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Foolishly, I don't really. I made the connection in some other thread on HN, and it's stuck with me. My advice is perhaps terrible: find yourself an old enginee

Foolishly, I don't really. I made the connection in some other thread on HN, and it's stuck with me. My advice is perhaps terrible: find yourself an old engineer and just do whatever it takes to be their friend and follow 'em like a puppy. It's sorta weird how effective it is to just be around people like that (and I think some PE licenses actually require apprenticeships for that reason). But I do have two formative things: Feynman's lecture on Cargo Cult Science is excellent, with this gem: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that... I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." - Feynman [0] I can't tell you how many times this has saved me in the field. Replace the word 'scientist' with '<YOUR DISCIPLINE HERE>' as needed. (And I think moreso for engineers than scientists, since safety absolutely requires this mentality.) And I really like the ideas in The Pragmatic Programmer [1]. More than anything specific, the idea of not being married to any particular concept or solution, but rather to pragmatically chose what is correct then for that circumstance helps a lot. The book is opinionated, but reasonable, and copying that pleasant tone is a fast way to make allies when solving problems in a group. And it's a pretty good book to boot. [0] http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html (and is an HN favorite, to be sure) [1] https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer (another HN favorite, though not always brought up in terms of engineering)

dTal 11y ago
Taken together, Feynman's "bending over backwards" and the "principle of charity" constitute a philosophy along the lines of "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". It's recently become fashionable to blame this principle for some sort of percieved flaw in the Web, but I wonder if a world where web browsers failed to render a entire page on so much as a misplaced </p> would really have been better. After all, it would be a shame if we lived in a world where people only listened to your opinions if you formatted them a certain way, wouldn't it?
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Often, I find requiring to format my ideas in a certain way has revealed problems with those ideas I'd not yet considered. For instance, if a theist was required to frame God in the context of provable science, they would realize how many holes exist in their logic.

dTal 11y ago

Taken together, Feynman's "bending over backwards" and the "principle of charity" constitute a philosophy along the lines of "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". It's recently become fashionable to blame this principle for some sort of percieved flaw in the Web, but I wonder if a world where web browsers failed to render a entire page on so much as a misplaced </p> would really have been better. After all, it would be a shame if we lived in a world where people only listened to your opinions if you formatted them a certain way, wouldn't it?

dclowd9901 11y ago
Often, I find requiring to format my ideas in a certain way has revealed problems with those ideas I'd not yet considered. For instance, if a theist was required to frame God in the context of provable science, they would realize how many holes exist in their logic.