One sidebar caveat re "René Girard observed that human communities in crisis often resolve internal conflict through scapegoating", and "humans will scapegoat at all times", and treating this as "human liturgy", rather than as culture-specific pathology.
Consider a South American fishing village culture, which didn't do concepts of "shit happens", nor "unintended consequences", nor "systems failure". So everything that goes wrong, is the result of some one individual's intent, exercised by direct action or by supernatural whammy. Your neighbor. Your family. Your enemy. Some fish escape the group net? Gather around to figure out who did it. Your plant not growing well? Stub your toe? Pay the witch doctor to tell you who whammied it/you, and to whammy them back. Described as a singularly toxic interpersonal environment.
Now moving subcultures to a safety/learning/challenge culture is so very hard (aviation CRM, etc), perhaps it's a valid approximation to view its absence as fixed. But having just read a comment suggesting unaddressed climate change should be blamed on the science community because reasons, I'm sensitized just now to "our local cultural dysfunction is simply human nature - it's them that's the problem". Even acknowledging bad actors fueling the dysfunction in which they thrive.
This is probably not top-level worthy and I'm going to hell for this but this reads like slop. Maybe I have trust issues with content now, because everything looks like slop. But I am pretty sure I can get that essay out of claude and just sed the funny grammatical characters out.
I didn’t get the slop feeling. I could see some long winded argumentation that diminished the messaging. The important aspect in this is that someone with political inclination can now use the powerful imagery of a scapegoat sacrifice to appeal to the psychological bias that we are better than previous people and fight a casus belli with another one.
> It is politics costumed as engineering, ritual costumed as analysis, scapegoating costumed as problem-solving. Engineering is the commitment to understanding what actually causes what, to targeted remediation grounded in evidence, to the disciplined separation of correlation from causation, especially when the narrative is seductive.
Maybe this should have been at the start of the blog post, and not the end. Anyway, I don't really agree with it.
Everything that works is its own form of engineering even when people don't recognize it. If your workplace is hitting optimal success despite being hostile to "real engineering", it originates in the types of problems being solved.
So then, the "real real engineering" is in reducing friction between various groups, and that often takes the form of a communication "silo". Your discomfort and confusion may actually be a significant part of the business success.
Ultimately, you choose to work there. Your happiness is not an indicator of whether the business is optimal. Your stubborn insistence on certain idealistic principles may be what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as "a foolish consistency". As anyone who has engineered a thing can confirm, some problems just suck and the optimal solution is full of tension.
I would argue the author even deliberately misunderstands engineering.
> Engineering is the commitment to understanding what actually causes what [...]
This sounds like science to me. Engineering is the exploitation of scientific principles for human reasons. Whether those reasons are "clean water" or "war" does not take away from the essence of their engineeringness.
One sidebar caveat re "René Girard observed that human communities in crisis often resolve internal conflict through scapegoating", and "humans will scapegoat at all times", and treating this as "human liturgy", rather than as culture-specific pathology.
Consider a South American fishing village culture, which didn't do concepts of "shit happens", nor "unintended consequences", nor "systems failure". So everything that goes wrong, is the result of some one individual's intent, exercised by direct action or by supernatural whammy. Your neighbor. Your family. Your enemy. Some fish escape the group net? Gather around to figure out who did it. Your plant not growing well? Stub your toe? Pay the witch doctor to tell you who whammied it/you, and to whammy them back. Described as a singularly toxic interpersonal environment.
Now moving subcultures to a safety/learning/challenge culture is so very hard (aviation CRM, etc), perhaps it's a valid approximation to view its absence as fixed. But having just read a comment suggesting unaddressed climate change should be blamed on the science community because reasons, I'm sensitized just now to "our local cultural dysfunction is simply human nature - it's them that's the problem". Even acknowledging bad actors fueling the dysfunction in which they thrive.
This is probably not top-level worthy and I'm going to hell for this but this reads like slop. Maybe I have trust issues with content now, because everything looks like slop. But I am pretty sure I can get that essay out of claude and just sed the funny grammatical characters out.
I didn’t get the slop feeling. I could see some long winded argumentation that diminished the messaging. The important aspect in this is that someone with political inclination can now use the powerful imagery of a scapegoat sacrifice to appeal to the psychological bias that we are better than previous people and fight a casus belli with another one.
> It is politics costumed as engineering, ritual costumed as analysis, scapegoating costumed as problem-solving. Engineering is the commitment to understanding what actually causes what, to targeted remediation grounded in evidence, to the disciplined separation of correlation from causation, especially when the narrative is seductive.
Maybe this should have been at the start of the blog post, and not the end. Anyway, I don't really agree with it.
Everything that works is its own form of engineering even when people don't recognize it. If your workplace is hitting optimal success despite being hostile to "real engineering", it originates in the types of problems being solved.
So then, the "real real engineering" is in reducing friction between various groups, and that often takes the form of a communication "silo". Your discomfort and confusion may actually be a significant part of the business success.
Ultimately, you choose to work there. Your happiness is not an indicator of whether the business is optimal. Your stubborn insistence on certain idealistic principles may be what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as "a foolish consistency". As anyone who has engineered a thing can confirm, some problems just suck and the optimal solution is full of tension.
I would argue the author even deliberately misunderstands engineering.
> Engineering is the commitment to understanding what actually causes what [...]
This sounds like science to me. Engineering is the exploitation of scientific principles for human reasons. Whether those reasons are "clean water" or "war" does not take away from the essence of their engineeringness.