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Are Engineers Natural Libertarians Or Technocrats?
uctpjac writes "This openDemocracy article uses Scott Adams' presidential bid to argue that however much engineers — especially Silicon Valley types — like to think that they're libertarians, they are in fact much more likely to be control-freak technocrats. Quoting: 'Sensibly if uncharismatically, Adams has pledged if elected to delegate most of his decisions to people who know more than him, and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position. His worldview has its limitations – he underestimates the value of ways of thinking other than the engineer's, and it's naïve of him to claim his approach to policy is purely pragmatic and non-ideological.' Is this a fair account? Has the author wrongly read Dilbert, or wrongly interpreted the relationship between the engineering mindset and Adams' representation of it in the cartoon strip?"
... for a fee.
Since when do Silicon Valley types "like to think that they're libertarians?" Going by the posters here, they are not libertarians at all as they vehemently hate corporations. Silicon Valley is known to lean left--Google's Marissa Mayer had Obama as an invited guest at her home for a fundraiser, for crying out loud. So on what is the article basing that claim?
Is this some new form of Godwin's Law?
Stalin was a gangster, probably something like a burglar.
It's the classic labor + criminal muscle sort of situation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It seems that most people have a hard time when life isn't left down to 2 choices. No wonder we have such a hard time coming together on a common ground and working out our problems.
China's government is probably the most engineer-dominated government in the world, in contrast to the lawyer-dominated Western governments, and it has definite technocratic tendencies. I'd say a lot of western engineers who otherwise dislike the government (e.g. its position on free speech) do admire some of its technocratic infrastructure achievements, like its rapid deployment of high-speed rail.
More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Once you understand the basics of politics, learning a new ideology is trivial really.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Stalin was an engineer
Just about all of China's "leadership" are scientists and engineers. And as I read about their political and economic policies and actions, they're making many of the same mistakes that Europe made a few hundred years ago.
And folks say that Liberal Arts (History) and Social Science (Economics, Sociology, and Political Science) have no value.
The typical libertarian engineer think everyone else should just study computers like they did and get a job doing that. Then they wouldn't be poor.
They don't have the empathy to understand that some people are simply baffled by computers, or are poor for some other reason.
They also don't understand why I put on my headphones every time they go on some poorly thought out rant that proves nothing other than their complete lack of empathy and social skills.
Decisions based merely on results, divorced from ethics and morality can bring disastrous results. Think how quickly we could advance medicine if we started experimenting on humans unchecked, or how "safe" we could be if we lived in a police state. I put safe in quotes because we might be safe from terrorists and other boogeymen, but we wouldn't be safe from the police state.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Adams has pledged if elected to delegate most of his decisions to people who know more than him, and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position
The problem with that is that there are millions of people who know more about X than any individual decision maker. The main issue is prioritizing what you want done, and that's where it all turns political.
...so taking what he says 100% seriously is probably a mistake. Even if Dilbert does often appear to be a thinly-veiled documentary.
I promise, that if elected, to suspend the Constitution and become a benevolent despot to straighten everything out.
I further promise to leave voluntarily after a 10 year term and restore the Constitution. I swear.
Engineers are the same in politics as they are elsewhere. They'll fix any well-defined problem, but the solution can only meet two of three criteria: fast, cheap, and high-quality. But voters (like customers) will want all three, and won't define the problem well.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
I prefer "Rational."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Its all in the perspective:
1) La de da, I'm building a bridge. My favorite welder on his days off likes to stick tab A into slot B of a member of the same sex. I understand the meaning of an independent variable and file this as such; don't much care. I guess that makes me an engineer-libertarian.
2) La de da, I'm a building a bridge. I sweat over a keyboard for 850 hours of computer simulation to prove that bolt #374904 must be a size 10-24 NC because if some idiot installs a 8-32 NC or smaller the bridge will collapse when loaded with precisely 17 pickup trucks plus one housefly. Cheap businessman wants to install a smaller 8-32 bolt because live and let live, man, my right to tell him what to do ends at the tip of his screwdriver, or some psuedo-libertarian stuff like that. No, F you businessman, I'm going full on technocrat control freak on you and 10-24 NC bolts are getting installed there or its off to the camps with you.
Want to run a country instead of building a bridge? Sounds to me like it don't much matter if tab A gets inserted into slot B no matter what sex A or B is, or what hole they're using, as long as they're both consenting adults blah blah. That's the libertarian answer. The control freak comes out when you say no, you are not F-ing setting up a concentration camp for brown people, because unlike two dudes in a closet, that does destroy a country.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
predestines you to a political viewpoint.
