4 ms·

I used to work at Intel and then Microsoft during the anti-trust years. We were totally oblivious to what mgmt did and were quite happy to accept the company li

by tendo6 9y ago

I used to work at Intel and then Microsoft during the anti-trust years. We were totally oblivious to what mgmt did and were quite happy to accept the company line. It was after all delivered by nice respectable people and we were getting paid well. Also realized engineers are not revolutionaries. We like to work on things that a textbook talks about. The kind of problems these articles talk about most engineers have no idea how to solve. And it's in our nature to say so and shrink away from such problem. Look at Elon Musk today talking about how depressing it would be not to goto space. Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. What ends up happening is the space we shrink away from gets filled with characters who don't know what they are doing. They compensate by pandering to the public and buying time mostly for themselves to retire to a nice little island. Having said all that as an Engineer reaching his retirement I feel quite disappointed in the culture we have left behind for the next generation.

dhcode 9y ago
> Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. Colonizing Mars would require engineers to develop more than just rockets. At some point political-economic models of colonies would have to be developed, in order to determine whether colonies will be economically sustainable without subsidies from Earth. Asking people to imagine how these colonies should be organized, and how to measure whether they will be economically sustainable, requires them to consider economic and political ideas which could be later applied to the problems of poverty and political instability on Earth. One potential model that could work well for Mars in order to reduce political tensions between competing colonies and to establish a clear and efficient mechanism for financing territorial public services is cellular democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy
- sdoering 9y ago
  Great link. Reminded me of the - in German - Concept of the 'Räterepublik'. Often called Soviet System without actually referring to the real Soviet State. Sadly the English Wikipedia isn't that great on this topic. But it actually describes the same concept.
jacquesm 9y ago
Another real problem is the willful ignorance of all things political. As if there isn't a political dimension to almost everything we do. Engineers as a rule have a lot of leverage, small changes in what we make have huge consequences in the real world and a bit of understanding about how the two are coupled would go a long way towards making this a better world. It would also at times require engineers to take a stand and I suspect that that is what drives the willful ignorance. After all it is much easier to do something inherently bad if you can pretend there are no real world consequences.
- akavel 9y ago
  Um, could you give some specific/concrete examples of what you mean, when speaking of this leverage? I honestly have no slightest idea of what you may have in your mind here, and am totally curious - at least as long as we're talking, I assume, about legit/ethical/morally acceptable actions? (Also please note I'm not in US, though I presume it's not relevant to this discussion.)
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Web developers of today are like the early printing press owners/operators.
  - drvdevd 9y ago
    I would say it depends on your position in your place of work, but there are multiple examples of this. I prefer historical ones, say for example NANP (the North American Numbering Plan). I'm not sure what country you're in, but here, these 10 digit numbers and their various prefixes (NPAs AKA "area codes") are literally burned into the consciousness of most citizens, without them even realizing it. Additionally, all modern cellular services here are still following it in some sense or other, making it an example of highly entrenched technical debt. I'm pretty sure that the design of this system bled heavily into most other countries' telephone networks as well. A small number of engineers probably drew up this plan on a chalkboard in the 1940s at AT&T, without a clue as to the magnitude of future ramifications.
  - dmos62 9y ago

by tendo6 9y ago

dhcode 9y ago

> Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace. Colonizing Mars would require engineers to develop more than just rockets. At some point political-economic models of colonies would have to be developed, in order to determine whether colonies will be economically sustainable without subsidies from Earth. Asking people to imagine how these colonies should be organized, and how to measure whether they will be economically sustainable, requires them to consider economic and political ideas which could be later applied to the problems of poverty and political instability on Earth. One potential model that could work well for Mars in order to reduce political tensions between competing colonies and to establish a clear and efficient mechanism for financing territorial public services is cellular democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_democracy

sdoering 9y ago
Great link. Reminded me of the - in German - Concept of the 'Räterepublik'. Often called Soviet System without actually referring to the real Soviet State. Sadly the English Wikipedia isn't that great on this topic. But it actually describes the same concept.

jacquesm 9y ago

Another real problem is the willful ignorance of all things political. As if there isn't a political dimension to almost everything we do. Engineers as a rule have a lot of leverage, small changes in what we make have huge consequences in the real world and a bit of understanding about how the two are coupled would go a long way towards making this a better world. It would also at times require engineers to take a stand and I suspect that that is what drives the willful ignorance. After all it is much easier to do something inherently bad if you can pretend there are no real world consequences.

akavel 9y ago
Um, could you give some specific/concrete examples of what you mean, when speaking of this leverage? I honestly have no slightest idea of what you may have in your mind here, and am totally curious - at least as long as we're talking, I assume, about legit/ethical/morally acceptable actions? (Also please note I'm not in US, though I presume it's not relevant to this discussion.)
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Web developers of today are like the early printing press owners/operators.
- drvdevd 9y ago
  I would say it depends on your position in your place of work, but there are multiple examples of this. I prefer historical ones, say for example NANP (the North American Numbering Plan). I'm not sure what country you're in, but here, these 10 digit numbers and their various prefixes (NPAs AKA "area codes") are literally burned into the consciousness of most citizens, without them even realizing it. Additionally, all modern cellular services here are still following it in some sense or other, making it an example of highly entrenched technical debt. I'm pretty sure that the design of this system bled heavily into most other countries' telephone networks as well. A small number of engineers probably drew up this plan on a chalkboard in the 1940s at AT&T, without a clue as to the magnitude of future ramifications.
- dmos62 9y ago