The Struggle

Greenwald has one of his trademark posts today, where he essentially makes the entire MSM look like a bunch of vapid tools. In reality, they are vapid tools. It's not that they are bad people per se, but they exist in the same world that most everyone else does, where reality and facts have no importance, but feelings and impressions rule the world.

And it occurred to me that the same exact rule set exists in my profession as well - and the same type of people that are wreaking havoc in the political world, also wreak havoc in the engineering world.

I have a very typical personality that you'll find in most hardcore engineering types. Most everyone I know (and I know a lot) that do this work are very similar. You simply cannot write thousands of lines of pure logic and have it actually work if you are influenced by emotional or subjective issues.

The news media, however, has no such constraint because their "product" is not testable like an engineer's work. Chris Matthews of MSNBC likes the way Fred Thompson smells (I'm so not kidding), and thus his work (opinion) is not the result of a unbiased review of a candidates credentials or opinions, it's purely an emotive reaction. This is why our political process is like a computer that blue screens every 3 minutes.

This is also why I've decided that Bill Gates should be emperor of the world.

The dirty little secret in the engineering professions (of all types) is that everyone associated with an engineering project, other than the engineers (and managers who used to be engineers), are actively working against the success of the project, even if they don't know it. I've seen it countless times, and I've seen hundreds of millions of dollars wasted because of these people. However, just like in the media business, you cannot challenge that structural orthodoxy because threatening the status quo is.. well, threatening the status quo. You just can't do it. Subjective people think they are useful precisely because they are subjective, and in this world, most humans value and reward subjective thinking because they themselves are subjective. It's a viscous circle.

I don't see much changing, either in politics or the media, nor in the engineering professions for that matter. This isn't planet Vulcan after all.. and most people are emotional retards, basing their point of view on the irrational knee jerk reactions of the moment...

.. but at the very least, we can see it for what it is.