" and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position"
If there's one aspect of the political system that mystifies me, it's this. One of the very definitions of intelligence is the ability to take information and make conclusions. Obviously new information can lead to new conclusions. Yet in politics, even a hint of a politician displaying intelligence by changing his stance after new information and it's the political kiss of death. So instead we get politicians who will stick to their beliefs despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So why are we pushing so hard to support political figures who don't demonstrate intelligence and tossing aside the ones that do?
So, the only choice is "Technocrat" or "Libertarian"?
Nowadays "Libertarian" has been co-opted to include views on economics and all sorts of things not everyone is going to agree with. I'm forced to conclude the article is a little sensationalist.
Of course, a lot of Slashdot is of the mindset that the only way forward is to dismantle government and go for a full on "free" market which will magically solve our problems. But that doesn't mean anyone in engineering falls neatly into one of these two buckets proposed in the article.
Libertarian is as much an ideology as anything nowadays.
Scott Adams is not now nor ever was an engineer. I don't see how he could be limited to an engineer's viewpoint considering that was never his viewpoint to begin with.
The suggestion that my career determines my political and social viewpoints is absolutely asinine.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Actually, no.
He has been educated in a seminary and before the October Revolution mostly lived as a bank robber.
they also have difficulty seeing when someone should be openly mocked for painting broad stereotypes.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
After all, that's what engineering is about: taking a situation (or problem) and finding a way to bend it to do your will. They are also conservative (with a small "c") and tend to be risk-averse: not wishing to release a product until it works perfectly.
Unless they are properly managed (and who would manage the american president? The chinese? The bankers? The mob? <choose one or suggest another>) they/we also tend to design overly complex solutions. Given that lawyers have more to gain from finding loopholes, exceptions and workarounds than a lawmaker has from preventing them, laws made by engineers would be ineffective - if they ever got to the state of perfection where they got passed into law. As a consequence, I reckon that a country run by engineers left to their own devices, would soon become a dictatorship - although none of the engineers would ever wish to create one, it would just happen.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Because of the pigeon holing aspect, I completely disagree with the whole concept of party-based politics.
I'd like to see parties abolished completely. I want to vote DIRECTLY for the Prime Minister without the baggage of party ideology. I want to vote DIRECTLY for my Member of Parliament without worrying about whether they're going to blindly follow party dogma or represent ME in Parliament as they're supposed to.
Party politics on both sides of the border have produced nations where we are subjected to surges of ideology instead of real dialogue of the issues and useful progress as a society on those issues.
And talk about a way to neuter the lobbyists if they have to lobby every single politician individually instead of making a big party donation!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Very few people actually switch political positions due to applying the intellectual tools of their job to reality. The exceptions tend to be people whose original political positions say something that flat-out contradicts what they have to believe to get their jobs done. Thus it's easy to find Conservative Christian kids who had to become less Conservative when they took a job that proved Evolution happens. But in general that's just not how the human mind works. You form your political opinions in your late teens, early 20s, and they don't change just because you get a job.
OTOH I doubt you'll find any techno-Libertarian or techno-Techncrat who switched from one to the other due to conducting an engineering study. There are probably plenty who switched because something happened outside of work that brought home either a) the value of government, or b) the drawbacks of it.
Engineers probably skew Libertarian, because the people who go into engineering school tend to be geeks and Libertarianism has an undeniable geek chic. But those folks didn't read Atlas Shrugged in their last Semester of College, they did it in the 11th Grade. They probably also skew technocratic, because the college-educated professional demographic tends to skew technocratic, and almost all of them are college-educated professionals.
My grandfather was an aerospace engineer and a lifelong New Deal Democrat. He grew up poor in the depression, worked in the tobacco fields when he was about 13, put himself through college by selling blood, etc. He understood that government had helped him and a lot of people of his generation to become middle class.
On the other hand I know a lot of engineers who grew up under Soviet communism and are super right-wing. They had a very bad experience with government persecution and they tend to view all government activity through the lens of restricting their rights.
Nope, no degrees. studied at a seminary off and on until he was 20 or so, iirc.
Pretty wild how a peasant can take a country of mostly peasants and turn it into an industrial superpower in 20 years, with little education no less.
Sent from my PDP-11
The bible has very little to do with morality or ethics in any modern sense.
... but also as an economic socialist and a social conservative. Can I find libertarian in there somewhere?
Scott Adams is not an engineer, he just writes a comic about one. If I remember correctly he's trained as an economist, but once worked with engineers.
We have nothing to fear but fear itself! And Spiders!
