I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: ‘In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.’
In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to explain why. (When the Swiss genius Robert Maillart designed bridges in the 1930s, little was known about the properties of reinforced concrete; Maillart was to some extent flying blind. Thankfully his intuition paid off, since his work is incomparably beautiful.)
‘Legal’ thinking now precedes ‘engineering’ thinking rather than the other way around
There is a huge difference between the mental processes we adopt when we want to solve a problem and those when we want to win an argument. Engineering is fundamentally a problem-solving process. Law is fundamentally about winning an argument. The first demands practical intelligence, the second reduces decisions to a kind of performative rationality.
Having studied behavioural science for the past 15 years or so, one thing that fascinates me is that individuals rarely use formal processes in making decisions – whom to marry, where to live, which airfryer to buy. This is always seen as evidence of their ‘irrationality’. By contrast, ‘serious’ decisions in government and large businesses are assumed to be highly rational since they adhere to formal processes of argumentation, quantification and direct comparison.
And yet for all this, institutional stupidity and dysfunction are far more common than individual insanity. Let’s face it, the reason we aren’t building any sodding houses is because our institutions aren’t up to the job. This is in large part because they are designed not to solve problems but to settle arguments; not to create good outcomes, but decisions which are defensible. Consequently, ‘legal’ thinking now precedes ‘engineering’ thinking, rather than the other way around. Law should largely be a corrective discipline; it has become a directive discipline instead.
When you dig deeper, there are several fundamental differences between the two schools of thought. Problem solving is empirical, iterative and exploratory; argumentation is linear. Perhaps more important still, in argumentation, as in a school exam, it is seen as ‘cheating’ to rewrite the initial question. In problem-solving, changing the question is often the best way to win. (Most entrepreneurs and inventors owe their success not to answering an established question, but to asking a new question their competitors had entirely overlooked.)
In his book Breakneck, Dan Wang contrasts the overly legalistic culture in the Anglosphere with the political culture in China which is dominated by engineers. He argues that the dominance of legal thinking in the West has created a self-serving ‘vetocracy’ – essentially people who prosper not from doing things, but from preventing them from happening at all.
When my brother-in-law briefly worked in the civil service, he and a friend would relieve the tedium by placing fake announcements on the departmental noticeboard. At one point several highly neurotic people who designed forms for the Ministry of Agriculture learned they had been earmarked for a three-month job-swap with a SWAT team from the LAPD.
There are currently only six engineers in parliament. The higher Chinese officialdom is, by contrast, stuffed with engineers. Perhaps a similarly bizarre work-exchange needs to be arranged. Channel 4 would love it.
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