Stardate 20030430.0200

(On Screen): Jane Galt writes about her experience talking to some students who had come up with a new conspiracy theory to explain the war in Iraq, and how she tried to demonstrate to them that their theory was nonsense and could be disproved with standard economics theory. She ends her post this way:

But it's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms. You don't need to be able to run a study yourself -- but you should understand the limits of experimental design, how data is used to build a case, and the frameworks of almost-sciences like economics that will let you understand where economists pronouncements are likely to be pretty solid (rent control) and where they're likely to be personal opinions dressed up as facts (tax policy). We can't all be scientists, but we can, most of us, understand the scientific way of thinking. And since the scientific way of thinking is what's building most of the science that's building our world, and should be constructing the economic thought we expect to make us all richer, we'd better be able to follow it or we risk being led around by the nose.

I agree that English Lit majors should have more exposure to the scientific way of thinking. This isn't a new idea, by the way. Even when I was in college (early 1970's) it was noteworthy that those of us in Oregon State's College of Science were required to take a large amount of humanities courses, but that many humanities majors had no requirement at all to study science. That was most prominent in the English Lit department. Some of us science students (at the time at OSU, my field of Computer Science was part of the Math department, which naturally was in the College of Science) thought that Lit students should be required to at least pass the dumbbell "General Science" sequence offered for outsiders. (And maybe some sort of minimum Math requirement.)

Then we decided that if that were actually made a graduation requirement for English Lit, they wouldn't ever graduate anyone in that department.

That said, I'd like to disagree with part of Jane's final point. Despite what she says, it's engineers and not scientists who are building the modern world. And if anything, this makes her point even more forcefully. But that's because the engineering sensibility is in a sense even more extreme than the science sensibility.

Scientists can still sometimes afford the luxury of ideological self-delusion -- it's happened many times. And scientists quite often work on some field for years or decades without producing tangible results. (Which isn't necessarily a criticism; it's a different problem. When you're trying to find out whether something exists, sometimes you spend years only to learn that it didn't actually, and there was nothing to find. But there's no easy way to tell that before you begin looking.)

No engineer can do either. If we don't produce results more or less on time, we're automatically failures. And if we do produce results, our work is instantly tested in the cold brutality of real-world use and market acceptance. If the product doesn't work, or doesn't actually solve customer problems adequately, no amount of handwaving and nifty turns-of-phrase in the documentation will change that, or prevent it from being discovered. It will be discovered sooner, rather than later. And when it is, the product (and us) will be a failure.

In the most extreme cases, that failure can cost people their lives. Engineers in those fields take this extremely seriously. (A friend of mine works on avionics software. He says that in his place of work, there's a big sign on the wall that says, "If our software crashes, so does the jet.")

Engineers cannot afford any kind of delusions; it costs too damned much. One of my readers referred once to my "ruthless engineer's pragmatism" and that's exactly right. We must be pragmatic, because any other view of the world leads to failure. So we have to be ruthless about pragmatism because we have no choice. That's why, for instance, we constantly check one another's work and are very free with criticism of it. It's why we don't mind (much) when someone shows that we're wrong.

But because we engineers (who are actually mostly responsible for the modern world as we know it, certainly far more so than experts in literature) are both "ruthlessly pragmatic" and strongly results oriented, it means that our world view is just about as different as it possibly can be from the fuzzy English-lit sensibility Jane describes. The only thing that matters to us is results. The only thing we reward is concrete achievement.