On the train home the other night, I listened to yet another interview with Dario Amodei, the thinking person's AI hype man. At the very beginning of the interview, he gave a little background on himself (neatly omitting stints at Baidu and Google and OpenAI) as a biophysics degree-holder who'd previously done research in microbiology. I thought more about this as he described the monitoring his company does of its LLMs by talking about seeing their "neurons lighting up" in their "brains." It's not the worst analogy, but it illuminates a bit more about the observer (biology guy) than the observed (computer programs).Engineers look at the world in a certain way: "engineering is the science of the art of trade-offs, and steam does have its benefits." (From the fascinating article on steam heating networks, the first link below.) Good engineers mostly assume it can be done because they mostly can find ways to get the job done. They'll bring to the decision-maker the difficult tradeoffs or point out when approaches will fail to abide by a project's constraints or ultimately not accomplish objectives. But you don't have to be a wild-eyed science fiction fan to know that it'd be a mistake to only rely on engineers to answer the question of "should this be done?" For that type of consideration, you'd want to adopt the perspective of an ethicist. For another interesting limit to engineer perspectives, take a look at the second article below: it could be alternately titled "how not to be a jerk at work," but it's a helpful understanding of maturity for your above-average engineer.
Artists see the world in a differently. From Makoto Fujimura, in the last essay linked below, "Artists have the potential of creating in love, providing an imaginative vision for their culture, a holistic language to deal with a fragmented, oppressed past." (Read the whole thing.) Perhaps the artist would better be able to tell us if an engineering project ought to be pursued. Maybe we should listen to them about our pursuit of computer programs able and expected to do everything. On the other hand, as you read Fujimura's essay about his trip to China, you get the impression that there are a few behind-the-scenes program planners to make sure the bus gets to the place on time and that no artists are left behind. And, you get the sense that the artist's perspective might be too narrow: should we really be impressed (almost enamored) with the Chinese regime's support of its artists and museums even as we see its brutal exercise of power in all domains, artistic expression included? I think the essay gestures at this, but, much like the "should" questions for our engineer, we might need some moral philosophy added to the mix for our artist, too.
These themes got me thinking about my own perspective and its limitations. If I were on a podcast, how would I introduce myself? My best guess is that I'd gloss over the political advocacy work that began my career and describe what I've done as helping people do their jobs with software. What blindspots does that give me? Anyone who's seen the laptop-toting consultant enter the building knows exactly the downside: here's a person who's never seen a problem they can't immediately understand nor a situation they can't immediate better. The assumption is that things can always be fixed, that I'm just the guy to do it, and that my software is objectively and always the right choice. Being able to articulate that is, in the G.I Joe sense, half the battle. Remembering that no one likes the whizkid helps me to be humble: focusing more on the work and less on the worker.
What is your model (best working understanding) of how you look at things? Helpfully knowing the upsides and downsides of your own perspective starts by understanding that you have one in the first place. Poking around any corner of the internet leads to example after example of people who don't. These folks are fishes in the water not knowing they're wet. They're looking through glasses at the world and thinking they see it clearly. Perhaps we can unpretentiously invoke Socrates as a reply to most of LinkedIn: that social network does not promote living an examined life.
When we identify with our own perspective, not holding it up for examination, we assume that our map is the territory. This failure has two bad results. First, it obscures places where our perspective isn't the right one to frame things. A useful lens in one arena might nudge towards invalid assumptions or obscure reality elsewhere. When I worked in politics, I noticed a lot of the more routinely effective operators operated with a zero-sum frame. While this helped them "win" arguments and the small decisions of routine power, by always seeking to win (and, implied, deliver a loss to the "other side") they weren't able to make lasting progress because our system requires lasting progress to be incremental and typically arrived at by compromise. Or, to the point from above, if you tend think like a biologist, you may anthropomorphize all manner of phenomena that are not persons.
The second result from identifying with and not examining your perspective is that communication about a shared reality becomes impossible. The jokey version is the fable of the older fish asking the younger ones, "how's the water?" and the younger fish look at each other, "what's water?" The divide isn't in reality: it's that the one set of fish are so immersed in it, they can't see that it exists. I sometimes hear this among people who never venture outside of their political bubble: they literally cannot fathom how a decent person could disagree with their opinion because they've never put their opinion at arms length and thought about the assumptions that led to it. Those of us in software land face this when we try to get people to change what they've always done and adopt the new-school software way of doing things. We can't imagine someone wanting to use a whiteboard to track their work when the electronic screen can do it "better"; the whiteboard guy can't imagine why you'd want a computer screen to take his whiteboard's job. The disconnect isn't about the benefits of software vs. those of whiteboard, it's about whether things need to change at all or about whether computer programs really are better than analog in the first place.
The work of examination, for me, is that when I have a new thought, I'm trying to think both about the evidence I'm seeing and why I'm seeing it that way. Are there other readings of the facts that'd result in different conclusions? Who are the people that'd look at the same world and come up with a different idea?
New York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.
Senior engineers often stay silent on bad projects because speaking up can slow progress and harm relationships. They choose when to intervene based on how much a project affects their team and company. Instead of trying to fix everything, they save their influence for the most important battles.
The author traveled in China and reflected on the deep wounds left by its past and the hope found in art and poetry. A Chinese minister shared a touching poem about loss and reconciliation, showing how creativity can heal broken hearts.