i call it commercialize
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And the difference between those and engineers is…?
The point in there somewhere is that what’s needed is a suitable complement of skills. Some engineers crank the handle. Others invent magic. Innovation needs both and more.
The problem such as it is one is the magic inventing engineer is much rarer because (and imo was the only real nugget in the article) it relies on connecting a huge array of disparate knowledge, and most people just aren’t that interested in stuff. Those I’ve met that are good at this spend their whole time expanding their knowledge in every conceivable domain.
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Yeah, I’m definitely on board with upgrading that middle layer.
I grind my teeth when people lump that layer in with “hard wired brains we can’t possibly improve on”.
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The prox fuze was a collaboration between the us and uk. The Germans and Japanese both failed to develop a prox fuze.
We engineers joke about magic all the time – mostly meaning, "stuff that works that I don’t understand or care to understand how, because that particular issue is not my f*****g problem – but at the same time, we know it’s just a joke. There is no magic. The stuff that looks like magic is furiously cranking the handle.
Innovation as the public likes to imagine it – as a novel idea implemented by novel means and brought to their homes in a single transformative instant – does not exist.
Most innovation starts with reading a 20 year-old grad thesis, or trying some signal processing that’s worked in a dozen arenas already before it made it’s may to yours, or boiling down a problem until you can say, “I just wish I had a block that could tell the difference between A and B, because that’s a harder problem than I would have thought.” And by the time you’ve thought of it, someone else already has too. Maybe they even tried and just couldn’t make it profitable enough to keep doing. Maybe your “innovation” even just started out as copying the other guy’s mediocre implementation.
Innovation is what claim to have done once you’ve worked hard, won a lot of the market, and waited for everyone to forget how much of that hard work was somebody else’s doing… up until the point people realize it was basically obvious. “Shopping lists, but on a computer” is obvious. “Buying things from a catalog, but on the internet” is obvious. And that’s what passes for innovation because even though it’s obvious, elaborating on all the little details and then implementing them is work, and that’s why it’s prohibitively expensive to try to compete with, say, Amazon today.
And I think it’s important to be a little jaded about this, because modern CEOs talk about innovation the same way we used to talk about the divine right of kings: as ineffable force that has somehow selected them to be better and more noble than the common sort. And a lot of us by into it because it sounds more than a little heroic, the fantasy of a lone inventor struggling in a garage to change the world. But in reality, innovation is going to happen in spite of us: once computers get cheap enough, one of the billions of people on Earth will eventually think of “shopping lists, but on a computer,” and so eventually someone will also invent “product catalogs, but on the internet”, and so someone will invent “online shopping,” and so on. It’s healthy then to learn to resist the outrageous claims people make about costs needing to foster and protect innovation.
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But “Shopping lists on a computer” are not really innovation (despite what people might assert).
I can tell you from personal experience that breakthroughs are sometimes a flash of inspiration and not just cranking the handle faster. They come because you see connections that you hadn’t noticed before. Of course, turning that inspiration into something useful is more often than not hard work and that’s when you need all the crank turning.
But absolutely, some people are better at having those flashes of inspiration. Clearly that’s what i meant when i said magic. It’s about seeing things that aren’t apparent to most people.
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As a sysadmin who was at a HUGE company where every little IT thing had a dedicated team I would joke about magic. The SAN while I understand what is going on in the background for all intents to us waiting for the SAN team to allocate disks to us for all intents were magic disk that appear on the server to our end of things.
Gamefication.
And the monetization of it.
The WW2 story fails to mention that the allies lost more men and machinery in these bombing raids than they ended up costing the Germans. Which makes me wonder about the larger lesson being taught here.
Maybe it has to do with all these bits of green paper changing hands, when it was never the bits of paper that were unhappy in the first place?
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It’s true that unconventional approaches tend to fail much more often than conservative ones. Stability, consistency and predictability tend to be the highest values for classically trained engineers.
That can be great for some purposes, but also a huge ideological blind spot. It’s no coincidence that at the same time capital from the inherently conservative financial world is flowing into technology fields, those fields are aligning more and more closely with the inherently conservative engineering philosophy.
Business ideology has effectively molded the information technology field into a form that reflects business values. This is why even when you think about “hackers, inventors, and weirdos” doing something, you imagine them building a VC-funded startup company. This paradigm itself is part of the problem. We need experiments and ventures which question business models and even capitalism itself.
Most of them will fail, but that’s not a concern. The real concern is that if the ultra-prioritization of engineering philosophy continues, we won’t have such failed experiments. Everything will be designed to stabilize the status quo, keep things predictable, and there will be no chance for anything to ever change.
