7 ms·

Much like a Commission for Stopping Further Improvements, a Coalition for Stopping Further Regulation is equally short-sighted. Brunel's contention that struct

Much like a Commission for Stopping Further Improvements, a Coalition for Stopping Further Regulation is equally short-sighted. Brunel's contention that structural engineers should be qualified to make their own decisions unencumbered by regulation makes sense on the face of it. But then, what qualifies a structural engineer? Licensing, a product of regulation. Like many things, regulation is, in isolation, neutral. It can serve the common good, or it can serve the interests of an unrepresentative cabal; it can be forward-looking and adaptable, or it can be hastily drafted by unqualified functionaries. Why couldn’t the regulators in Brunel's day have carved out an open-ended “unless otherwise demonstrated” around the use of iron structural members?

its_ethan 4y ago
It feels like you answered your own question in a way.. "Why couldn’t the regulators in Brunel's day have carved out an open-ended “unless otherwise demonstrated” around the use of iron structural members?" The answer is partly in your statement: "regulation is, in isolation, neutral." Looking around at regulatory/ bureaucratic bodies, "in isolation" is rarely (never?) achieved. Satisfying ambiguous "unless otherwise demonstrated"-esque clauses that are enforced by unelected paper pushers is very much part of Brunel's concern.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > unelected paper pushers The core of your argument is that regulators are unelected (vs engineers ???) and incompetent, when in reality they either get counsel from people in the field, or are former or partially active members of the profession themselves.
  - jkhdigital 4y ago
    Engineers, at least at that point in history, paid the consequences of their failures. It’s not about competence, it’s about “skin in the game”. For further reading, Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this idea.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      That doesn't ring true to me, looking at Amazon it doesn't look to me like their warehouse system engineers are paying the consequences of their system, while the OSHA is some corrupt/carefree player. Also, looking from a step behing at our exchange, you are arguing that people need skin in the game to be fair and make weighted decisions, pointing at a writer who stopped having any skin in the game to write books and go on interviews and become an influencer.
    - zokier 4y ago
      Dubious. The designer of River Dee bridge, Stephenson, faced inquest after the incident and was cleared of any charges. Stephenson continued to have successful career as engineer and also in politics as MP.
    - jimbokun 4y ago
      Funny, I thought it was the people who died or were seriously injured due to the bridge collapse who paid the highest price for the engineers’ failures.
      - chii 4y ago
        But they're already dead, so future events do not affect them, as they are no longer in the iterated game of life. The engineer, on the other hand, continues playing the iterated game of life, and so their reputation does matter (to themselves at least). Therefore, by making sure that any bridges that collapse has social stigma painted against those who designed and/or built it, it would encourage proper engineering even if there's no third party at the time to certify it.
        newjersey 4y ago
        Makes me think of the portal song > for the people who are still alive The test subjects who are already dead don’t matter. GlaDOS, on the other hand, must continue to make choices in which experiments and test subjects will deliver the best bang for the buck.
  - xp84 4y ago
    "In reality" the politicians who appoint the regulators "get counsel from" the lobbyists who bribe them (excuse me, completely legally help the PACs that help re-elect them) the most generously. Regulatory capture is a very common theme throughout every agency. Take Ajit Pai, who is and always was very obviously a Verizon stooge, as a textbook example. For that reason I don't blame anyone who would prefer a minimum of detailed, 'implementation-detail-level' government regulation on tech. Best case scenario they're poorly-written and arrest innovation, worst case they're also written to advantage the biggest or most politically-connected companies, who never deserve the help.
pdonis 4y ago
> what qualifies a structural engineer? Licensing, a product of regulation. No, licensing does not qualify a structural engineer. What qualifies a structural engineer is being willing to sign a legal document when, say, a bridge is completed, that says that they take legal responsibility for the bridge's safe functioning, and agree to be held legally liable if it fails. Licensing just means that, in addition to knowing enough about structural engineering to be willing to make such a legal commitment, they also have to get a piece of paper from the government before they can sign off legally as the structural engineer of record for a project.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I'm sure I can find lots of people willing to sign such a document. Particularly if I pay them to.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    I'm sure the people you are thinking of would change their minds pretty quickly once they saw the legal language that engineers of record for projects actually have to sign up to.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      Not if they are starving. Starve now for sure, or starve later after getting paid - pretty easy choice.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - pdonis 4y ago
