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The "anti-political" part is probably the most pertinent to modern tech thought. People repeat it here as well - the idea that any kind of specification or stat

The "anti-political" part is probably the most pertinent to modern tech thought. People repeat it here as well - the idea that any kind of specification or statistic is just cold and hard, and there are no lenses. What I wonder more is: is it a product of the "build it" mentality like Turner says, or is it manipulated by money men with an interest is maintaining the status quo by silencing dissent as non-scientific?

AlexCoventry 9y ago
It's both. It wouldn't be so rhetorically useful to the latter if the former weren't repeatedly knocking out runaway success stories.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  But the former don't repeatedly knock out runaway success stories. Runaway success stories are incredibly rare. Worse, the people who are most famous for achieving them rarely appear particularly sympathetic or humane. Edit to add: that was a great read, IMO - unusually interesting and insightful.
matt4077 9y ago
In my experience, engineers tend to fetishise the sciences to a degree even scientists don't. Physics and math are among the most influential, and their biggest successes were build on reductionism, or the ability to split large problems into smaller, manageable units. The first instinct is not to immediately solve a problem, but to reduce its size. They also seek axioms, i.e. simple, universal truths from which to build larger solutions. This approach quickly turns into frustration: people behave irrationally, for example, which turns economics from an offspring of mathematics into something more akin to applied psychology. Laws fail to live up to a standard of "plain meaning", because the myriad conflicts of life are to nuanced to be exhaustively captured in simple language. That's where the distrust of the legal system, as well as "smart contracts" come from. It's interesting to compare engineers and scientists in this regard: the most successful scientists tend to have a vast appreciation of culture beyond their field of study. Richard Feynman, for example, excelled in music and painting, and became a bestselling author.
- viridian 9y ago
  I think it comes from not really having a grasp of a lot of the real BS involved in science, which you can really only know from first or secondhand experience. A lot of the magic and awe I found in science was beaten out of me by having close friends and partners who were lab techs, doctoral students, postdocs, etc. I really hope knowledge of how the scientific process works in practice becomes more common among engineers though, it's very frustrating when someone takes a study as being the word of god, and you can't convince them otherwise, because science. Like some 3-4 years ago there was some lab claiming to be on the cusp of having a real cold fusion prototype, and people just buy in because they want it to be true, and the lab had written a paper.

AlexCoventry 9y ago

It's both. It wouldn't be so rhetorically useful to the latter if the former weren't repeatedly knocking out runaway success stories.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
But the former don't repeatedly knock out runaway success stories. Runaway success stories are incredibly rare. Worse, the people who are most famous for achieving them rarely appear particularly sympathetic or humane. Edit to add: that was a great read, IMO - unusually interesting and insightful.

matt4077 9y ago

In my experience, engineers tend to fetishise the sciences to a degree even scientists don't. Physics and math are among the most influential, and their biggest successes were build on reductionism, or the ability to split large problems into smaller, manageable units. The first instinct is not to immediately solve a problem, but to reduce its size. They also seek axioms, i.e. simple, universal truths from which to build larger solutions. This approach quickly turns into frustration: people behave irrationally, for example, which turns economics from an offspring of mathematics into something more akin to applied psychology. Laws fail to live up to a standard of "plain meaning", because the myriad conflicts of life are to nuanced to be exhaustively captured in simple language. That's where the distrust of the legal system, as well as "smart contracts" come from. It's interesting to compare engineers and scientists in this regard: the most successful scientists tend to have a vast appreciation of culture beyond their field of study. Richard Feynman, for example, excelled in music and painting, and became a bestselling author.

viridian 9y ago
I think it comes from not really having a grasp of a lot of the real BS involved in science, which you can really only know from first or secondhand experience. A lot of the magic and awe I found in science was beaten out of me by having close friends and partners who were lab techs, doctoral students, postdocs, etc. I really hope knowledge of how the scientific process works in practice becomes more common among engineers though, it's very frustrating when someone takes a study as being the word of god, and you can't convince them otherwise, because science. Like some 3-4 years ago there was some lab claiming to be on the cusp of having a real cold fusion prototype, and people just buy in because they want it to be true, and the lab had written a paper.