Life is Not Always An Engineering Problem. | Hacker News Reader

Life is Not Always An Engineering Problem.

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21 pointslexilewtan10 comments

With all due civility, this is stupid. The fact that we as a species are short staffed and short on time doesn't mean that engineering strategies are inappropriate. On the contrary, they're the only game in town. Triage and problem selection are themselves algorithms with defined optimisation criteria. That you take issue with the selection of those criteria (e.g. elegance, aesthetics) by people trying to solve their personal pain points doesn't repudiate the framework.

IF engineering strategies are not always inappropriate, does that necessarily imply that they are always appropriate?

I think the point of the post is that there's more to life than "frameworks". Not every problem is worth solving, and not every problem is an engineering problem.

What's a non-engineering problem? The examples given in the article, love and happiness (I don't believe in free will), certainly are engineering problems; or rather, treating them as engineering problems (the "lifehacker" approach) will generally lead to greater success.

As for some problems not being worth solving, sure. But that's a key facet of the engineering/lifehacking approach: don't prematurely optimize, and don't try and optimize anything until you've figured out how to measure your goal.

So unless you have an example of a problem where engineering strategies don't apply, I'm going to keep applying them.

The question isn't whether problems should be solved using engineering strategies -- in general, I agree that they should. Rather, it's whether everything in life is an engineering problem.

Here's an example: When I was 18 I wanted to listen to some new music. This was when we got our music on CDs, and we didn't have algorithms like iTunes Genius to help us find something we might like. I bought something just because I liked the cover art. Fortunately I ended up liking the album. (It was this one: http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/dink/dink/)

Which shows... what, exactly? That a non-engineering approach to music discovery is better? No, you got lucky. That your music discovery procedure was adequate and not worth investing time to optimize? Sure, but that's an engineering judgement.

I'm not looking for official citation, but it seems unjustified to state that "treating [love and happiness] as engineering problems will generally lead to greater success." I am open to that possibility, but it doesn't seem at all obviously true to me. For many people, I feel like letting there brains run on instinct works well for many problems. I feel confident there are certain problems where conscious decision making can actually get in the way.

Not a very convincing article.

  "Love, or happiness, and free will certainly aren’t. Or for 
  that matter, a lot of other “problems” being solved on the 
  internet today. Simply put, we can’t dedicate our energy to 
  fixing it all. Nor should we.

While I don't necessarily disagree with this sentiment, presenting it without elaboration or support is sloppy. Additionally, what are these other "problems" being solved on the 'net that aren't problems? Yes, yes, we might know what they are, but that really out to be mentioned.

Sloppy, sloppy.

"But colloquially, the word “hack” seems to have lost its way syntactically. What once stood for elegance and rebellion under the hood of the machine has since taken on a new meaning; namely, in the form of mashups, toys, and even life as a whole. It’s as if for the first time, every problem is an engineering problem."

I don't think the word 'hack' has lost its way, but rather it has expanded its meaning. Every problem is not an engineering problem, but I think that the expansion of the term reflects a cultural change where we are looking at the world around us and ourselves, and seeing (where we didn't before) engineering problems that actually have been there all along. It's a shift in perspective, and without even speaking to whether or not that is a good, bad, or neutral thing, I do think that there are many aspects of our lives and world that are engineering problems that were not looked at this way before.

"Life is not always an engineering problem. Love, happiness, and free will certainly aren’t."

Obviously (to me anyway) life is not always an engineering problem, but happiness often is, by any definition. A patient seeking treatment for clinical depression is the very portrait of 'happiness as an engineering problem'. Outside of the medical field, there are entire industries devoted to 'self help' and improvement of one sort or another. Millions stacked upon millions of people walk into stores, pull a manual off the shelf, and follow instructions on how to attain happiness. I think happiness as an engineering problem is actually a lot more common than it seems at first blush.

This reminds me of Hamdy Taha and his textbook on Operations research, who proposed that simpler approaches should be approached first:

Responding to complaints of slow elevator service in a large office building, the OR team initially perceived the situation as a waiting-line problem that might require the use of mathematical queuing analysis or simulation. After studying the behavior of the people voicing the complaint, the psychologist on the team suggested installing full-length mirrors at the entrance to the elevators. Miraculously the complaints disappeared, as people were kept occupied watching themselves and others while waiting for the elevator.

update: fixed formatting.

  If developers tried to solve every problem the 
  way that life hackers try to add shortcuts to 
  their life, they would get nothing done.

Can't agree more with this sentence.

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