Mr. Fix It - The Engineer's Mentality in Politics

>But society isn’t a building. Its parts are people, not struts or circuits. That is why a humanistic education is far more useful to the policymaker (and by extension, the citizen) than a technical one.

Of course society isn't a building. Who was arguing that it was? But many of our problems are technical in nature, or, at the very least have technical solutions. Moreover, without at least some understanding of the scientific background for these problems, it's very difficult for a policy maker to know whether their suggestions will have beneficial or harmful consequences. I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing in Congress right now, with regards to Internet regulation. Politicians are proposing laws for which enforcement is either impossible or for which enforcement would require massive infringements on freedom of expression. Do they do this out of malice? No. They do this out of ignorance. They simply don't know the consequences of the things they are proposing, and so they propose (and sometimes pass) laws that have harmful unintended consequences that wipe out any possible benefit from those laws.

>Here are some of the things that the humanities, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise; that judgments of value cannot be reduced to judgments of fact; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine.

People do not always have "equally valid" perspectives. That is the very centrist bias that allows out and out untruths to pass unchallenged. This is why it's possible for a creationist to come on television and have equal time with an evolutionary biologist. Your perspective is valid insofar as your premises are based upon evidence about the world as it is. It is not valid if your premises (e.g. all species on Earth were created by a divine intelligent designer) have been proven false.

In addition, while it is true that judgements of value cannot be reduced to judgements of facts (i.e. the "is-ought problem"), one must acknowledge that judgements of value must be based upon judgements of fact. If you're basing your values upon incorrect facts, your values are very likely to be mistaken. For example, if you state that another person is not deserving of moral consideration, that is a judgement of value which may or may not be valid. However, if your justification for that judgement is hearsay evidence or religious bias, then that judgement starts to look very shaky.

>It is characteristic of the engineering mentality—whose representatives are so often male and so often adolescent, in spirit if not in age—to suppose that our fundamental problems are resolvable.

What you consider adolescent, I consider hopeful. After all, what alternative do we have to supposing that our age-old problems are solvable? Your cynical resignation to the world as it is? If everyone on this planet had that attitude, we'd still be huddling in caves. Progress of every sort - technological, economic, social - occurs because there are individuals who believe that we as a society can do better. That we can resolve our problems. That we can dream of a world that is better than the one we have today.

For an article that speaks in such profundities about wisdom, I find this piece to be profoundly unwise.

On the other hand the "mass media representation" of engineers is limited solely to old star trek episode reruns, and a few autism themed movies (literally, like Temple Grandin's biographical movie and a couple others). The author's conclusions are going to be completely screwed up when writing from a position of such profound ignorance.