Actually we're agnostic. It really doesn't matter if bombs explode because that's what happens when you make them a certain way or if God said that bombs explode when made a certain way... The bombs still explode and we still get our oil.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I think Dilbert's pretty funny and all, but Scott Adams is a pretentious douche. The proof is in his reddit comment history. Yeah, wow.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
The article is poorly thought out, as it is based on a false dichotomy between so called "libertarians" and "technocrats". While a libertarian advocates the idea that free will should be the founding rule of a society, which brings us concepts such as the state doing absolutely nothing to affect society, technocracy represents a system of government which is ruled by technical experts. This means that, unless this hypothetical state is a anarchist utopia, the state requires leadership, and if a state requires leadership then that leadership can very well be exerted by technical experts. Hence, you can have a libertarian technocrats, and libertarian states run by a technocratic government.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
This site is for computer programmers and systems analysts, not engineers.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
It is pretty obvious most engineers in the IT field are prone to control-freak technocracy. That's the very nature of the IT to control everything as tight as possible.
Achille Talon
Hop!
We are all dictators inside and that's the exact reason why government power must be limited in a way that satisfies libertarian principles - no one person or a group of people can be trusted when given power over others, that's why individual liberties and private property are paramount and government power must immediately be considered intrinsically evil by the very design and it must be treated as such. Only with the understanding that government is evil by design and will destroy everything it touches, we will come to a balance (if we want to), of keeping the government at its smallest and individual liberties at maximum.
Any time that the balance of power shifts from individual liberties towards growth of government power, it must immediately be suspect, be considered evil and be opposed by all.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm assuming that the implication is that engineers can solve our problems with process. Lots of social problems might seem like the solutions can be obviously derived with logic, but we're human beings and we do a lot of things that aren't driven by logic. Having children isn't logical; it's expensive, a time drain, and ultimately a financial loss. Practically any form of entertainment we engage in isn't logical (besides intercourse), since we're probably wasting time and resources best spent elsewhere. Hell, even our diets aren't logical. We should all be eating nutrition bars carefully concocted to provide us with the optimal calories and nutrients to keep us functioning (regardless of taste).
I had the enlightening experience of dating a social worker who explained how often the layman's "logical" and simplistic solutions to all kinds of domestic issues were either ineffective or could be downright detrimental. When you understand that, you can start to envision how the "obvious" solution to social ailment X would fail in practice (otherwise it would have been tried already).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Engineers often like to think of themselves as libertarians.
But I've met enough that when you even begin to scratch the surface, they tend to be very technocratic... believing there must be a better way to organize something if only *they* could be trusted to run something.
This is more and more true in places with a higher emphasis on academia.
Academics suffer from what I like to call systems thinking. Having spent enough time there, they almost always try and solve every problem by modelling and then playing with it numerically.
This results in the idea that we should trust in such models above and beyond people's choices. To use an engineers mentality, they tend to like centralized big computers instead of distributed systems :P Kinda odd isn't it.
There is nothing 'scientific' about it. Science can't tell you what values or policies you should follow, but they tend to like to frame it that way.
I personally credit this kind of systems thinking for the recent financial collapse. At no point in history has there been so much sophistication and modelling in the financial system. Yet of course people are still in the system for their own self-interest, their own biases, still gaming it, models were incorrect or imperfect. And of course who gets to be in charge and make decisions based on the models...
When Greenspan made his point about the 'market failing' it was a classic systems thinking mistake.
The banks have a vested interest to enhance share holder value, so they would be in the best position to regulate themselves... as their institution's purpose is to enhance share holder value... which means keeping the bank in good shape.
It's like saying car drivers have a natural interest to prevent accidents. Therefore, they should be allowed to regular themselves.
I won't get into saying whether we need more/better/less regulation. But I will say this. We as a society have decided we like to have stable banking. The government backs and insures banks. It then has a duty to regulate them. Just like your car insurance company regulates you by charging you more for more risk, denying you coverage if you're too risky...
I see the same thing all the time on so many policies.
When it comes to education policy or health policy, many think we can generate expert panels on all of these to deliver excellent healthcare and education.
Meanwhile, the centralization of power that comes with unions and medical associations and payment and politics and facing parents with different beliefs and facing people who are facing death or illness... basically anything human is something they choose to ignore.
Which is very common for technocrats... and hence engineers. Just like the Euro. These big systems designed by technocrats and engineers and scientists will eventually fail because they're ignorant for anything related to humanity.
It's like they try and solve a complex equation... but they ignore the biggest variable... humanity.
They might be libertarian or liberal or easy-going or whatever in areas they have no expertise in, but for sure unbearable technocrats (u) in areas where they feel they're experts (x) and that their opinion is more accurate (a) than that of the general public and that the solution to the problem will be a technological one (t) not a political one based on consensus.
This will be even more so the case with engineers, that are complete gits (g) who equivocate technologically possible and desirable.
