Conversation

Just as there is "science envy" in parts of liberal arts/humanities leading to pseudo-scientific superstructures on their subjects, there is a sort of "engineering envy" that leads adjacent fields to create engineering-like agency fictions on their fields.
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In both cases, what actually undermines these attempts at imitating the epistemic structures of science and engineering is that you cargo-cult the processes without taking on equivalent uncertainties or risks of failure
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In science, experiments can fail. In engineering, prototypes can blow up. Such failure represents the phenomenology of irreversible historical movement, however you narrativize it ("falsifiability" is metaphysical aestheticization of this irreversibility by non scitech types)
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By contrast, though critical theory, management theory, or design theory can have the procedural trappings of science or engineering, there is a lack of clear-cut failures marking the evolution of the discipline's history. There is only endlessly clever renarrativization
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When I moved from engineering (a particularly applied-science/math kind) to these HSS type fields, while I greatly enjoyed the new intellectual challenges and curiosities to pursue, there was no denying the clear step-function decrease in actual agency
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And before you jump to the conclusion that I'm bad at this new domain, no, I'm actually unreasonably effective at traditionally "soft" things like management problem solving, *because* I have no illusions about the reality of seemingly "engineering" like processes.
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Invariably, when I've picked battles (either in my past career, or now as a consultant), the adversary is a pseudo-engineering management "process" or a pseudo-scientific marketing or strategy approach.
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By contrast, when I like something native to management, it's because it doesn't pretend to be engineering and owns the softer, subtler, poetic aspects which are hard to cast into an engineering. I'll take a poetry spouting marketer over a lean-six-sigma ideologue any day
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While I have sympathy for a lot of engineering-adjacent types who are often mistreated or undervalued in engineering culture, the fact that they have to resort to rights advocacy rather than just fait-accompli doing what they want tells you where the agency lies.
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By contrast, asshole linchpin engineers can be so irreplaceable that they can be effectively dictatorial in their decisions and others have to adapt to them (good managers know how to tame them). A sign of how critical you are is how much you can get away with being an asshole.
Replying to
Which is not to say you should... When you look at indispensable-assholery in the non-engineering professions, invariably you'll find that they're the ones who ignore the pseudo-engineering stuff, have no engineering envy, and just get things done their own inimitable way.
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