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

As soon as I saw the statement that everybody's opinions are equally valid, I realized this must be satire. Only in a massive joke would somebody think that any two opinions on a matter are both equally valid. Compare the person who has thoroughly researched all sides of an issue and come to a proper conclusion with a person who has been persuaded by media and special interests, and call that equally valid? Sorry, some of us are simply smarter than the average, and our opinions are worth more. Not giving in to the "everybody's equal" BS.

*relativist bias, not centrist.

centrist means that the average of the positions probably has some sense to it; relativist means "everyone can be right at once, children..."

I'm a centrist, and I violently disagree with the dude! :)

On the other hand, playing the devil's advocate, it's remarkable that a system where, sometimes uninformed people, make decisions based on opinions they hear even works at all. There is very little empirical research on the value of the uninformed, but i wouldn't rule out the possibility it might be found to cause some benefit.

There is an attitude towards politics that seems to belong especially to liberal arts graduates, and even more, to B authors pushing their next book. You pick up whiffs of it on the discussion threads, in the blog posts and talks. It expresses itself, with the weary arrogance of the guy who fixes your coffee, as a contempt for engineering as hopelessly mechanical. The answers are robotic and don't take humans into account, the implication goes, or at least the route to them doesn't. Public policy ought to be left to the people who know how to get things done: the political science graduates and liberal arts thinkers.

You can understand these feelings, to a certain extent. 'Idea people' deal with people and their imprecise measurements. Authors must look intelligent when pushing bullshit theories. The bailout is either great or not; the country either stands up or it doesn't. Neither matters unless the argument is well written. The endless technical muddle of public life is going to seem despicable to people who are used to pursuing their ends talking about their feelings.

But society isn't a drum circle. Its parts are people, who need struts and circuits. That is why a STEM education is far more useful to the policymaker (and by extension, the citizen) than a liberal arts one. Here are some of the things that the STEM fields, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that when people have different but equally valid perspectives you shouldn't give them shit for doing engineering; that Truth just means matching our models of reality, sometimes several values can fit the model, that does not both make them right; that judgments of value are influenced by several judgments of fact in our brains, factors like priming, cognitive biases and learned behaviors affect every decision you make; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine, but proper use of our tools and technology can help.

Blog posts arguing cute but nevertheless wrong all-compassing theories of the world, which appeal to the kind of person I’m talking about, and which are usually far more fiction than science—that is, the human complexity of science—tends to give them bad numbers upholding theories that are way too orderly to be plausible as manifestations of human nature. Perhaps that is why our political discussions often involve the same, tired wrong arguments. We either go Keynes, Hayek, or are replaced by socialists. Not for nothing does the idea of the silver bullet remain the central figure of the liberal arts imagination.

I've never written a post critiquing the idea that we are heading towards a multiplanetary civilization. I have no idea if it's possible or not, and I know enough not to make predictions that far out into the future. It is characteristic of the liberal arts mentality—whose representatives are so often biased enough to throw around statements like 'adolescent of spirit if not of age', to suppose that our fundamental problems are unresolvable. The thinker believes himself possessed of superior wisdom. In fact, he has no expertise. Wisdom is not to be found in an essay; its formula is experience plus reflection. Engineering is the management of human affairs, the never-ending calibration of interests, vanities, and corruptions. It depends on knowing, how things work, and how people do to build a better world.

The point about a humanities background and internet regulation reminds me of some great dialogue from a Stephenson novel: "Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything... "Very well, let me put it this way," Kivistik said "How many on ramps will connect the world's ghettos to the Information Superhighway?" The words came out of Randy's mouth before he had time to think better of it. "The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!" he said. "That doesn't tell me very much," Kivistik said."Everything is a metaphor. The word 'fork' is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork. "All discourse is built from metaphors." "That's no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said. "Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik said, doing his killer impression of a heavy lidded, mouth breathing undergraduate. Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with: "Who decides what's bad? I do." Even Dr.G.E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn't sure if Randy was joking. "Excuse me?" Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. "It's like this," he said. "I've read your book. I've seen you on TV. I've heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you're not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.'' "Oh," Kivistik said in mock confusion, "I didn't realize one had to have qualifications." "I think it's clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick, I don't ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it." "Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet," Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd. "You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true," Randy said, pleasantly enough. "A number of Internet experts have written well reasoned books that are sharply critical of it." Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone. "So," Randy continued, "to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D." "Oh. I see," Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. "So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology." The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck. "I'm not sure what a technocrat is," Randy said. "Am I a technocrat? I'm just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?"