Engineering and Postmodernism
The following is from my response to a friend’s Facebook post about the value of postmodernism to engineers, and the role that education plays in introducing engineers to postmodernism.
As a software engineer with a liberal arts education, as someone with little knowledge of what a traditional engineering education even looks like, I desperately wish more people in this industry had a background in postmodernism. By that I mean: I wish they had a deep understanding of the way that human beings, individually and collectively, construct their own realities. How everything looks different depending on your perspective, and how institutions and cultural norms shape both the perspectives one has and the objects one is perceiving. I wish they understood that there are many different lenses with which to view a project or event, and those lenses are sometimes in conflict, sometime orthogonal to each other, sometimes complimentary, but rarely commeasurable.
There are individual fields I wish engineers spent more time with - sociology, social psychology, race studies, disability studies, etc - but no one person can study everything and so most important is the core skill of realizing: “This is a really complex topic. There’s no way for me to be certain in my perception of it. I better explore the different possibilities with an open mind and collaborate with others towards a shared understanding of it.”
A lot of engineers are more likely to fall prey to “Engineer’s Disease” - this belief that there’s A Problem and they can construct A Solution. And then when they’re critiqued because their solution doesn’t take into account X, or Y, or Z, instead of saying, “Yeah,wow, there’s this whole other perspective I missed, let’s work together to incorporate it” they say, “Well, you can’t please everyone!” Or, worse, “those people will find fault with anything.” Because they see critique as nitpicking, instead of an articulation of the way a given tool or process or artefact fails to take into account the critic’s experience of the world.
I think it’s vital that engineering education teach people to understand critique as a sharing of perspective, as a gift - someone is sharing their lens of the world with you and helping you see things in a more rich and nuanced way. They are helping reveal the complexity of the world to you. (And yeah, sometimes they are angry with you, if the complexity they are revealing includes ways in which you’ve harmed people.) We need our engineers to have this mindset if we want to build technology that isn’t actively harming society.
We need practitioners who are reflective, humble, collaborative, and comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. And part of how you get there is through educators who are reflective, humble, collaborative and comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. A style of education that’s like, “I know all the things and skills. I will now impart on you all the things and skills, and judge whether or not you’ve learned them” – that’s in line with the Engineer’s Disease model, this idea that there can ever be a single set of things that are What You Need to Know.
All people, but maybe engineers especially - we want certainty, we want to be able to safely abstract away a whole bunch of complexity and focus on this small piece we can understand. And that’s an important skill to have, to be able to narrow in and build in a sandboxed area. But we all also need to acknowledge that the world is not a sandbox. Google or Facebook are not sandboxes. An engineering department is not a sandbox. The scope of things you might need to learn about and factor into your decision-making is infinite; educators need to role-model this process, and the maturity of thought and emotion that come with it. That’s the most important thing they can possibly teach.
From a follow-up comment, in response to someone pointing out how this relates to common failures of diversity initiatives in tech:
One sometimes finds people in tech who think it’s important to include X group or build tech to support people struggling with Y issue, which is great, but if they come at it with the mindset of “all I need to do is specify The Problem, and I can come up with The Solution”, they’re going to fail pretty spectacularly most of the time.
Whereas if you say, “okay, this problem can’t be perfectly defined, it’s messy and complex and there are lots of different perspectives on it” that leads you naturally to “well, what perspectives are most important here? oh, probably the people most impacted by the problem” which leads, hopefully, to a design process involving or ideally, led by, the people being impacted.
The more nuanced mental model leads, hopefully, to a more just, inclusive, and effective development process. And that more nuanced mental model comes from learning postmodernism, maybe not directly, but through concepts, curricula, processes, and people who have been influenced by postmodernism.
I will end with one of my favorite quotes from Michael Polyani, an accomplished physicst, chemist and social scientist, who predated postmodernism but likely would have been at home with it. This is his description of the scientific process, which goes beyond simple stories of insight, discovery, and problem-solving to lay bare the messiness beneath:
In the course of any single experimental inquiry the mutual stimulus between intuition and observation goes on all the time and takes on the most varied forms. Most of the time is spent in fruitless efforts, sustained by a fascination which will take beating after beating formonths on end, and produce ever new outbursts of hope, each as fresh as the last so bitterly crushed the week or month before. Vague shapes of the surmised truth suddenly take on the sharp outlines of certainty, only to dissolve again in the light of second thoughts or of further experimental observations.
Yet from time to time certain visions of the truth, having made their appearance, continue to gain strength both by further reflection and additional evidence. These are the claims which may be accepted as final by the investigator and for which he may assume public responsibility by communicating them in print. This is how scientific propositions normally come into existence.
The certainty of such propositions can differ therefore only in degree from that of previous preliminary results, many of which had appeared final at first and only later turned out have been only preliminary. Which is not to say that we must always remain in doubt, but only that our decision what to accept as finally established cannot be wholly derived from any explicit rules but must be taken in the light of our own to personal judgement of the evidence.
Trusting our personal judgment is scary. Deferring to the expertise of others with lived experience is scary. Realizing that even our deepest certainties are a little bit uncertain is scary. It would be so much nicer if there were explicit rules we could fully rely on. But there aren’t any rules that we can fully rely on, and so we must learn to rely on ourselves and on each other.