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> If you think that scientific rigour will help you avoid the need for good judgement, you're in for a great deal of distress. Broadly, assuming more data and tighter calculations == more certainty is a folly endemic to engineering-focused organizations and industries. In reality, you're increasing precision without increasing accuracy: a dangerously misleading state. It's understandable: organizations obviously need to play to their strengths, but there's real danger in succumbing to the "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mindset. Firstly, It's much easier for non-engineers to parse the difficulty of engineering problems than the other way around. Outsiders easily see that they don't have the requisite chops to do engineering work. Secondly, cutting through ambiguity and unpredictability to reveal factors you can control is critical to engineering, while non-engineering jobs like management, design, and community outreach are hard because you must confront those things. Engineering types often reason about non-engineering problems either like they have the same level of predictability, or simply disregard the ambiguous and unpredictable factors because they don't fit into an equation. It's easy to see why that micromanaging non-technical manager screwed up by insisted on using some technology or approach they read a snappy article about; an engineer's authority is cut-and-dried in that situation. It's harder to see why purely formulaic approaches often fail dealing with people, nature, markets, etc. Most things in the world are far more complex, temperamental, and less predictable than cache invalidation. |
-- N.N. Taleb