Real talk. The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and reinforce social structures and social relations in ways that they would otherwise object to.

To the degree that we've collectively built a dark forest, it's been in part due to this lack of multi-disciplinarianism.

Humans are amazingly adept at rationalization.

It would help if those "soft sciences" had any sort of reproducible outcomes. As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.

I was thinking that "disdain" might be overdramatic and too broad of a generalization - until I read the replies to this comment.

It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance, largely due to exponentially better and cheaper compute, as well as tools for distributed collaboration.

But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility.

So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history.

We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society.

We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective.

This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.

When I was an infant taking my first couple years of EE I joined right in with everyone else ridiculing the "basket weavers".

Now I say that stem is just a tool that does no good by itself. It's just as harmful as beneficial. An engineer doesn't like to think of themself as a tool, but tough shit. Without the humanities an engineer is exactly that, merely a tool that others wield, and others decide how to wield and to what ends.

Stem tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb. The humanities tells you whether/when/why to build a bridge or a bomb.

It also made us worser engineers unable to contemplate the computer in front of the computer . We cyclical reinvent the wheels and our brightest regularly bump into the limitations of self projecting themselves upon everyone they meet.

We need a field that is able to systematically cartograph the limitations our brains impose on us, society and technology. We need a world map of blindspots, of disabilities l. Not 15 years ago we congratulated ourselves on plans to degrowth , and look at what happened during the pandemic.

> The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology]

While I agree that disdain is not the right reaction, neither is misdescribing what these disciplines are. And the most important fact about them is: they are not sciences.

We do not have a science of how people work, how groups of people work, how collective action works. Dealing with people is an art. It requires applying non-repeatable human judgments to non-repeatable human situations, and doing so constantly, day after day, year after year, realizing that there is never going to be a stable state of things, there is never going to be a time when you have dealt with all the conflicts and solved all the problems and can sit back and relax.

Engineers are understandably uncomfortable with such a situation because it goes against everything we (I say "we" because I'm an engineer myself) are taught. We are taught to engineer solutions to problems, solutions that keep working, if not forever, at least for a long enough time that we aren't constantly having to manage them. A well built bridge does not require constant engineer attention once it is finished.

But there is no such thing when it comes to humans and human relationships. They do require constant attention in order to survive and flourish. But we have no science of how to do that, the way we have a science of how to build bridges. All we have is our fallible human judgment, and if we're lucky, some rules of thumb that, while they aren't science, are hopefully better than nothing. Unfortunately, I think what rules of thumb we have have been mostly ignored in the process of building systems like social media.

Soft "sciences" don't have enough predictive power to, on expectation, improve this situation to any meaningful degree

These “soft sciences” have actually been responsible for 100s of millions of deaths in the 20th century.

Many times these practitioners of these ”soft sciences” are cloistered away in the ivory towers of academia and away from regular people whom they actually look down on because they don’t match their theories.

This is an interesting point, but how do you this psychology as a field has or usefully could push against such forces? Is that its role even accidentally?

Another way of saying this is: everything non-trivial you build embeds at least a little bit of cultural baggage.

If you’re not thinking about that it just means you have no idea what stuff you are loading into your designs. It’s still there you’re just not aware of it. It’s like being the unwitting carrier of a disease or a parasite.

Makes me think of brain slugs in Futurama for some reason.

I thought it was for the money

How do you think one leads to the other?

Engineers due tend to be pretty critical of things that can’t be accurately and consistently measured (not meant as a slight. It’s true, but it doesn’t make those soft sciences worthless), but they aren’t the only ones making these systems.

Most of the time, engineers are given requirements and build systems to satisfy them.

You wouldn’t blame a construction worker for gentrification, right?

It seems to me that these soft sciences are parasitic and only try to follow successful things created by engineers and impose their vision upon them.

There are plenty of engineers for hire, and sociologists can build their own vision.

https://xkcd.com/435/