Do you believe it to be truly efficient or just the most effective hypothesis? For example perhaps where it is inefficient this is indistinguishable and highly random therefore not terribly useful?
214 karma · joined July 24, 2007
I find it interesting that almost all of the most truly interesting and valueable things I have read were written in plain english by people that strive to keep it as simple as possible. It's far too rare unfortunately.
I was curious if people more knowledgeable than myself on this topic took genuine exception to these philosophies and had others to add to the list. Part of doing your homework is asking other smart people questions. Perhaps not the best site for this one but what can I say, I respect the people here more than elsewhere.
Now of course the answer is that no one really knows what's coming but recently I have started taking that point of view slightly more seriously and have stopped taking the next big web cycle as such a given.
Don't know if I'm the only one noticing this.
I used to be sharing announcements from Techcrunch, Venturebeat etc like mad but now there seems to be very little to get excited about.
Has everyone else been noticing this too?
In making things better in engineering the first goal is first try and stop people spending so much time managing and moving data around. This really takes up a large percentage of the work done, unnecessarily.
Second is to start getting engineers to see things more like programming where things aren't repeated and data is separated out from the method. If you receive new data (e.g. new aircraft loads and geometry) your goal is for there to be nothing whatsoever required for you to update your analysis. Its already setup, you just point at the new data and it's done. This is rarely the case I find.
Finally, I think is the issue you are talking about which is to tackle the problem of engineering by forming new abstractions and figuring out how to best represent those abstractions with existing tools or something new. This is definitely promising but honestly there's lots of easier stuff to do first that would make a big difference.
The thing that makes it so hard in engineering is that every job has its own set of "approved" methods and the amount of work required for each part varies for a number of reasons. There's a lot stuff you're never going to get the world to agree on but a spreadsheet type thing that separates the data and formulas completely is a good start.
The general one size fits all solution that is useful but does not lead to the mess Excel creates seems to be what you have in mind.
In aerospace the second most popular tool is Mathcad it seems. Have you seen that?
Although there's rarely enough licenses around (why spend when everyone has Office installed) and a lot of people aren't familiar with it.
There are software tools for analysis developed to standardise what can be standardised and to force people to use templates for their analysis, but they are generally not great and getting them developed is always politically and financially challenging.
IMHO engineers find it difficult to identify and extract the common processes because every part is slightly different and complex and usually requires its own judgement calls to be made about how to deal with it. This leads naturally to everyone doing things their own way and therefore using the most flexible and cheap tool there is...Excel.
That's not to say there aren't common processes and higher abstractions to be made, it just requires people to look hard for them and think about things in a way that does not come naturally to the industry. They also need to have the clout to get people using them.
I think things are changing some what with modern aircraft though. My opinion is that judgement is playing less of a role in many cases and we are moving to brute force analysis i.e. Just throw it at the computer and analyse it all in great detail.
This leads to more common processes and standard ways of sharing and moving data around.
It's a big problem and I enjoy working on it but the support isn't always there to invest in it.
The cost of designing an aircraft is tiny compared to the overall lifecycle of the aircraft and the costs involved in manufacturing. So the industry would generally prefer to keep operating in the same old ways rather than take risks on new things. Especially new things that involve upfront investment. Just my opinion anyway.
Engineers often get away with creating monstrous spreadsheets that are difficult to follow:
- scattered logic - methodology obsficated with complex excel formulas - magic numbers that you have a hell of a time tracking down the source of - links all over the place. Are they still valid or have they gone bad due to all the copy/pasting? etc etc
As a programmer who has to write something that has logic and no ambiguity for a computer to understand it, it makes you want to beat your head against a wall trying to understand and check someones work.
Until recently (victim of the downturn) I was in a small dev team looking to automate and improve things. We had some good wins but it's a struggle.
If someone like toyota starts making aircraft seriously and develops more standardized methods rather than simply employing piles of engineers to punch numbers wildly into excel they may be able to crush everyone else in time to market.
Aside from Joel and Clay Shirky (http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) does anyone have any other must read links on this type of thing?
So I was able to talk my way into the software development team and have been learning like mad ever since, thanks mostly to this site.
Even though I had little experience, the sheer variety of technologies and points of view I've seen here has made an enormous difference in getting me started.
Is anyone here able to describe how their interface to your bank account works in more detail? I haven't heard a great explanation of it.
Part of me is still amazed that many people have happily typed in their banking passwords.
Looking at how well a site like Stack Overflow is working gives me hope of a happy medium between rigor and usability being possible in the future somehow.
It combines a whole bunch of ideas from social sites such as voting, points, awards, wiki style editing into an effective solution. Far from perfect but useful which as about all you could ask for I guess.
It would also be interesting if a company like Disqus started experimenting with features in this area.
One approach could be to have a group of site moderators who make it their mission to, as Paul said, keep their identities as small as possible and simply judge the logic and biases of peoples arguments.
Perhaps their vote is what locks in a statement to be taken as true or false and then everyone has to then play by the rule of accepting their judgment on the matter for future debates.
In a similar way that scientific research builds on the work that was done before it to make progress, standing on the shoulders of giants type stuff, the conversation could be mapped to show these towers of progress grow as people logically move from "if A is true then B must be true..." and so on.
Perhaps the debate branches at points of contention and goes off down different paths.
The idea being that anyone can join in and quickly get up to speed as to where the conversation is up to by looking at the map of statements that have been dealt with so far.
If someone wants to reopen the debate around some statement and attack the foundation of one of these towers and bring it crashing down then they can.
Of course an enormous element of this will be based on the subjective judgment of the moderators. It can't be entirely based on pure logic but if it is useful and leads to new and interesting things then who cares...
Even if it succeeded in removing a lot of the crap around a debate and focus precisely on the points that people differ on so they can be attacked directly I think that would be a useful thing.
My idea for making this somewhat enjoyable and stand a chance of people participating in it would be to make it game like in some way.
Anyway, its all pretty out there stuff I know, but I'll no doubt continue to think about anyway...
I've often wondered what would be possible in terms of designing a website that aims to moderate debate in a way that leads to new ideas and conclusions and attempts to negate as many of these types of effects as possible.
Some formal system, that the users would have no choice but to follow, that begins with some one making a statement such as "X is true because of Y and Z" and then everyone debates it, reforms the statement as necessary and at some point it gets locked in as either true or false and then the discussion has to proceed based on that understanding.
People are forced to address each others points and eliminate as much bias as possible in their statements.
You could visually map out the progress that gets made until perhaps some new interesting conclusion gets reached.
Obviously no perfect solution exists but for me its an interesting question of how useful a system could be designed. There's also the obvious problems that a) few people are likely to want to use such a system and b) those that do are probably skewed to favor some particular point of view.
There is just so much wasted energy on the internet not being harnessed for actual progress. There are many blogs etc that have been created with the specific purpose of progressing some cause or area of expertise but people are just turning up, yelling opinions at one another and leaving with very little gained. Such is life I guess...
A couple I've got in the first few pages:
- Reductionism seems to be failing a quite a lot and things we thought we could separate we are now starting to intertwine again.
- The weakness of expertise and hypothesis testing. Kinda goes nicely with Nassim Nicholas Talebs books which I just finished.
I'm looking forward to getting to The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.
To some degree I'm wishing for a new style of journalism. Or at the least journalists actually learning to write headlines that make any sense and are useful.
The startup ideas there are:
- Subscribing to specific issues that you want to keep track of over time is something I want to see way more of.
- Sites that use data visualisations to increase understanding and perspective of...anything really, is something I've been thinking about. Think the world would be a better place if people had perspective and we have access to a lot of data now to play with.