Engineering as Policy Dogma

One of the enduring questions that I have is this: Why are intellectuals generally and Silicon Valley specifically so darned liberal. I don't have any real good answers to this, but I do have some thoughts regarding why engineers should be conservative if you consider that to mean being on the fact side of the fact-value distinction.

The foundation for this argument rests in dogma, a set of beliefs that are not questioned. For me, as an engineer, my dogma is engineering. I believe what I learned as an engineer because I've proved to myself that these rules work. Specifically, I refer to control theory, information theory, and computational theory, all of which impact policy and influence policy resistance through complexity. Now I've had arguments with philosophy professors who take as their dogma democracy theory, social justice theory, or critical legal theory, but none of these can come close to the trust or reliability offered by engineering. If the engineering 3 are incompatible with the philosophy 3, then that says more about the latter than the former. After all, the engineering 3 are all based on logic and rules, so why should they be incompatible with philosophy?

So how this argument manifest itself? First, Hayek in his 1967 essay "Complexity" talked about how advanced math and computation impacted policy and analysis. Second, Jay Forrester's system dynamics explicitly applied engineering to policy problems by accounting for aspects of causal complexity such as feedback relationships, stock-flow (integrative) relationships, and nonlinear relationships. Each of these causal relationships can confuse the human mind, but all three combined make even fairly simple policy problems hard to predict.

But you see politicians, professors, and policy professionals regularly acting like they know it all when they don't. This lesson was brought home to me when I had coded up a fairly large software system--over 5000 lines--and I didn't know how it would react when I changed it. So I made changes very carefully and always ensured I could get back to a knowable state when making changes--that is, I took pains to conserve the system. I took these precautions even though I knew more about that code base than anybody else on the planet and the code system was simple compared to social systems. And yet so-called experts and elite leaders regularly recommend massive, huge, and irreversible changes to systems about which they know very little. Any disinterested analysis would reveal that such changes are good for them but probably not so good for the system itself.