
he ignored them, defense submitted formal complaint, board ended up seeking declaratory judgment that both his research and his testimony separately violate the Engineering and Land Surveying Act
from the opinion https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Nutt-v.-Ritter-opi...
> The Board seeks a counter-declaration that Nutt's engineering work for the plaintiffs in the Autry litigation, including his engineering calculations, analysis, and resulting expert report, constituted the unauthorized practice of engineering. The Board also seeks the same declaration regarding "testifying at the discovery depositions in support of the work contained in the expert report prepared by Wayne Nutt."
In general though I think the legal system worked pretty well here. I don't think the board's initial position was crazy. The dispute was escalated to federal court, and the court made a pretty reasonable judgment. Probably could have happened faster though.
Edit: trimmed my comment so that it's less cranky. Merry Christmas!
https://ncpro.sog.unc.edu/manual/706-2
nothing about specific licensing
also NC is a daubert state, which I think means you can attack the testimony's methodology via motion in limine, but doesn't add anything about the expert's qualification
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/daubert_standard
that said the engineering + survey act seems fairly clear that evaluating the safety of a public work constitutes 'practice'. if dude has 20+ yoe he could just take the exam under the 13(a3) long-established practice section
https://www.ncleg.net/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha...
I am far and away an expert in artificial intelligence, and had one of these “expert witnesses” interview me about my expertise. They hardly knew the basics of software engineering in a modern way let alone modern machine learning pipelines. This is a person who had some patent exposure and generally does small business type of “IT.”
The key differentiator in this case is because they couldn’t make it as a actual engineer they decided to parlay their skills into convincing even less technical people that they knew what they were talking about.
Unfortunately, it’s work that’s pretty distinct from engineering expertise despite in theory being supplemental atop engineering experience itself.
A former customer of mine was a civil engineer, and also a California-credentialed Professional Engineer (PE), who did code consulting and gave expert testimony about the ASME boiler and pressure vessel code. His code interpretations earned about $100k in 2023 dollars ($50k in 1996) for 45 minutes of effort in 1996. I'd take a guess that an appearance was ~$10-80k depending on the amount of preparation, time, and travel. Needless to say, he had/has a 8-figure house in Saratoga, CA. Finding a niche that is essential to industry and monetizing it well is a fairly repeatable plan for success if one identifies and chooses the right profession.
(PE in California means someone has attained accredited education, worked in a learning capacity at an appropriate type of firm for 4 years, and taken the very difficult PE exam. California licenses generic PEs and fields related and adjacent to construction and civil engineering. It's a shame there aren't specific software or hardware critical assurance PE subcategories.)
The other aspect that’s interesting to me is that, like “engineer”, the term “expert witness” may be too generic to have much meaning. From the related Oregon case linked elsewhere:
>“Courts have long recognized that the term ‘engineer’ has a generic meaning separate from ‘professional engineer”
>It's a shame there aren't specific software
NCEES tried to have a software PE but it withered on the vine and was only offered for a few years. I suspect the incentives in industry don’t support it and the only way itv would get traction is if it were forced by regulation.
So in that light, I want a software PE to know things like thermodynamics if they are writing controls code for a nuclear reactor or aerodynamics if they’re writing avionics code for an aircraft. In my experience, there’s a lot of problems created when SWEs don’t consider the physical dynamics of the system and having some breadth of engineering knowledge can mitigate some of that. Breath of engineering knowledge is the aim of the FE exam. There are oodles of materials to study specifically to pass the FE, so I don’t think that’s really an hurdle for a properly motivated person. Also in that vein, I want them with real experience under a PE. It’s a hurdle, but there are plenty of PEs in domains like oil & gas, aerospace, automotive etc. to work under. But if you think you’ll can work at a FAANG or adjacent SV role and get a PE, it’s probably harder to find a senior PE. I also don’t know if it adds much benefit to a web developer.
Not all that useful in practice.
The guy had an entire career as an engineer, he’s now in his 70s and retired.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(I originally had something snarky here but in the spirit of being better I edited it out)
In computing even. E.g. that time Rivest and Diffie both went on the stand to bat for newegg
The expert witness called by the opposing side was someone I had never heard of, who had a certificate from "Blockchain University," and near as I can tell never worked as a software engineer anywhere, much less on bitcoin.
Guess which one of us nearly got disqualified for lack of credentials.
Expert witness testimony is such a joke.
I’m curious about the context of Bitcoin in this divorce proceeding. What was at dispute?
The case I was consulted for was pretty bog standard “guy claims he lost his bitcoin in a hard drive reformat X years ago; wife claims BS and wants half of peak market value as of the highest historical price.”