We therefor propose:
u=(x*e^at)/sqrt(1-g^2)
While it's currently fashionable for Neo-cons to call themselves libertarians, the philosophy of Libertarianism actually covers everything from far-left anarchists to far-right objectivists.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
We're only libertarians to the degree in which we're not in control :)
Libertarians don't demand control over anyone else's affairs, but they do seek to get as close to complete control over their own affairs as reasonably possible. So it could easily be that engineers by nature want to control their own personal universe, and thus are libertarians when not in power and technocrats when in power.
I am officially gone from
Silicon Valley is known to lean left--Google's Marissa Mayer had Obama as an invited guest at her home for a fundraiser, for crying out loud.
And how does that indicate a "left" leaning political ideology?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's not a completely absurd concept. You'll have variation in any group, but it's not unreasonable to wonder if people in profession X tend to have a set of views described as Y. You'll never have 100% correlation, but if research suggests that, say, dog catchers tend to be pro-life, then it's silly to just ignore it. It doesn't mean that any given dog catcher has to hold that view, but when something trends like that there's usually a reason.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
No he wasn't, but Osama bin Laden was a Civil Engineer. Possibly.
Actually, Russia had an industry before. The Putilov Company in St. Peterburg was founded in 1789, and it was one of the largest canon foundries and machine construction plants of the pre-WWI world.
It could be that Scott Adams is just a dickhead who's coasting along on the singular achievement of pointing out what everyone already knows, but doing it with a dog wearing glasses.
That seems like a very complicated answer. How bout "a hacker is an engineer with a really small budget".
Cause basically, it is wrong.
Hacker is a mindset.
Usually one coming from a natural propensity towards tinkering and technology.
Engineer is a vocation.
And while an underlying propensity towards tinkering and technology MAY be present, one is an engineer first and foremost due to training and education.
Take away engineer's budget and he/she won't drop his/her mindset or the accumulated knowledge about best practices on solving the problem and go back to tinkering until they blindly stumble on the solution.
Give hacker the same education and neither will he/she.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Your desire to pigeon hole society and the views of the individual does not make it rational or reasonable.
I see labelling someone a "Libertarian" (for example) as no more viable than assuming the personality of someone just because they're Black, Hispanic, etc.
The labels themselves are bigotry, regardless of whether they're based on race, creed, or profession.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The country would likely come as close to collapse as ever with an engineer in charge. In general, engineers make terrible managers, especially the ones who think they would make great managers. I'm including myself in this.
Plus, it's silly to say that there's a clear line drawn between a pragmatic approach and an ideological one.
I will say that it is refreshing to see someone willing to stand up and say that their opinion of something can and will change in response to new evidence... but that is political suicide. A democratic system of government is better than most, but a fundamental problem with it is that most of the time the lesser intelligent candidate wins. And the public has no time for someone who spends more time thinking and less time doing... right or wrong, actions outweigh contemplation in the court of public opinion. (That's not to say one won't be punished for being wrong, if whatever action was taken is wrong enough to warrant it, but they'll be equally punished for being right and being too slow about it.) This is especially true these days... ideological consistency is considered a virtue by many. It's probably the most cited trait that Ron Paul's supporters report, in a positive light. Many confuse stubbornness with correctness.
Funny how engineers seem to make good terrorists and despots.
Ironically there are two straw men here. Scott Adams is the straw man of engineers being libertarians and from TFA, the Dilbert comic strip is Adams' straw man.
Engineers aren't "naturally" drawn to any ideological field. For engineers in the United States, there are definite economic and social pressures to become a shithead but nothing obligates engineers to design bombs or oil rigs -- those acts are committed by a minority of engineers. If an engineer's role in society is to design and maintain the systems society relies upon for survival, then for most engineers their profession is somewhat of a social service.
The Chinese educational system turns out many times more engineers than the US, and many fewer law students. Also, because of the volume and sharply varying quality of the educational institutions, what a qualifies as an engineer varies wildly: some are every bit as highly trained and competent American or European engineers, others are no more technically skilled than someone with an equivalent liberal arts or communications degree who took a couple extra math classes.
This is partly as a legacy of Communism, I think, although in India and Japan it seems to be the same situation. The official ideology valued the technical professions over the the humanities, making engineering the default degree for anyone looking to advance in government, but any visitor to China would note the problems local and national governments have building and maintaining their infrastructure: the tendency is to go for big projects with big flaws (like high speed rail) and poorly-thought-out long term effects, like water treatment plants rendered ineffective by bad pipes.
I have no desire to pigeon hole anything.
I'm also not assuming anything about a given person because they're a 'whatever-label-you-want-to-pick'. I think I was actually fairly explicit about that.
