I personally find engineering to be a great compromise between the abstractness of math or even science, and the leaps of faith or arbitrary assumptions needed to follow other methods of doing good. Engineering has a hard, systematic, first-principles-based core but also a track record of building highly complex real things that work in the real world. It is also humble in the sense that no engineering product is ever considered to be “done”. All these qualities are missing from pure rationalist thinking or EA etc. I have written about it here: https://meaning.lifevisor.ai.
Agreed to an extent—engineers have clearly developed many of the innovations have allowed our quality of life to dramatically increase since the industrial revolution.
However I think engineers can have very similar blindspots to the mathematicians and economists described in this piece. I went from an urban planning* undergrad to civil grad program, and it was fascinating to witness the extent to which those who had an exclusively engineering training saw every complex socio-technical problem as something that had a purely engineering solution. For some problems this mindset works out. But there are other problems for which there might be a policy bottleneck that they were blind to.
I think there's also sometime a tendency among engineers to view their decisions as value neutral. When really, the framework of those decisions contains a very large number of embedded assumptions about how the world ought to work.
I agree that many times engineers have those blind spots. But the saving grace in engineering is that there are no ultimate truths. There’s no righteous zeal. (At least there shouldn’t be otherwise it’s not pure engineering.) In engineering there should only be incremental improvement towards a desirable goal. So once the problems are noticed, they should be worked on. Or the product just fails and joins others like it in the garbage heap of history. As long as real products are being developed, reality can be the judge.
once again asking reboot to stop being based for just one second
Thank you for a wonderful essay.
I personally find engineering to be a great compromise between the abstractness of math or even science, and the leaps of faith or arbitrary assumptions needed to follow other methods of doing good. Engineering has a hard, systematic, first-principles-based core but also a track record of building highly complex real things that work in the real world. It is also humble in the sense that no engineering product is ever considered to be “done”. All these qualities are missing from pure rationalist thinking or EA etc. I have written about it here: https://meaning.lifevisor.ai.
Agreed to an extent—engineers have clearly developed many of the innovations have allowed our quality of life to dramatically increase since the industrial revolution.
However I think engineers can have very similar blindspots to the mathematicians and economists described in this piece. I went from an urban planning* undergrad to civil grad program, and it was fascinating to witness the extent to which those who had an exclusively engineering training saw every complex socio-technical problem as something that had a purely engineering solution. For some problems this mindset works out. But there are other problems for which there might be a policy bottleneck that they were blind to.
I think there's also sometime a tendency among engineers to view their decisions as value neutral. When really, the framework of those decisions contains a very large number of embedded assumptions about how the world ought to work.
* though also math
I agree that many times engineers have those blind spots. But the saving grace in engineering is that there are no ultimate truths. There’s no righteous zeal. (At least there shouldn’t be otherwise it’s not pure engineering.) In engineering there should only be incremental improvement towards a desirable goal. So once the problems are noticed, they should be worked on. Or the product just fails and joins others like it in the garbage heap of history. As long as real products are being developed, reality can be the judge.