1/ Widespread attitude: "Good engineers should be seen, not heard." Quite a few clueless engineers seem to actually buy that line.
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2/ Engineers get suckered into shutting up by being flattered into "doing is better than talking" John-Henry prowess vanity.
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3/ Those who kindly agree to speak "for" engineers usually do so by claiming all the credit and assigning all the blame to engineers.
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4/ In some ways, a lot of tech backlash is against engineers presuming to speak up and breaking cozy blame game rules of 20th century
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5/ The ineffective response is to be kinda apologetic, like Samuel Florman.
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6/ Dumb response is to go noble-martyr first and then flip to righteous anger. Juvenile Ayn Rand response that many biz types fall prey to.
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7/ Effective response is to continue talking, but not in zero-sum discourse forms of politics or liberal arts. Talk like *engineers*
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8/ Which means inventing clever ideas, verbal building blocks etc. Treat words like just another engineering medium.
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9/ Engineers only fare poorly with words when they get suckered into rhetorical modes of others. Opponents know this.
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10/ They sucker engineers into using their verbal "game rules" (literary etc.) by *defining* engr forms as "bad style", "too abstract/aspie"
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