But the questions raised by a demonstrable correlation can be interesting. Let's take the one from the article, that engineers tend to be libertarians. Assuming for the moment that it's accurate (if 'libertarian' bothers you, try 'male' or 'nose pickers' or 'tea aficionados' or whatever makes you happy), it brings a few questions to mind:
1. Is there something about the libertarian mindset that finds engineering attractive?
2. Inversely, is there something about libertarianism that attracts engineers?
3. Is there something else that just happens to be common to both engineers and libertarians?
Those are just the obvious ones. You can wonder what makes these groups align without denying the individuality of any member of the group, and without making blanket assumptions about what characteristics a member of the group must have.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
There's lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Some statistics don't tell you anything useful. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse a particular ideology doesn't tell you what their thoughts on the issues are. Knowing that some percentage of the population fits a pigeon-hole doesn't mean they don't have fundamental rights.
Now your points about why a particular segment of the population favours a viewpoint is a much more useful application of the statistics, because it means those interested in the numbers are trying to understand what the mean.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is not their first article accusing engineers of having an authoritarian mind set. They have a typical humanistic hatred for people in the areas of science and technology, for they feel that engineers and scientists limit the possibilities of imposing an utopian system on society. Also in the past they used to support Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. That gives you an idea of what means libertarian to Opendemocracy. And worst of all, their jargon is typically of a humanities faculties (puck).
The evil socialist countries of Germany, France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom will happily take up the slack.
The USA isn't the only country in the world with world class pharmaceutical giants.
Technocracy means doing things that make sense, without attention to ideology (or necessarily, public opinion). This is certainly something the US is in serious need of. One only need to consider SOPA and the myriad of other failed bills intended to "fix" the country to see why engineers would want to include reason and proof in the process for once, over outcry and dollars.
However, I'd not say I lean libertarian at all. Corporations are currently the largest source of corruption and the largest threat to personal rights in the western world. Right now, there are a number of corporations with far more power over you than the government. So I am dismayed at the common libertarian diatribes that everything will be alright, if we just get rid of government. What fills the hole left by government?
I would say I lean much more towards European socialism. I don't believe in survival or the fittest or deep class structures. If inheritance and embezzlement are the two biggest sources of wealth in the country, then the country is in the wrong and needs to be repaired. Further, there are many times when something just does not belong in private hands. Corporations naturally are greedy and corrupting influences, and are nowhere near as efficient as the libertarian types like to think; government can be corrupted, but is not inherently anything negative.
My primary concern is that given my definition of Technocracy above, it has the potential to become all sorts of bad things. Which is why I think anyone who actually goes out to claim they are a Technocrat needs to ultimately follow a few rules:
1. The goal of society is to provide the greatest average good for its members.
2. Communication should always be free. Censorship is always wrong.
3. Nothing should be restricted on emotional or religious basis.
If even half of politicians followed those three rules, we'd be living in a far better world today. It is time we start forcing them to do so.
Great Intellect...
Disclaimer: I classify myself as a libertarian and I'm an engineer by training so take this with a (very large) grain of salt. Maybe engineers tend to be libertarian because when you apply a systems analysis approach to what is wrong with government/the system/the world it just turns out that the rational common sense "solutions" all end up falling under the libertarian umbrella. How probable (or improbable) can it be that so many (supposedly/hopefully) smart and rational people can all be wrong?
Actually, no.
He has been educated in a seminary and before the October Revolution mostly lived as a bank robber.
Oh, so that would make him a Republican presidential candidate if he were alive today.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Perhaps the notion is only a US perspective, because I don't know anybody with right-wing libertarian beliefs in anything that could be described as an engineering, or science career here in the UK.
Libertarianism here is largely seen as a form of mental illness. In fact we don't tend to use the term (in the way you do) much at all. We do have people like that; Paul Staines, Dan Hannan, etc. but as I said they are considered to be pretty well insane by those who know of them.
To be honest, the notion of engineers being 'libertarian' sounds like a way of trying to promote libertarianism by associating it with a career type that has a lot of geek-cred. Its an attempt to make an irrational ideology seem rational by association.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
their systems.
That is the single most common failing of politically-produced systems, as the parties want to give voters a continuing reason to vote for them.
We are now experiencing the destruction of those systems.
Well on his way. Only cancer can save Venezuela.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Having the government dictate the type of sandwich you can serve on a flight doesn't make sense. From that PoV, I'd be moving toward libertarian which is exactly what we did. OTOH, getting rid of the EPA and letting individuals and corporations duke it out in civil court over issues of destruction of private property doesn't make sense either. From that PoV, I'm a damned awful statist technocrat who wants to rule you with an iron fist (noted with sarcasm).
