Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins
Absolutely. Guilty as charged. We are data driven. We make decisions based on observable, quantifiable data. We expect others to do so as well, at least insofar as they wish to make decisions on how others should live their lives. When they are making law, imposing their authority upon the rest of us, we would prefer their decisions to be data driven. If they do not know, if they do not have solid data supporting their decisions that will ultimately affect other's livelihoods, they have no right to impose their decisions on the rest of us.
While they busy are "winging it", others are suffering irreparable financial harm. They do not have the authority, legal nor moral, to act in this manner. It's one thing to go through life making these kinds of baseless decisions for themselves, but when they abuse their authority to impose their scatter gun, willy-nilly approach on the rest of us, they have gone too far.
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This is a great description of the difference between engineers and scientists.
Engineers deal with finite knowledge that has been tested and proven to be absolute. Want to design something, engineers simply have to refer to finite data in scores of tables. Look up a modulus, see if it works for the application, use it if it does. Simple.
Scientists have no such luck as the best they can do is apply known data in testing and then defining the unknown. That's pretty much the definition of science. It would be nice if scientists could just look up the specs of CV19 and tell the world exactly what to do, what drugs to take, how to act, easy, right, just look on page 49 of the virus manual, table 3.1. Done.
Of course that's not how the real world works when something brand new is generated, there is no book, no table to look up a modulus that will cure us all. Science is all about creating whole new books, not looking at tables.
Both scientists and engineers are valuable members in our society. I think it would be helpful for each to walk a few steps in the shoes of the other.