        People who are starving won't even get asked to be an engineer of record for the kind of project we're talking about. Do you think companies that build bridges go down to the local 7-Eleven and ask for structural engineers willing to sign off on the documents?
asdfman123 4y ago
Nuance is always important. Too much regulation is bad. There’s also very high costs for too little regulation (scammers, charlatans, the incompetent, etc.) Taking an inflexible stance that cannot admit that some level of regulation is advantageous is a mistake. (Also, reading this article has inadvertently made my writing style more 19th century apparently.)
kragen 4y ago
no, knowledge qualifies a structural engineer, not licensing in the ideal case, they coincide, but that ideal is always far from reality by proposing that licensing is what qualifies a structural engineer you are engaging in petitio principii: asking us to stipulate a premise which is in reality just a disguised version of your (incorrect) thesis, and from which you can then easily prove it
- ajross 4y ago
  > no, knowledge qualifies a structural engineer, not licensing Only to other structural engineers of similar or higher competence. How does a property developer know their engineer has sufficient "knowledge"? pg wrote a whole essay on this problem: you can't hire good people unless you start with good people doing the hiring. But that doesn't scale to problems like "all the buildings society needs" because of the chicken and egg problem. Someone needs to have a way to (1) identify sufficiently knowledgeable engineers and (2) ensure that only sufficiently knowledgeable engineers are designing buildings. Call it whatever you want, but any such regulatory regime is going to be isomorphic to "licensing".
  - revelio 4y ago
    Corporate reputation. We don't need licensing in the tech industry to build things like search engines, ai and space rockets because hiring standards are a form of private sector regulation (over the workforce). Reputation is sufficient to ensure the best companies rise to the top
    - ajross 4y ago
      Building failures happen after decades, when the original engineers are retired or dead. Internet products sink or swim in months. I don't see how those timescales are remotely comparable.
      - revelio 4y ago
        Engineering companies stick around for a lot longer than tech firms though. The people who still work there and would like a long career will be looking out for mistakes.
bjornsing 4y ago
> Like many things, regulation is, in isolation, neutral. Hardly. As Brunel points out regulation is always biased towards the past rather than the future. But I think there’s an even stronger and more dangerous bias in regulation, one towards mediocrity. Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power. What is in the interest of the mediocre? To outlaw the outliers (like Brunel). It’s sad, but unfortunately part of human nature.
- hnbad 4y ago
  > Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power. No, most people are not mediocre. Most people are mediocre at any given thing by definition. Individuals can excel at a given thing. Some can even excel at multiple things. But let's not allow our hubris to blind us to our own shortcomings. Picking arbitrary data points to rate people on a scale and discard the majority as "mediocre people" is painfully half-witted pseudoscience. Much like Interesting Numbers, there really is no such thing as an exceptional person because there is no unexceptional person. When we judge people as "mediocre" or "exceptional" we view them in a given context and we only look at a momentary snapshot of an aspect of them. People are infinitely more complex than you allow yourself to imagine and even if you can find a way to grade them that takes this complexity into account (surely as an intelligent person you don't believe antiquated, unscientific, disproven number games like IQ test scores are a helpful tool for this) you'll find that other than sharing whatever metric you used to declare them mediocre, "the mediocre" don't share much of a meaningful in-group identity as a collective. The Great Man Myth makes for appealing storytelling but it's such an oversimplification and distortion of reality that it should be considered an insult to any intellectually curious individual. Great Men arise not despite society but because of society. Without society you would wilt, naked and abandoned in a desert. Just think of it from an evolutionary standpoint: what's the point of evolving such that most individuals are useless or at best capable underlings and the survival of the species hinges on the eventual appearance of a natural leader? That sounds less like science and more like the kind of fairytales we used to justify the Divine Right of Kings. I'm honestly shocked to see such a reductive and uncurious take on a site like HN which prides itself on the intellectual curiosity of its community.

