There used to be this thing said about China vs. the US: That the leadership of elites in China were mostly from Engineering backgrounds, while those in the US

There used to be this thing said about China vs. the US: That the leadership of elites in China were mostly from Engineering backgrounds, while those in the US went to Law School. The idea is that STEM people are better grounded in the epistemological reality of an external objective universe that doesn't care about your texts, your desires, or your ideology. My Chinese wife tells me this had reversed itself somewhat under Xi Jinping. (Re: Geeks, MOPS, and Sociopaths?) That regime's performance in the current pandemic crisis would seem to support this, though that government's record has been spotty to poor on the epistemology vs. ideology front for awhile. The problem with spending so much of one's time wrangling texts which are somewhat abstracted away from reality, is that one can lose touch with the epistemological grounding of reality. One might even start to believe they can start to rewrite reality through strong conviction. Before all you fellow programmers out there start feeling smug, think about this: As a programmer, one is primarily a wrangler of a particular kind of text. Ever wonder about why so many conflicts in the programming "field" ("" are a reference to Alan Kay) have the tenor of medieval sectarian religious squabbles?