Engineers and Politics

Will Collier wrote a short piece about how, despite claims to the contrary, engineers tend to be conservative. I've been meaning to write about it for a while and now I have.

I'm an engineer. There is a general tendency towards conservatism in the engineering community. I think this comes from two things:

1. When engineers screw up people die.
2. Engineers appreciate solutions that work.

Engineers have instruction on safety margins and how to minimize error and different failure modes. Our whole discipline is about trying to make sure things don't break. A big way to do this is general conservatism about how much material you need, etc. Engineering is a high stakes game and those high stakes breed a certain approach towards mitigating danger and risk.

We also like known processes and practical solutions. That stuff that worked yesterday ought to work today, although perhaps better solutions may now exist. Solutions that have lasted a long time generally do so because they are very very good.

It is no coincidence that many great engineering disasters come from using revolutionary solutions to problems. The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge was longer, lighter, and widely considered a breakthrough in bridge design. It also turned out to be infamously unsound. Another novel solution that thankfully didn't take many lives was the collapse of the hartford civic center roof, which was a revolutionary computer-designed space frame. Turns out the civil engineers in charge flubbed the boundary conditions on the analysis. In both these cases the engineers in charge didn't know as much as they thought they did.

Old methods of finding solutions still work too. Newtonian physics isn't right. It has never been right. Neither is Hooke's Law. But both are widely used because they are good approximations. The truth about science is not that it is finding out how the world works, the truth is that by and large it is about modeling how the world works which is different. But don't tell this to a scientist, they won't appreciate you informing them that they may not be unlocking the secrets of the universe.

This does not mean that all engineers are going to be technolibertarians or the like. We do not tend to be extremists. You will find a fair number of engineers who are moderate Democrats. You will find a fair numbers of engineers who vote Republican. Mostly this will break down ideologically, there are engineers who prefer centralized planning and control and there are engineers that would prefer a more modern, but less predictable, decentralized distributed network like the market. Academic engineers will probably prefer the former, engineers in business will probably prefer the latter. In the end though, we all respect good practical problem solving which is the heart of our field.