Mr. Fix It - The Engineer's Mentality in Politics
theamericanscholar.org
theamericanscholar.org
"Here are some of the things that the humanities, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise; that judgments of value cannot be reduced to judgments of fact; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine."
The problem with his claim, is he's described the role of an architect / designer / analyst better than I've ever seen in print, anywhere. Despite it supposedly being his intent to slam techies, I've never seen such an eloquent description of my experience with database management and design. That's exactly how I spent 90% of my brain power on the job, all day long.
The ideas and descriptions, amazing. The thesis and conclusion, laughable.
I think the author also completely (intentionally?) missed the whole "dilbert" trope and its valuable contribution to political debate.
The problem is that those things are all INTUITIVE CONCLUSIONS. You could learn them by never getting a Lib Arts degree and never really even studying them formally. In fact, I would say most Lib Arts people I know struggle with those things and most engineers/scientists seem to get them on a fundamental level. The difference is that engineers and scientists dedicate themselves to understading how to dissect and solve problems - even when the solutions might be difficult or counter-intuitive to get to.
We are categorically worse off as a nation for handing our government over to the poli-sci complex. It is just the epitome of conceit that someone who never solves any complex problems should be allowed to annoint themselves as legislators over those that do.
Go down the chain of control for the Presidency. You have to get to like 16 (Secy of Transportation or something like that, I forget) before you find someone with a real science or engineering degree. It's pathetic and IMO, it's the source for most of this country's problems.
I call it the "binary geek fallacy". Some people tend to assume that scientists, engineers and especially programmers deal only with hard facts and precise measurements, think in "zeroes and ones" (literally heard that in a recent discussion with friends) and reject emotional thinking in favour of logical, which - they say - isn't able to describe the entire reality (or even the more important parts).
It is of course wrong. The thing they don't seem to understand is that math is capable of not only describing "hard facts and precise measurements", but fuzzy facts and educated guesses as well. And it does it much, much better than intuition, or "heart", or common sense. Moreover, STEM thinking allows you to abstract over those sophisticated, supposedly too imprecise things, to get something one can work on. If something is too difficult to comprehend, we'll keep using Science and Maths and Engineering on it until it becomes easy, and thus we'll have another tool in our arsenal. That is how progress in thinking is done.
There's also no problem with (false) logical vs. emotional thinking modes dichotomy. Just pull both of them into the model you work with, and you'll be fine.
Math is nothing more, than applied thinking - human brain at its best.
>Here are some of the things that the humanities, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that people have different but equally valid perspectives;
People do not have different but equally valid perspectives, it's a recipe to pass bullshit around.
> that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise;
Of course it's not. But engineers can, and do deal with it quite well, using methods much better than waving hands and doing things because they feel or sound good.
> that judgments of value cannot be reduced to judgments of fact;
Wait until neuro- and cognitive scienctists disassemble the brain. A new chapter will start in discussion about values.
I don't think engineers (and for the sake of this argument I'm going to include all sorts of techies in that definition) and scientists should run the show exclusively, no. But we do tend to be intelligent and results-oriented people and ignoring us completely is foolish. Not only that but we're more likely to insist on evidence based policy over partisanship or lawmaking based on gut reaction.
Plus so much of the world runs on tech of various form these days that lawmakers without any tech education or knowledge can only ever create nonsensical legislation.
http://theamericanscholar.org/upper-middle-brow/
In this case, the kind of upper-middle-brow cultural consumers he is examining (in a rather unfriendly way) is the readers of the American Scholar.
So it's not just throwing stones at engineers. (And we are a touchy bunch, as this thread shows. ;-)
>But society isn’t a building. Its parts are people, not struts or circuits. That is why a humanistic education is far more useful to the policymaker (and by extension, the citizen) than a technical one.
Of course society isn't a building. Who was arguing that it was? But many of our problems are technical in nature, or, at the very least have technical solutions. Moreover, without at least some understanding of the scientific background for these problems, it's very difficult for a policy maker to know whether their suggestions will have beneficial or harmful consequences. I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing in Congress right now, with regards to Internet regulation. Politicians are proposing laws for which enforcement is either impossible or for which enforcement would require massive infringements on freedom of expression. Do they do this out of malice? No. They do this out of ignorance. They simply don't know the consequences of the things they are proposing, and so they propose (and sometimes pass) laws that have harmful unintended consequences that wipe out any possible benefit from those laws.
