Why I stopped using the phrase “This is not rocket science.” | Hacker News Reader

Why I stopped using the phrase “This is not rocket science.”

anjaligupta.com

43 pointspavanlimo44 comments

Rocket science is hard because the slightest error will trash your multi-billion-dollar mission. See Feynman and the O-Rings, for instance. Ironically, social science would be easier if it was that rigid. What makes it hard is that even very bad models seem to sort of explain some things, sometimes, or make predictions that come true despite the model being blindingly wrong and stupid, instead of blowing up badly. And a bit more controversially, it doesn't help that social science's "blowups" can be a lot more subtle, and frequently actively shuffled under the carpet. Sometimes it seems like a bad idea in economics or social science can't be discarded until it has completely destroyed an entire civilization, and even then some of them keep popping up... of course, there's little agreement on exactly which ideas those are.

Add to this the fact that those who champion certain social science theories at the expense of other theories can never _really_ be proven wrong. Physics, math, and engineering on the other hand can be proven -- at least insofar as the airplane flies, the bridge doesn't collapse, etc.

In the most recent American political debate, we had two candidates describing different political philosophies for the role of government and the future of this country. Notice that instead of attempting to judge those positions, the media commentary simply "scored" the candidates on debate points and "gotcha" moments, assigning a "winner" based upon polls and these imaginary points.

"Rocket science" was esoteric and super-complex, at least to the educated masses in the 40s and 50s when this phrase seemed to be coined (http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/166731?print). Think secret German technology, V2s, von Neumann, the space race, etc. Nowadays we tend to regard the complex Curiosity landing as ordinary.

But the more important point is: It's never pointed in the OP why rocket science is simpler than social problems, e.g. solving world hunger (didn't watch the linked TED talk, though). I think that the reason is that most social problems are "Wicked Problems" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem). The most important difference between a problems such as solving religious extremism and putting a satellite in orbit (or nuclear fusion or brain surgery) is that in the latter case you can isolate affecting factors and study them in (relative) isolation and sub-problems are well-defined and have well-defined answers, at least compared to social problems.

Rockets used to be hard. Really hard: they mostly blew up, especially when the various agencies were trying all sorts of weird and wonderful fuel / oxidiser combinations in the search for the best possible specific impulse. See the book "Ignition!" by John D.Clark for some of the details.

Interestingly, poking Google's ngram search suggests that whilst the phrase "rocket science" saw a little use around 1900 (I've no idea why: HG Wells?) and some use around the 1940s and 1960s, the phrase "not rocket science" is a far more recent coinage & only appears in the text corpus from the 90s onwards:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+rocket+scie...

That's the second time recently I've seen that book mentioned. The first was in a couple reddit comments, with high praise.

I wish the cheapest price on amazon wasn't $229.97.

Ridiculous isn't it? A little searching will lead you to a pdf if you're willing to channel your inner pirate.

The rocket always lands as predicted? He didn't pay much attention to the Space Shuttle accidents, did he?

Perhaps he's referring to ballistics. Rocket science generally refers to designing the rockets, which to this day sometimes blow up, lose engines, spiral off course, and suffer various other catastrophes.

* blog refers to husband--should it be a "she"?

Yes, twitter account confirms: https://mobile.twitter.com/anjaligupta

Isn't the person being quoted a man?

>Recently, my husband pointed me to the work of a well-known sociologist, Duncan Watts, earlier at Yahoo! Research, who explains why people exhibit such behavior. Here is my favorite part of his TED talk

Spot on. My apologies.

Men can have husbands, too, you know.

Percentages are small, and the name was not male. See further comments.

Unfortunately this is not true for most of the world.

Yes, but relatively rarely, and when they do we can almost always work exactly why they did what they did and exactly what went wrong where to cause that failure.

There is no debate as to the science behind the failures of Colombia and Challenger, but there is a lot of debate about what human factors led up to those failures and what to do about them, which rather strengthens his point.

They forgot a comma - "The rocket always lands, as predicted."

They might blow up, but they always land.

For many rockets the whole point is that part of them doesn't - see e.g. voyager 2.

There's a distinction between engineering (icy o-rings) and science.

I believe the author of the article misses the mark on many situations where the expression is used.

In the technical domain, when my colleagues or I use the phrase, it's usually in disdainful reference to an inane request or situation where someone can't accomplish or learn a very basic task that they should know due to their lack of effort or attitude.

Example 1: "The project manager needs help in formatting worksheets in Excel. It's not rocket science."

Example 2: "The client's network admin can't figure out how to open a file with a .zip extension. It's not rocket science."

It's odd to me that everyone comments on the phrase "rocket science", when hindsight bias is a much meatier subject to discuss. I've learnt (by reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality[1]) that hindsight bias is pervasive, yet easy to get rid of.

Whenever you find that something is common sense, reverse the outcome and see if it's still common sense or not. If you find both cases equally (very) likely, then you've just fallen prey to hindsight bias. Here's an excellent post about it: http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

Something can't be common sense both ways. If one solution is obviously extremely likely, all the others must be equally unlikely.

[1] http://hpmor.com/ It's a fantastic Harry Potter fanfiction novel, around 1500 pages and just amazing. If you've liked the original series, you'll love this. I read this before reading Harry Potter, and now the latter seems childish. Definitely recommended.