Look. We've got a body of code called law (in fact, law is called "code" by lawyers) and some of it's bloat, some of it works fine, and some of it crashes our lives on a routine basis. We need to keep the parts that work, with an understanding of why they were put there. We need to get rid of the parts that crash, or were put there at the request of Hal from marketing because he got a free lunch from somebody.
In short and to reiterate, I'm in favor of what works. "Whatworksian".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No shit you ran out of money, startup costs for the first year of a winery more than 3 Million $.
Also most business don't have to deal with liquor regulations either.
It's nice and convenient for them, they only have to fund two parties & they have it in the bag.
Deleted
> Pretty wild how a peasant can take a country of mostly peasants and turn it into an industrial superpower in 20 years, with little education no less.
Eh? Even at the max the Soviet Union was a third world country with fusion bombs. Some parts, Russia itself might could have been declared 2nd World if one were being very generous on the grading. These days more third world than second. Lots of propaganda of the time regarding their industrial and military might was eagerly passed on by their fifth column in the Western media but we now know they were a basket case.
Democrat delenda est
Well judging by the bulk of comments (and moderation) here on /., I think it's pretty clear that as a group they sure as hell aren't libertarians.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Did TFA actually mention some kind of psychological or sociological research about the relative frequency of libertarian vs. technocratic tendencies in engineers? From what I saw, I'm guessing not.
I remember thinking as a teenager that technocratic socialism made perfect sense. Of course we could engineer a solution to make sure that everyone enjoyed life and had plenty.
Only after a brief stint with Democratic party politics did I realize how naive this was. Complex networks of governments and economies are impossible to control centrally. They must be organized to solve problems with self-organization.
The price signal is the most important self-organizing feature of the world. Only with free prices can thousands of people who don't know each other figure out how to mine the ore, refine the metal, design things, make the parts, assemble them, market and sell things, resell things, modify things, all in a network of increasing value to humanity.
There are certainly zones of central authority (sometimes at the level of an industry, a business, but often only within a department of a business). But they are just nodes in the network of the economy.
I'll note that a price of zero is still a price, and we know that is often a good price for some software. And of course if you use GPL software, you are paying a non-zero price in terms of opportunity cost of what you might do with that software.
May I interrupt the "engineers are this or that" war to ask one thing? Could we get a definition of the word "engineer" for the purposes of hostilities?
Most places I know (with the exception of the province of Quebec) allow all characters no matter how unbalanced to call themselves engineers. So I guess we need to control for the population of sociopaths who call themselves engineers because calling themselves doctors would be illegal. And for the companies who call some guy named Charlie wielding a toilet plunger an engineer because... oh jeez that's depressing.
Also, I'd love to see citations when someone makes a "these people are like that"-type statement.
Thank you.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
My impression of hardware engineers (at least where I work) is that they tend to be more politically conservative and more likely to stay married. Those that tend to be libertarian also seem to be social conservatives. I also get the impression that software engineers are more progressive or libertarian. No idea how common this is.
I'm having a hard time figuring how rational and religious isn't a contradiction. Perhaps you could clarify?
Some religions do clearly have a concept of human dignity, but that's defined much differently from religion to religion and within any particular religion. It seems to me that the end goals are what we call morality and rationality comes into it as we try to determine how to get there.
However, there is definitely a trend that many libertarians are engineers (or, more broadly speaking, someone with formal or informal education in "hard" sciences and not humanities).
I think the reason why libertarianism is appealing to software engineers in particular is that we often tend to think in terms of "clean code" and "minimalism is beautiful" - simply put, use the simplest, clearest data structures and algorithms that will do the job. This mode of thinking generally produces good results, but occasionally goes beyond the minimum that's actually necessary for good results - it evolves into minimalism for minimalism's sake, justified at the heart purely by aesthetics, and superficially by mental gymnastics explaining how you "don't really need all that bloat". For a typical example, remember the usual discussion of the merits of IDEs on Slashdot - invariably, a bunch of people will come up and proudly proclaim that all you need to code is Vim. If you start inquiring further, you'll get told that any feature that is present in your-IDE-of-choice but not in Vim is not needed anyway, and that you're an incapable idiot for even thinking about it.
Libertarianism is similar, in that the crux of its argument is that things will be working just as well or better if we get rid of as many regulations as possible, since we "don't need them anyway". If you start pointing out specific examples of how things will be worse for many people if such deregulation is actually implemented in full, libertarians will explain to you that you're wrong to think of the differences as "worse", and they are actually "better" in some higher moral or philosophical way.
I believe true Engineers are Altruists.