Without getting into identifying details, I was able to use blockchain data to independently verify the guy’s claims. Traced transactions, found watermarking features tying them to specific wallet versions. Can’t actually prove that the keys were destroyed of course, but I did show the coins were being spent like crazy from one wallet on one machine, then all activity stopped right around when he claims he reformatted the computer, and the coins sit there on those same wallet outputs to this day, even with multiple market peaks in the intervening years, and many years between then and when he became aware of his wife’s intent to divorce.
That’s the way things go in court cases. Us software developers like to think that the law is a highly rational, proof based system. But in reality it basically comes down to “which story seems more believable” in the end, and being able to point to technical proof is the exception.
Sometimes a story is more believable because there is incontrovertible physical evidence. Normally in those circumstances it'd never go to the court room though -- plea deal in criminal cases, settlement in civil.
All of the qualifications you list amount to subjective evidence of clout in an obscure (to non-programmers) programming clique.
On the other hand, the certificate from a Blockchain University probably had a well defined curriculum and criteria for passing.
Is this serious?
Seems like lawyers unsure of how decide if someone knows what they are doing or not.
It pretty much says the state licensing requirements do not apply to expert testimony or preparation of reports supporting such testimony, which in this case they specifically say "doing some math" in the decision.
A bit of additional context: the dispute stemmed from the fact that Nutt was asked to give testimony about stormwater management systems, not chemical engineering. Unlike chemical engineering, this subject is within the purview of the Board, so they believed that their ban on unlicensed expert witness testimony should apply.
From what I can see, the court here ruled that the ban itself is unconstitutional, so not only do they need to leave Nutt alone, but they're not allowed to enforce the ban on expert engineering reports at all going forward.
[0] https://ij.org/press-release/federal-judge-hands-free-speech... ("IJ is a public interest law firm. We represent clients free of charge in cutting-edge litigation defending vital constitutional rights.")
Licensing regimes have a valid purpose: protecting those who have to rely on qualified engineers, when they calculate and advise that something is safe and fit for purpose.
Restricting those who raise concerns that something is not safe or fit for purpose is the opposite.
Not saying you need credentials but it's difficult for outside disciplines to know if somebody knows what they are talking about.
Scary as fuck, especially when one doctor threatened to lock me up if I wouldn't take them.
Sick and disgusting behavior.
However it's true that there are cases where such an expert might be solely relied on, for example they might be brought in by the judge. That happens in family court here, where a judge might appoint a neutral expert to evaluate a child's situation, and indeed there have been complaints that such experts were not sufficiently qualified or regulated. In that case, I would agree that licensing is desirable.
Professional engineering is as much 'talking about math' as performing legal services is 'talking about words'.
Both need a license if you're doing it for a living. Neither needs a license if you're just shooting the shit, and don't try to put the profession's weight behind you.
In this case, though, this was closer to political, rather than professional speech, and ended up protected.
So “talking about words” is a subset of a larger requirement.
https://www.cairncross.com/blog/ch-news/engineer-wins-ground...
Something feels fundamentally uneasy about an expert bringing of supposedly rigorous scientific facts to only one side of a court argument. Cases that come to a court are based on much fuzzier, human condition concepts like “did they mean to do it?”, “was it in the heat of the moment?”, and “did they know what they were doing was wrong?”. Even more so when it comes to the sentence which is handed down.
I think it’s also the same sort of queasiness I feel when I see a paper that states that an exoplanet has butterflies due to the presence of a certain kind of Nitrogen molecule in its atmosphere. The science of the molecule detection is bang on but the inferred conclusion is not.
A licensed engineer may put the title "Ing." in front of his name (e.g. "Mr. John Doe" becomes "Mr. Ing. John Doe") in communication, everyone else can still call themselves an engineer without issue but are not allowed to use that specific issued title in front of their name.
A similar solution could have been found here, where people who are licensed can use a suffix like "CE" with their name.
A company that sends out unlicensed / untrained staff to fix something will have a harder time convincing a judge that they did their due diligence if something goes wrong.
I am not saying this is good or bad, just that it is legal reality in parts of Europe.
I'd take as an example the welding industry, there are bajillions of domains, with various requirements depending on what's at stake. There are some interesting forces at play, some domains do 100% weld testing, so they can recruit non-certified welders, because they would see the problems, generally they have a 3 strikes system, others would not take the risk and want to see certification, and some underwater welders have to pass a welding test immediately upon entering the water (then the crew pulls the coupon out, cut it and gives the ok), before really diving and doing their task, every day.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/professional-liability/liabil....
The certifications are (ostensibly) there to make sure the people who are doing the work are qualified to do it - a protection against scammers and fraudsters doing shoddy engineering work and endangering people. If instead the powers that be uses it as a tool to silence people, it becomes simply a corrupt access point to power.
God bless freedom and the First Amendment. And God bless software for being a field so concordant with America's principles.