its_ethan 4y ago

It feels like you answered your own question in a way.. "Why couldn’t the regulators in Brunel's day have carved out an open-ended “unless otherwise demonstrated” around the use of iron structural members?" The answer is partly in your statement: "regulation is, in isolation, neutral." Looking around at regulatory/ bureaucratic bodies, "in isolation" is rarely (never?) achieved. Satisfying ambiguous "unless otherwise demonstrated"-esque clauses that are enforced by unelected paper pushers is very much part of Brunel's concern.

makeitdouble 4y ago
> unelected paper pushers The core of your argument is that regulators are unelected (vs engineers ???) and incompetent, when in reality they either get counsel from people in the field, or are former or partially active members of the profession themselves.
- jkhdigital 4y ago
  Engineers, at least at that point in history, paid the consequences of their failures. It’s not about competence, it’s about “skin in the game”. For further reading, Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this idea.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    That doesn't ring true to me, looking at Amazon it doesn't look to me like their warehouse system engineers are paying the consequences of their system, while the OSHA is some corrupt/carefree player. Also, looking from a step behing at our exchange, you are arguing that people need skin in the game to be fair and make weighted decisions, pointing at a writer who stopped having any skin in the game to write books and go on interviews and become an influencer.
  - zokier 4y ago
    Dubious. The designer of River Dee bridge, Stephenson, faced inquest after the incident and was cleared of any charges. Stephenson continued to have successful career as engineer and also in politics as MP.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Funny, I thought it was the people who died or were seriously injured due to the bridge collapse who paid the highest price for the engineers’ failures.
    - chii 4y ago
      But they're already dead, so future events do not affect them, as they are no longer in the iterated game of life. The engineer, on the other hand, continues playing the iterated game of life, and so their reputation does matter (to themselves at least). Therefore, by making sure that any bridges that collapse has social stigma painted against those who designed and/or built it, it would encourage proper engineering even if there's no third party at the time to certify it.
      - newjersey 4y ago
        Makes me think of the portal song > for the people who are still alive The test subjects who are already dead don’t matter. GlaDOS, on the other hand, must continue to make choices in which experiments and test subjects will deliver the best bang for the buck.
- xp84 4y ago
  "In reality" the politicians who appoint the regulators "get counsel from" the lobbyists who bribe them (excuse me, completely legally help the PACs that help re-elect them) the most generously. Regulatory capture is a very common theme throughout every agency. Take Ajit Pai, who is and always was very obviously a Verizon stooge, as a textbook example. For that reason I don't blame anyone who would prefer a minimum of detailed, 'implementation-detail-level' government regulation on tech. Best case scenario they're poorly-written and arrest innovation, worst case they're also written to advantage the biggest or most politically-connected companies, who never deserve the help.

pdonis 4y ago

> what qualifies a structural engineer? Licensing, a product of regulation. No, licensing does not qualify a structural engineer. What qualifies a structural engineer is being willing to sign a legal document when, say, a bridge is completed, that says that they take legal responsibility for the bridge's safe functioning, and agree to be held legally liable if it fails. Licensing just means that, in addition to knowing enough about structural engineering to be willing to make such a legal commitment, they also have to get a piece of paper from the government before they can sign off legally as the structural engineer of record for a project.

aidenn0 4y ago
I'm sure I can find lots of people willing to sign such a document. Particularly if I pay them to.
- pdonis 4y ago
  I'm sure the people you are thinking of would change their minds pretty quickly once they saw the legal language that engineers of record for projects actually have to sign up to.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Not if they are starving. Starve now for sure, or starve later after getting paid - pretty easy choice.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pdonis 4y ago
      People who are starving won't even get asked to be an engineer of record for the kind of project we're talking about. Do you think companies that build bridges go down to the local 7-Eleven and ask for structural engineers willing to sign off on the documents?