>Here are some of the things that the humanities, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise; that judgments of value cannot be reduced to judgments of fact; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine.
People do not always have "equally valid" perspectives. That is the very centrist bias that allows out and out untruths to pass unchallenged. This is why it's possible for a creationist to come on television and have equal time with an evolutionary biologist. Your perspective is valid insofar as your premises are based upon evidence about the world as it is. It is not valid if your premises (e.g. all species on Earth were created by a divine intelligent designer) have been proven false.
In addition, while it is true that judgements of value cannot be reduced to judgements of facts (i.e. the "is-ought problem"), one must acknowledge that judgements of value must be based upon judgements of fact. If you're basing your values upon incorrect facts, your values are very likely to be mistaken. For example, if you state that another person is not deserving of moral consideration, that is a judgement of value which may or may not be valid. However, if your justification for that judgement is hearsay evidence or religious bias, then that judgement starts to look very shaky.
>It is characteristic of the engineering mentality—whose representatives are so often male and so often adolescent, in spirit if not in age—to suppose that our fundamental problems are resolvable.
What you consider adolescent, I consider hopeful. After all, what alternative do we have to supposing that our age-old problems are solvable? Your cynical resignation to the world as it is? If everyone on this planet had that attitude, we'd still be huddling in caves. Progress of every sort - technological, economic, social - occurs because there are individuals who believe that we as a society can do better. That we can resolve our problems. That we can dream of a world that is better than the one we have today.
For an article that speaks in such profundities about wisdom, I find this piece to be profoundly unwise.
You've committed the same error. One ramification of the is-ought divide is that ultimately, ethical norms are assertions divorced from empirical basis. Saying that 'murder is wrong' is epistemologically very similar whether it is based on some religious text or something like "what would society be like if we allowed people to murder each other?". It is simply expressing a preference for one empirical state over another empirical state, and absent some transcendental determinant, no final conclusion can decisively be reached.
But humans tend to universally value some states over other, and it seems to be hard-wired into our brains. I think that when the neuro/cognitive scientists finally disassemble our firmware, we should have a new, interesting take on this problem.
Sigh...
The entire middle third of the comment is the standard engineer's fallacy that because the laws of physics are absolute and not relative, people's values should be also, and all conflict could be avoided if people were just rational. The main evidence offered is this aside about "science" "proving" the non-existence of god, so its fallaciousness is highly relevant. (There's also the fun of pointing out a fallacious and therefore irrational arugment in support of being rational, I'll admit it.)
Every college student in a technical major who has to take a humanities class for general ed goes through this phase, it's understandable. But it's just as important to grow up and leave it. Values are not rational, but that doesn't mean you get to ignore them.
- That people's values are absolute, or in anyway similar to the laws of physics.
- The existence, or non-existence of god, proving it, or otherwise.
- That values are irrational.
- That you get to ignore people's values.
You're putting words into his mouth. I think he's got quite interesting things to say about moral relativism, and his view point is hardly as naive as you think it is, but you're not hearing it.
The problem the author has with this is in the next sentence: "Its parts are people, not struts or circuits." I find this somewhat silly. When examined in numbers, humans are quite predictable, or fields like sociology and anthropology wouldn't exist. Advertising wouldn't be effective. Why shouldn't we approach the development of society from these perspectives? Even if it isn't some sort of panacea that can solve all our problems, it should at least be a step up from the mishmash of business interests, religion and pandering that controls large parts of our government and society currently.
Of course we should. It's called abstracting things. And, just as you write, it's much more effective than "the mishmash of business interests, religion and pandering that controls large parts of our government and society currently."
You probably didn't realize this, but the reason is that it's authoritarian and paternalistic. In a democratic society everyone, participates in public life, at least at some level. Organizing society so that experts rule gives them the power to dominate, control and exploit non-experts.
Not to mention a blatant strawman argument.
The author never even bothers to defend his argument against the obvious counterargument that perhaps the same kind of politicians, and the same kind of political thinking, that has failed to solve (or outright caused) so many major national problems is perhaps not worth trusting to solve them in the future, and that maybe a more pragmatic approach is needed.