Casteism
A good engineer studies models and patterns that can be applied to solve the problem. He follows them and also tries to keep his system adhere to the pattern.
I guess that makes him more of a technocrat than a libertarian.
So is Angela Merkel.
Take off every 'sig' !!
I read the other spat that ensued from this sentence. I'm in the camp that this is a dubious beginning. You could at least add the asterisk "by the time we are angry enough to pay attention". Here's a physics question for you: is symmetry breaking dictatorial? Is the uniform chirality of life on earth dictatorial? Are we all better off driving on whichever side of the road suits us on any given day? Pretty quickly you arrive at Rawl's concept of the original position: whichever symmetry-breaking decision is made must intrinsically favour one side or the other, but the process by which the decision is reached need not. Allegations of unfairness succumb to circular argument. Success in life is a proxy for good decision making, so we choose successful decision makers (whenever the process is overt). Wealth is a common proxy for success, but also for corrupt influence. Ergo we are all dictators inside. Here's something else to square with your rabid reductionism of human nature: a fair decision is the one which leaves both sides equally unhappy. I really see the story here as having more to do with how the human mind conceptualizes blame. I guess the solution to attribution bias is to delegate all decisions to an invisible hand. What can't be accounted is functionally blameless.
I often have this very sentiment myself when pouring over the TLA+ proof system.
We're a long ways from fascism, in case you haven't noticed. What you really mean is that government must shrink until we can drown it in the bathtub, it's radioactive ashes ground to a powder, and exploded into the upper atmosphere, never to trouble us again.
Brought to you by the anti-theorem that all virtuous principles are orthogonal in practice.
Arrow's impossibility theorem
The problem with high-dander moral clarity is that it overspecifies the system, returning you to the original political conundrum about which point of self-evident common sense is first to be voted off the island.
I didn't spend 100 hours of my life listening to Russ Roberts in a state of conflicted agreement/disagreement out of a sense that the grand answer could be distilled to a business card slogan, but if you read enough Dilbert amazing things can happen:
Simplicity is a vector of caprice.
There aren't many real engineers out there anymore, and certainly very very few under the age of about 50. The new generation are not engineers, but rather process-followers that play connect the dots.
The new way they teach engineering in college today is that, for any given problem, if you put this set of data into this process, you will get a reasonable result. This new engineering paradigm is the reason the consumer has become the beta tester - because all engineers do is blindly follow the process, then worry about the details later.
In 1984, I bought a Tandy 1000 computer. It came with DOS, and Deskmate. And, guess what. It worked. I never had to upgrade the firmware. I never had to upgrade to a new version of software. This is because that computer was truly engineered. It wasn't "slap this set of chips together and ship it."
PC hardware today requires constant firmware hacks (I won't say upgrades), and each new hack fixes a known issue, and creates several other unknown issues. A case in point here is OCZ SSDs. They're pitiful. There is a new "urgent" firmware release about every week for them. The motherboard in my PC is on firmware J (10th!).
As far as the political leanings of engineers, they're just like everyone else. There are democrats, republicans, libertarians, and kooky fringe lunatics. The job does not predispose anyone to a particular political belief system.
Stalin was an engineer
No he wasn't. He was a seminary student.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Uh, the USSR was the 2nd world by definition. That's what 2nd world meant.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Well, first of all, USSR was second world by the very definition of that term. Second, the Soviet Union was a country with a well developed industry, certainly not bleeding edge, but in the seventies it was only a decade behind USA or Germany. Some of the union republics weren't as developed, though, that's true.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
that few of life's real problems are well-defined.
Silicon Valley is known to lean left--Google's Marissa Mayer had Obama as an invited guest at her home for a fundraiser, for crying out loud.
You say that as if you think Obama is some sort of left leaning political figure. I can see where you would get that impression, but it's pretty far from accurate. The left only likes him because he isn't as far right as the GOP.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If Slashdot is any indication, then a government filled with engineers would be really snarky!
I don't believe that any particular group of people will ultimately be better or worse than any other at running government. I would like to point out that the technology, that members of Slashdot have helped develop, will allow governments to micromanage a large population in a way that was previously impossible. The ability to use computers to track and profile people has allowed the government to lockdown society in ways that make the powers of a police state truly terrifying.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Some statistics don't tell you anything useful. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse a particular ideology doesn't tell you what their thoughts on the issues are.
Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse libertarianism tells you that those programmers are probably not going to be in favor of, say, strong government regulations of pollutant emissions or of drug laws. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse social-democratic views tells you that those programmers are probably going to be in favor of some form of universal health insurance with some form of government mandate. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse....
