[kragen]

I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

I do respect self-sacrifice on principled grounds. If you were starving in a besieged city, and killing and eating a baby were your best chance for survival (https://youtu.be/KOkBEqtGUI8?t=2886), I'd endorse you not doing it. Even if, in some utilitarian calculus, you were more important than the baby, I'd endorse your hypothetical non-baby-eating moral choice. I'd like to think that I'd be one of the people abstaining from lifesaving cannibalism myself, though I've often seen people fail to uphold their principles when it comes down to it. I respect drawing a line in the sand beyond which you refuse to coldly weigh costs and benefits like an engineer.

But that's not what you're doing. If not buying a smartphone were "all about principles" to you, you wouldn't have a smartphone in the first place. You've crossed the line in the sand; you're already eating babies. All that remains to you is balancing the number of babies you kill and eat against your nourishment.

And, in that situation, refusing to balance costs and benefits isn't a matter of principle. It's merely irresponsibility, and will result in you eating unnecessary quantities of babies.

[netdevphoenix]

> I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

This is HN naivete at its best. Engineer-centric worldview directly inspired by Ayn Rand science fantasies with single-factor causality at its core.

Engineering happens in and is regulated by its surrounding socio-entrepreneurial-political context. Apple releasing Apple Intelligence is not exclusively an engineering decision. OpenAI releasing ChatGPT is not exclusively an engineering decision. The birth of the internet is not an exclusively engineering decision.

Every single one of those decisions involved more than just calculating costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

What is the difference between saying "I am an engineer" and "I work as an engineer" if we leave aside any desires to bind your personality to your employment contract?

[kragen]

I don't subscribe to a belief in single-factor causality. You can't do engineering with such a belief. Engineering is a discipline of bringing about desired effects, and that requires bringing about all of their necessary causes, not just one of them. If you attempt to operate a motor, a CPU, or an electroporation apparatus at the right voltage without paying attention to the temperature, or the right temperature without paying attention to the voltage, your design will have a bad problem and you will not be doing engineering today. And if you look at the motor's datasheet, you can see that the operating conditions have not just voltage and temperature but another dozen or two parameters.

But when you try to reduce a relationship in the infinitely complex and mostly unknown real world to a sentence, or even an essay or an encyclopedia, you have to simplify it. When you do this well, you can manage to say things that guide your readers toward the inexpressible and incompletely knowable truth, rather than away from it. You may even be able to figure out how to do something that you are trying to do.

To describe a bit more of the situation, among the unbounded complexity of the causal graph that has mostly eliminated the risk of global warming continuing, many of the critical nexuses are engineering achievements: the reduction of the resources required to manufacture solar panels to a tiny fraction of what they were only ten years ago, the construction and successful operation of solar panel factories that would already suffice to meet the human world's energy demands within decades, the similar improvements in rechargeable batteries, the not-yet-built solar farms that will deploy these panels, and so on.

These are ultimately causally dependent on nearly all of human history and especially on the political history of China, Germany, and Spain in the early 21st century and of the US in the late 20th. And the effects that will proceed from them are still largely unknown and unknowable, depending on future politics, but some of them are predictable; in particular, fossil fuels have become economically uncompetitive as a source of energy almost everywhere in the world, and will consequently decline over time. This may not be completely inevitable, but it is likely enough at this point that the alternatives are not worth worrying about.

You ask what it means to be an engineer if it's not just an employment contract, which makes me wonder if you have ever met an engineer. I have already given a partial answer: it is a way of thinking that seeks acceptable tradeoffs rather than perfection. I think it has a lot of other aspects as well. For example, engineers tend not to worry too much about factions with conflicting interests; we see life as a series of problems; we expect problems to be solved with enough knowledge and diligent hard work; we tend to value what is knowable and measurable over intuition, even as we depend unavoidably on intuition every day; we design things; our designs are based on material implications of inequalities (to compensate for the unknown unknowns in the world) rather than just equations; we respect expertise, especially expertise that can be put into words; we dare to imagine what has never been, and bring it into existence.

Contrast this with, for example, the worldview of a lawyer, or a doctor, or a mystic, or even a scientist.

Each of these aspects of being an engineer has good effects and bad effects, and sometimes the congenital blind spots of engineering thinking lead us into disasters. (Those blind spots don't bear much resemblance to your caricature of them, presumably because you know almost nothing about engineering, but they do exist and are very important.) But that's basically the way we have not only built the internet but also solved the climate change problem, including at the political level—you may have recognized Xi Jinping's good and bad points in the outline above.