From reading through some of his other pieces, I'm fairly certain that he doesn't know his subject well here. Does he seriously think that engineers think in binary and idolize Mr. Spock?
centrist means that the average of the positions probably has some sense to it; relativist means "everyone can be right at once, children..."
I'm a centrist, and I violently disagree with the dude! :)
I am aware of very few platforms that use the internet for what it's best at: giving everyone a voice. Things like http://liquidfeedback.org/ are only a start. I would bet that if the right tool existed, you could base a whole government on it.
On the other hand the "mass media representation" of engineers is limited solely to old star trek episode reruns, and a few autism themed movies (literally, like Temple Grandin's biographical movie and a couple others). The author's conclusions are going to be completely screwed up when writing from a position of such profound ignorance.
Now that the author is done insulting me ("adolescent, in spirit if not in age") let me reply: we know (from science, not from politics) more and more about "how people work" - for example, see here a talk from 2010 about the way the languages we speak affects our perception and preferences ( http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shape... ) - this is not wishy washy philosophy but empirical experimental psychology.
The thrust of this post is downright negligent and while some of what the author says is reasonable, I take objection to this snippet (among others):
"people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise;"
this sort of relativism is utter nonsense (perhaps excluding some moral judgements) - how economies works is a deterministic thing, which is nonetheless incredibly complicated, highly sensitive to initial conditions including fluffy things like 'public mood'. This doesn't make the truth any less precise or hard, just difficult to calculate, like weather patterns.
Over the centuries we have garnered an awful lot of data, both on state governance and economies, and (one of) the reason(s) engineers and scientists get cross with politics is that humanities graduates do not understand how to look at this data and learn from it.
We are sick of contradictory facts being shouted from one side of the radio argument to the other, without anyone bothering to check them (or the presenters bothering to know what they're talking about by reading a properly researched briefing before going on air, preferring as they do to improvise.)
Now, before someone accuses me of breaking the "firefly rule" ("sooner or later they'll come back around to thinking they can 'make people better' ") let me also add the caveat that I'm not in favour of forcing everyone to learn a second language (although that's actually not a bad idea, we already try to in schools) or anything worse. I am in favour of redesigning our existing institutions (government, education, etc) in line with how evidence suggests they will be more effective at fulfilling their own goals. Evidence-based policy is considerably more valuable than the author seems to realise.
You can understand these feelings, to a certain extent. 'Idea people' deal with people and their imprecise measurements. Authors must look intelligent when pushing bullshit theories. The bailout is either great or not; the country either stands up or it doesn't. Neither matters unless the argument is well written. The endless technical muddle of public life is going to seem despicable to people who are used to pursuing their ends talking about their feelings.
But society isn't a drum circle. Its parts are people, who need struts and circuits. That is why a STEM education is far more useful to the policymaker (and by extension, the citizen) than a liberal arts one. Here are some of the things that the STEM fields, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that when people have different but equally valid perspectives you shouldn't give them shit for doing engineering; that Truth just means matching our models of reality, sometimes several values can fit the model, that does not both make them right; that judgments of value are influenced by several judgments of fact in our brains, factors like priming, cognitive biases and learned behaviors affect every decision you make; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine, but proper use of our tools and technology can help.
Blog posts arguing cute but nevertheless wrong all-compassing theories of the world, which appeal to the kind of person I’m talking about, and which are usually far more fiction than science—that is, the human complexity of science—tends to give them bad numbers upholding theories that are way too orderly to be plausible as manifestations of human nature. Perhaps that is why our political discussions often involve the same, tired wrong arguments. We either go Keynes, Hayek, or are replaced by socialists. Not for nothing does the idea of the silver bullet remain the central figure of the liberal arts imagination.
I've never written a post critiquing the idea that we are heading towards a multiplanetary civilization. I have no idea if it's possible or not, and I know enough not to make predictions that far out into the future. It is characteristic of the liberal arts mentality—whose representatives are so often biased enough to throw around statements like 'adolescent of spirit if not of age', to suppose that our fundamental problems are unresolvable. The thinker believes himself possessed of superior wisdom. In fact, he has no expertise. Wisdom is not to be found in an essay; its formula is experience plus reflection. Engineering is the management of human affairs, the never-ending calibration of interests, vanities, and corruptions. It depends on knowing, how things work, and how people do to build a better world.