None of those tell you that all programmers will have those views, but I'm not sure that anybody argued that all programmers will, say, oppose strong government regulations of pollutant emissions and oppose drug laws and....
I see labelling someone a "Libertarian" (for example) as no more viable than assuming the personality of someone just because they're Black, Hispanic, etc.
"Labeling someone a {insert your ideology here}" is not the same thing as "assuming the personality of someone just because they're {insert race, sex, ethnicity} here". It's the same as "labeling someone a member of {race, sex, ethnicity}", and both are quite viable in many circumstances. If somebody has a Y chromosome, I'm probably correct to label them as a "male" (modulo transsexuality, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, etc.). If somebody believes in a minimal government, with no drug laws, no sodomy laws, little or no regulation of private commerce, a military sufficient to defend against external attack but no more, etc., I'm probably correct to label them as a "libertarian". There are other cases where it's not so easy - what about somebody who believes there should be no drug or sodomy laws, little or no regulation of private commerce, and a large military with bases all over the world? What's their ideology called? What's the race or ethnicity of somebody from a very-mixed background? In their case, it might be what they consider themselves, unless that's a completely silly self-identification (e.g., somebody whose ancestry is 127/128th northern European white and 1/128th Nigerian black identifying themselves as "black" if nobody else even knows about their black great-great-great-...-grandfather).
The labels themselves are bigotry, regardless of whether they're based on race, creed, or profession.
Calling Keith Ellison or Herman Cain or Condoleezza Rice "black", or calling Mitt Romney or Bernie Sanders or Stephen Harper "white", or calling Joseph Lieberman "Jewish", or calling Rick Santorum "Catholic", or calling Keith Ellison "Muslim", or calling Linus Torvalds a "programmer" or "software engineer", is bigotry?
Is it Monday? You guys just enjoy playing with my mind, yes? Scott Adams is running for President?!? Since when?!? WTF?!?
Fine. Turnabout's fair play. Ptheh.
... engineers -especially Silicon Valley types- like to think that they're libertarians, they are in fact much more likely to be control-freak technocrats.
Point of order, Mr. Speaker ... I'm a small "l" libertarian, and I'm somewhat of a "control freak technocrat." Why do you believe it's so difficult to be both? Methinks you don't really understand the meaning of the words you're using.
On systems I admin or support, I'm a benevolent tyrant; no apologies. I enjoy protecting the weak (no offence intended) from hurting themselves. It's my job! They're welcome to play all they want and have all the fun they can, but at the end of the day, if they can't find the file they need, that's my fault. I don't expect them to know what they're doing, nor to read all the spiffy documentation I write for them, nor to bother to understand the informative emails I'm continually bombarding them with. I do expect that the backups I create can be read. I do expect that I can clobber their lost password when they need me to. I do expect them to fear me when there's a need for that (which isn't often). I'm not ordinarily a BOFH (too much work), but I can be when necessary.
I want users to have all the freedom they can grab for. That means I need control of the system to ensure they get it. This is not a difficult question. When I'm logged in as root, I'm carrying lit sticks of dynamite in both hands. That's serious business. You just go on with your day and ignore the messes I'm dealing with. We'll both be better off that way.
Ah, crap. /usr's filling up. !@#$ Never mind ...
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Jimmy Carter
Damn kids don't even know history.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Large budgets are too much for people to process. When I explain things to people I try to use values they can relate to.
So to the Conservative supporters up here in Canada, complaining about wasting 3 million dollars annually on a national gun registry, I try to explain it as thus:
If you just bought a 30,000$ car last year, and found out this year you had to actually pay out 30$ on maintenance, do you think it is reasonable to torch it or throw it away. Heck even if you decided to keep it for a decade it would only cost you 300$ to find out.
It is sort of hard to argue that. I find most people have a hard time evaluating much more than 7 figures. Once you get into Billions with a capitol B, I think it is lost on most people how much money that is. With the US, you start getting into the Trillions with a big capitol T, which I have a hard time getting my head around... XKCD had a great chart not too long ago, that illustrates the issue.
http://xkcd.com/980/
Neil Papaloto would be proud (sorry if I mis-spelled that) ... ... COBOL is sort of self documenting .... a non-trivial problem ... a few comments could really help out if anyone can figure out what ASCII is (or UNICODE).
Language matters
and my favorite is APL since it is Greek to everyone, and obfuscation is implicit -- good for coding trade secret information.
Easy to read code assumes expertise in the language, Vint Cerf has been raising the specter of "code rot" including format rot -- where we lose the ability over time (think 100's of years) to read, execute, compile, render, etc. the earlier versions of things that are stored in our archives.
I'd be happiest in a benevolent dictatorship, so long as they were both competent, and their benevolence was guaranteed.