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We’ve got plenty of visionaries and weirdos.
Most of them are plain wrong.
Of those that are right, half fail because they cannot find enough qualified engineers to actually do the work that they are dreaming about. The other half succeeds, and gets celebrated as “great visionaries.”
But it’s all just sheer dumb luck, and they get rewarded way beyond their actual contribution.
The computing world could have done without Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. But where would the computing world be without John McCarthy, Dennis Ritchie or Alan Kay?
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Even better, he lived long enough to see Apple beat IBM to releasing a cryptographically enforced garden of pure ideology. Talk about turning around Apple’s fortunes…
Worse, it’s not even the right analogy for the problem Cory proposes. He’s talking about solving the wrong problem because the right problem is too hard; the bullet-hole thing is about solving the wrong problem because your understanding is incorrect.
A better analogy might be the taxi driver problem, beloved of behavioural economists.
Taxi drivers who own their own cabs tend to set themselves an income target for each shift. They work until they make that amount, then go home.
A consequence of this is that they end up working long shifts on quiet nights and short shifts on busy nights.
If they were to reverse this strategy and work the longer shifts on the busy nights instead, they could significantly increase their income without increasing their total hours worked.
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I wonder whether the bullet pattern story is right at all. I would expect the actual story is not the simple two stages of (a) gathering the data, and (b) consulting the expert as described. I expect things would have gone a bit like this…
“Aircraft are getting shot at. We are repairing them as fast as we can”.
“We seem to be getting most of them back in the air if we get the parts. But is anyone gathering the data? Perhaps if we had reports on each damaged aircraft in a consistent format, we would be able to tell something.”
“Great. More paperwork. But we should get some bloke at the end of the month who will sort through it all, and by then he ought to have lots of the bumf to amuse him.”
“The bloke turned up. He’s sorted the stuff into piles. There are some basic patterns, but nothing you couldn’t guess. He’s made a nice drawing with red dots where all the recorded hits are, which is quite interesting. It’s not even at all”. (aside - there are big gaps where the engines go for starters, but of course when the engine goes, you lose the whole crate…)
“I am going to see a bunch of boffins this afternoon. I am going to take the drawing with the red dots. It might amuse them. They might just see something we are missing…”.
Moral: the expert sees what the regular engineers were probably seeing all along. Then another sixty years of repeating reduces the anecdote to a Zen koan, where the Wise Man points to Where the Bullets Are Not. I think this is telling us more about how tales are told then how people think.
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It is to quite a lot of the people putting in the money.
Unless of course you reach a point in society where some people have so much money they’re literally running out of sensible, conservative things to do with their money…
exactly. the measurement of success has become dollars. in the earlier days the measurement was discovery. lots of people employed by colleges, hackers working out of their basements, and on.
that’s normal for any field. there is so much to learn when no one knows anything. parsers, compilers, shunting yards, garbage collection, object oriented programming, bsp trees, a-star, state charts, post, tcp/ip, cert, oh my. who knew? no one.
it’s a big problem when artists and researchers, hackers and coders, mathematicians and engineers, all have to worry about their day job.
but, that’s the situation in the states where everything is about the bottom line. where it’s hard to live as anything but a money maker.
money is conservative because - as you point out - it has to be. that’s part of why money tends to solve yesterday’s problems. not those of today or tomorrow.
You’re wrong.
The work Wald did was actually way more sophisticated than all this. You can find some of the research results here.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5dcc/ab070b8f9c5d03e8a0d3a9e92327dbd31c44.pdf
Wald was working as part of a general statistical research group. The ultimate purpose of the research was to compute, exactly, the probability that a plane is downed when it is hit in a specific region by a specific round. This is a lot more sophisticated than ‘the parts that are not hit are the important bits’ - the purpose is that actually they produced more specific data - for example, are the engines twice as important as the cockpit? And so on. This means you can optimise precisely the armour you want to put on the different areas.
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Yeah, that’s the problem I was describing. Venture capitalism is by its nature about prioritizing the goals and values of capitalists. Their money, and even the possibility of getting their money, shifts the priorities of everyone involved.
If I have a theory, idea, or experiment that seems promising, I might pursue it from any number of different angles. But if someone will give me a million dollars if my idea conforms to their priorities, I will pursue it from the angle they like. Everyone will pursue their ideas from that same angle, because a million dollars trumps whatever unique motivations and values we each might have going for us.
The point is not that wealthy capitalists should give their money to unconventional endeavors - obviously they won’t. The point is simply that capitalism flattens innovation and creativity, and we need to find ways to move beyond it.
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