5 ms·

> no, knowledge qualifies a structural engineer, not licensing Only to other structural engineers of similar or higher competence. How does a property develo

by 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.
kragen 4y ago
> How does a property developer know their engineer has sufficient "knowledge"? well, they can study engineering just like anybody else; we don't need to structure society for the benefit of the stereotypical clueless pointy-haired mba, particularly if it means improvements in structural engineering slow down to medieval levels it's perfectly okay if people who are ignorant of structural engineering are unable to found a successful railroad
- ajross 4y ago
  > we don't need to structure society for the benefit of the stereotypical clueless pointy-haired mba Seems to me like building codes and other such regulation is for the for the benefit of the people living in those homes, precisely so that they don't get built by stereotypical clueless pointy-haired MBAs.
  - kragen 4y ago
    so on one hand building codes make a huge difference in cases like earthquakes and fires, where places with reasonable and enforced building codes have orders of magnitude lower mortality than places like iran, turkey, and haiti and bad buildings can and do kill people accidentally, including people who don't live there; i've had a chunk of concrete the size of my foot plummet from a skyscraper and land on the sidewalk next to me, presumably due to poor maintenance on the other hand, at least in the last century or so, the major disasters from engineering failures have not been from insufficiently centralized state control over what gets built (not enough regulation), but rather from too much centralized state control over what gets built (too much regulation): the banqiao dam failure, chernobyl, the beirut explosion, the levees in new orleans, the st. francis dam, the collapse of the morbi bridge last year, etc. there are some exceptions, like the bhopal disaster, the hyatt regency walkway collapse, minamata disease, and the great smog of 01952 but the balance is clearly strongly in favor of strong regulation of engineering causing disasters (by reducing both the technical competence and the accountability of the decision-makers on large engineering projects), not preventing them. it would take thousands of collapsed railway bridges to equal the death toll of the banqiao dam failure (and this is without taking into account the safety improvements that would have resulted from faster progress due to greater freedom to experiment, which was brunel's concern here) but i was addressing a narrower question, which was how a property developer can know which structural engineers are competent to design skyscrapers and bridges and the like. even if government licensing of engineers were the best way to ensure that ordinary people don't get suckered into buying a deathtrap house or a money-pit house, that wouldn't imply that it's the best way for property developers to avoid hiring incompetent structural engineers who will build them deathtrap bridges managing the construction of a bridge is a full-time job for years, if not decades; it hardly seems unreasonable to expect the person entrusted with this job to possess sufficient engineering knowledge to evaluate candidate structural engineering hires, nor will a government licensing regime for engineers be enough to save them from disaster if they do not, as amply demonstrated by the horrific litany above of engineering disasters caused by incompetently-run government projects

by ajross 4y ago

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.

kragen 4y ago

> How does a property developer know their engineer has sufficient "knowledge"? well, they can study engineering just like anybody else; we don't need to structure society for the benefit of the stereotypical clueless pointy-haired mba, particularly if it means improvements in structural engineering slow down to medieval levels it's perfectly okay if people who are ignorant of structural engineering are unable to found a successful railroad

ajross 4y ago
> we don't need to structure society for the benefit of the stereotypical clueless pointy-haired mba Seems to me like building codes and other such regulation is for the for the benefit of the people living in those homes, precisely so that they don't get built by stereotypical clueless pointy-haired MBAs.
- kragen 4y ago
  so on one hand building codes make a huge difference in cases like earthquakes and fires, where places with reasonable and enforced building codes have orders of magnitude lower mortality than places like iran, turkey, and haiti and bad buildings can and do kill people accidentally, including people who don't live there; i've had a chunk of concrete the size of my foot plummet from a skyscraper and land on the sidewalk next to me, presumably due to poor maintenance on the other hand, at least in the last century or so, the major disasters from engineering failures have not been from insufficiently centralized state control over what gets built (not enough regulation), but rather from too much centralized state control over what gets built (too much regulation): the banqiao dam failure, chernobyl, the beirut explosion, the levees in new orleans, the st. francis dam, the collapse of the morbi bridge last year, etc. there are some exceptions, like the bhopal disaster, the hyatt regency walkway collapse, minamata disease, and the great smog of 01952 but the balance is clearly strongly in favor of strong regulation of engineering causing disasters (by reducing both the technical competence and the accountability of the decision-makers on large engineering projects), not preventing them. it would take thousands of collapsed railway bridges to equal the death toll of the banqiao dam failure (and this is without taking into account the safety improvements that would have resulted from faster progress due to greater freedom to experiment, which was brunel's concern here) but i was addressing a narrower question, which was how a property developer can know which structural engineers are competent to design skyscrapers and bridges and the like. even if government licensing of engineers were the best way to ensure that ordinary people don't get suckered into buying a deathtrap house or a money-pit house, that wouldn't imply that it's the best way for property developers to avoid hiring incompetent structural engineers who will build them deathtrap bridges managing the construction of a bridge is a full-time job for years, if not decades; it hardly seems unreasonable to expect the person entrusted with this job to possess sufficient engineering knowledge to evaluate candidate structural engineering hires, nor will a government licensing regime for engineers be enough to save them from disaster if they do not, as amply demonstrated by the horrific litany above of engineering disasters caused by incompetently-run government projects