asdfman123 4y ago

Nuance is always important. Too much regulation is bad. There’s also very high costs for too little regulation (scammers, charlatans, the incompetent, etc.) Taking an inflexible stance that cannot admit that some level of regulation is advantageous is a mistake. (Also, reading this article has inadvertently made my writing style more 19th century apparently.)

kragen 4y ago

no, knowledge qualifies a structural engineer, not licensing in the ideal case, they coincide, but that ideal is always far from reality by proposing that licensing is what qualifies a structural engineer you are engaging in petitio principii: asking us to stipulate a premise which is in reality just a disguised version of your (incorrect) thesis, and from which you can then easily prove it

ajross 4y ago
> no, knowledge qualifies a structural engineer, not licensing Only to other structural engineers of similar or higher competence. How does a property developer know their engineer has sufficient "knowledge"? pg wrote a whole essay on this problem: you can't hire good people unless you start with good people doing the hiring. But that doesn't scale to problems like "all the buildings society needs" because of the chicken and egg problem. Someone needs to have a way to (1) identify sufficiently knowledgeable engineers and (2) ensure that only sufficiently knowledgeable engineers are designing buildings. Call it whatever you want, but any such regulatory regime is going to be isomorphic to "licensing".
- revelio 4y ago
  Corporate reputation. We don't need licensing in the tech industry to build things like search engines, ai and space rockets because hiring standards are a form of private sector regulation (over the workforce). Reputation is sufficient to ensure the best companies rise to the top
  - ajross 4y ago
    Building failures happen after decades, when the original engineers are retired or dead. Internet products sink or swim in months. I don't see how those timescales are remotely comparable.
    - revelio 4y ago
      Engineering companies stick around for a lot longer than tech firms though. The people who still work there and would like a long career will be looking out for mistakes.

bjornsing 4y ago

> Like many things, regulation is, in isolation, neutral. Hardly. As Brunel points out regulation is always biased towards the past rather than the future. But I think there’s an even stronger and more dangerous bias in regulation, one towards mediocrity. Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power. What is in the interest of the mediocre? To outlaw the outliers (like Brunel). It’s sad, but unfortunately part of human nature.

hnbad 4y ago
> Most people are mediocre, and when consensus or even majority is the norm they have the power. No, most people are not mediocre. Most people are mediocre at any given thing by definition. Individuals can excel at a given thing. Some can even excel at multiple things. But let's not allow our hubris to blind us to our own shortcomings. Picking arbitrary data points to rate people on a scale and discard the majority as "mediocre people" is painfully half-witted pseudoscience. Much like Interesting Numbers, there really is no such thing as an exceptional person because there is no unexceptional person. When we judge people as "mediocre" or "exceptional" we view them in a given context and we only look at a momentary snapshot of an aspect of them. People are infinitely more complex than you allow yourself to imagine and even if you can find a way to grade them that takes this complexity into account (surely as an intelligent person you don't believe antiquated, unscientific, disproven number games like IQ test scores are a helpful tool for this) you'll find that other than sharing whatever metric you used to declare them mediocre, "the mediocre" don't share much of a meaningful in-group identity as a collective. The Great Man Myth makes for appealing storytelling but it's such an oversimplification and distortion of reality that it should be considered an insult to any intellectually curious individual. Great Men arise not despite society but because of society. Without society you would wilt, naked and abandoned in a desert. Just think of it from an evolutionary standpoint: what's the point of evolving such that most individuals are useless or at best capable underlings and the survival of the species hinges on the eventual appearance of a natural leader? That sounds less like science and more like the kind of fairytales we used to justify the Divine Right of Kings. I'm honestly shocked to see such a reductive and uncurious take on a site like HN which prides itself on the intellectual curiosity of its community.