Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Engineering Philosophy

I was reading a post on Eric Raymond's blog today that struck me as particularly insightful. It goes like this:
Past that my father, also born in LA, and well educated by even by blue standards, was an engineer. Engineers think in a very specific way. The requirements of the profession forces them to divide the whole universe into "works" and "does not work." This habit of thought definitely rubbed off on me. The problem with the blue types is that the post-modernist fantasy world they seem to live in does not even recognize that there are categories defined as "works" and "does not work."
Yup. I'm an engineer and that basically sums up my outlook pretty well. I am more than willing to recognize that There's More Than One Way To Do It (TMTOWTDI) However just because the set of possible solutions is large does not mean you are necessarily within it.

I think part of my problem with the current incarnation of liberalism has a lot to do this. Its one thing to disagree with someone on moral grounds. It is another to say that you live in a completely different reality than I do. Post-modernists and other Relativists often follow the second course and I'm sorry but I can't buy it.

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