Are Engineers Natural Libertarians Or Technocrats? 727
uctpjac writes "This openDemocracy article uses Scott Adams' presidential bid to argue that however much engineers — especially Silicon Valley types — like to think that they're libertarians, they are in fact much more likely to be control-freak technocrats. Quoting: 'Sensibly if uncharismatically, Adams has pledged if elected to delegate most of his decisions to people who know more than him, and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position. His worldview has its limitations – he underestimates the value of ways of thinking other than the engineer's, and it's naïve of him to claim his approach to policy is purely pragmatic and non-ideological.' Is this a fair account? Has the author wrongly read Dilbert, or wrongly interpreted the relationship between the engineering mindset and Adams' representation of it in the cartoon strip?"
Re:Libertarians? (Score:2, Informative)
Corporate welfare, yes. Corporate "personhood" no. Many libertarians believe individuals retain their rights when they join groups, but they also object to the lack of responsibility.
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not a big fan of commenting code. I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting. If your code fails this test, no amount of commenting will improve the situation. Bad code is bad code, no matter how well-commented it is. (True, some code is truly difficult to comprehend and therefore requires comments, usually because what the code is doing is supremely complicated and difficult to comprehend itself. I'm not talking about that kind of code).
Now describing the design overall, that's another matter. But most of the designs I'm called in to fix are so bad that they are undocumentable.
Then you should not do it for a living. Period.
It does not matter how elegant/clear your code is, eventually, someone else will have to maintain it.
Properly documenting your code ensures that it will have real longevity. Really, the only reason many (most) folks fail to document their code is laziness.
Now, This is often encouraged by the company. They want their code yesterday, not tomorrow. It costs money to place remarks in the source, as well as document the process so that the users can utilize the full functionality of the product.
We had a backup system whose documentation actually consisted of photocopies of the engineers personal notes! Not only did we have to interpret a lousy UI, but we also had to interpret the documentation that was provided. Yes it was cheaper, but in the long run it cost far more than if we had just purchased a proper solution.
So, in closing I can repeat that, laziness is the prime reason so much code goes unremarked/undocumented properly, regardless of the arguments to the contrary.
Don't worry... (Score:2, Informative)
The USA isn't the only country in the world with world class pharmaceutical giants.
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:5, Informative)
The why matters a lot. Good comments should be things like /* I chose this algorithm because I expect the data to meet these criteria. */ When you come to the code ten years after this was written and see that, in fact, the data don't match those criteria at all, you can replace it with a different algorithm. Or you can find that the data still do and so the algorithm makes sense even though its worst-case performance in the general case is terrible.
The sanity check is also useful. If the comments say the code does one thing, yet the code does something else, you've identified a bug. It's a lot better to use a proper specification language for the project than rely on this, but it's also at least an order of magnitude more time consuming...
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Informative)
And a lot of that tape prevents fraud, tax cheats, skirting labor laws, and your screwy idea from polluting the environment
You realize that you are replying to a strand which specifically mentioned the removal of limited liability, right?
I suspect that you didnt even consider it a possibility that the real problem with corporations is that their members are not generally treated on a legal level as individuals responsible for their corporate actions.
...excluding people by race color creed and national origin (and perhaps a few more characteristics, depending on juridiction).
Ah yes, the ol' legislate morality bullshit. If in one breath we complain about the dangers of corporate influences on the centralized government and thus the people, then how is it OK that in another we champion special-interest influences on the centralized government and thus the people?
The problem with both corporations and government is the centralization of the very things that shouldnt be centralized. We have corporate welfare on the grandest scale ever, while the government strips us of our rights at the fastest pace ever. You lost your 4th amendment rights just shy of a decade ago, and last month you just lost your 6th amendment rights.
Re:China too.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Informative)
Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be welfare-staters, because their science funding and grantsmanship culture is ever more dependent on the state.
So many things wrong with this idea.
1.) Academic findings benefit all humanity, since they are publicly available. (Read that a couple times.)
2.) I would venture that most scientists are employed outside of academia. (I.E. they're producers..) (Unless you're defining a scientist as someone in a science field that never applies science. That's a rather arbitrary distinction since all applied subjects rely on theoretical constructs, and rife for counter examples.)
3.) There's a fundamental question that your statement begs at. That fundamental question threatens the nature of our civilization. 'Pure' science subjects (theoretical physics, theoretical chemistry, pure math, and so on) are probably best funded by a government. Ideally, they would be conducted in a vacuum outside of the economy (maybe then all results would be trustable). But, short of that, broad reaching government funding probably works best. Even number theory has its applications, and I doubt any developments would be made in number theory without government funding.
4.) Contrast professor pay with industry pay sometime. Be careful to include years of experience, as professor positions require constant research into new areas. A tenured professor probably has dozens of published articles and roughly a decade worth of work experience. In short, they're experts at the top of their fields. In industry, they would be paid at the top end.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that's because a number of the views that are qualified as libertarian here are indeed nothing but anarcho-capitalism. They're not even true anarchy, they actually manage to be worse than that.
The main problem with those views is that they start with the premise that government is bad by definition. It isn't - it's a tool we invented to organize our social tendencies. As a result, libertarians who claim that the government is bad by definition fall into the trap that there is never a level where there is too little government. You could always cut back more. Furthermore, they vastly underestimate how much even the basic services they are ok with would cost: DoD, DoJ and State Department.
I'd love to get on board the Libertarian bandwagon - in theory, it should be the ideal place for me: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand and her followers have managed to corrupt that term to a degree that it has nothing to do with its classical definition. The reason I bring up Somalia is because it is one of the few places that truly has a weak central government. Even Afghanistan has a stronger central government than they do.