I've always preferred to use "rocket surgery".

ThinkGeek have a relevant t-shirt: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ea8c/

I disagree with OP. I think the phrase "rocket science" is still valid as a stand-in for the performance of a complicated task with high accuracy. In terms of the effort required to create a useful prediction, I agree that many things are more complicated than rocket science (often by virtue of being intractable). However, in almost all of these things success is not as highly correlated with the performance of some mental/engineering feat. If a rocket correctly performs a non-trivial task (i.e. gets to a specific orbit/planet/location), we know with certainty that the rocket scientist created a valid physical model and performed difficult calculations on it with high accuracy (ditto for other parts of the engineering). Testing rockets is expensive and the likelihood of making one that works by trial-and-error is zero (I'm referring to rockets on the scale that put satellites into orbit, launch probes thorough the solar system, etc). In comparison, common wisdom holds that startups usually launch with poor product/market fit and pivot until they find something that works. Eventual success doesn't correspond nearly as well to the performance of mental acrobatics.

Don't get me wrong, both tasks are difficult, require "guts", and so on. But I think a direct comparison of the difficulty is disingenuous. To me, "This isn't rocket science" doesn't mean "this is easy", it means "we should be able to eventually succeed by trial&error".

@pja: your observation that "not rocket science" only became popular in the 90s jibes well with associating "rocket science" with "low margin for error", as challenger exploded in 1986.

I never understood this idiom; to me, 'rocket science' seems to be a fairly well understood issue compared to i.e. the (human) brain.

Rocket science seems simple today, by comparison of other more-complicated technologies. Using computer modeling and calculation, we can accurately predict probable trajectories in which an object will travel.

But it wasn't always this way. For a long time, we were trying to figure out how to measure the speed of gravity with blackboards and pocket-watches. Figuring out "who likes cake vs who likes pie" seems simple, yet we still wrangle with it.

There are similar idioms about brain surgery and brain surgeons. It's been around for a while, since the time when rockets did blow up with a bit more regularity. Now it's just a thing people say without considering whether it's an accurate expression or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

I have personally always found that the phrase "It's not rocket surgery" gives a deeper and more wide-spanning explanation of the issue.

I place "it's not rocket surgery" in the same class as "redonkulous" ... mildly clever the first time or two I heard it.

That's redonkulous, rocket surgery is timeless.

I like saying "We're not landing a rover on Mars."

And I never use the Edmund Burke quote, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it". I've never liked that phrase because it's overly simplistic. The vagaries of human nature and the shear number of variables that influence world events are much to complex to model as a simple "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out" equation.

I never liked this phrase; my friend & I (as probably many other HN'ers) were building small solid-state fuel rockets at the age of 15. There's nothing inherently difficult in the basics of rocket science and rocket engineering. Frankly, I find cooking more difficult than making a solid rocket motor land at my neighbour's backyard.

Most of common phrases don't make much sense when taken literally.

You can't compare toy rockets with real rockets any more than you can compare toy trains with real trains.

No, but I think people see rockets as magic they aren't.

I think toy trains and real trains scale differently than "toy rockets". A home-made SRM is a more powerful version of fireworks SRMs, and then there's a thin line between home-made SRM design and things you could stack on car or helicopter to fire at things. Not every rocket is a space rocket, and depending on size and cost tradeoffs required, you get more and more complicated designs, creating a spectrum from a home-made 1km rocket to Falcon 9 & stuff.

I'd say that the real problem with rockets is not that they're inherently magical/difficult, but dangerous and costly to develop. We can say a lot about great engineering that went into things like fuel, nozzles, fins, etc. etd. but the same if not more engineering went into internal combustion engines, and I don't see people saying "it's combustion engine science".

That's like saying that electrical engineering is trivial because you used an arduino once and it wasn't so hard.

Wasn't the rocket science done by the people who made the solid rocket fuel tube thing?

There's nothing inherently difficult with carrying a ball over a painted line, or walking up a hill in the snow. That doesn't trivialize the difficulty of being a professional athlete or climbing Mt. Everest.

The devil is always in the details. While much of the pioneering work in rocketry has been done, it isn't an irrelevant pursuit. A group of high school students can take prefabricated parts and build a pretty cool model rocket. That same team of students are not going to be capable of building an air-to-air missile.

I find it amazing that the audience on HN would be trivializing a "hard" science and engineering discipline.

Because it trivializes the current problem. Some everyday things are as important as getting your rocket built correctly. Like driving.

Baking isn't rocket science, but knowing about food allergies and proper preparation and substitutes can save someone's life.

Also: "It's not rocket science. You just have to... Actually, I guess it is rocket science. No fuel rods, Sheen."

Duncan Watts has a book titled Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer Very good and interesting read.

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Is-Obvious-Once-Answer/dp/0...

As an economist, I salute this post. While common sense will get a person far in life, strategic decision making is a hard process to model.

That is probably the reason new models are en vogue every other decade.

Not quite. Models advance as their conclusions are shown to not hold in reality.

You may be thinking about macroeconomics, in the which there seems to be a fad cycle of models, and a hyped up difference of assumptions. I assure you macroeconomics doesn't actually have a fad cycle.

this article includes the phrase "it turns out common sense is [often] wrong."

when people collectively understand this sentence, politics will stop being such a hard problem. I'm not sure this will ever happen, sadly.

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