Engineer's fallacy
aka:: Engineer's syndrome
Aspects
- Law of the Instrument (Hammer) - bias and over-reliance on technological solutions as the best kind of solutions, or over-confidence in technological solutions as opposed to other kinds of solutions like social, human, process, physical, etc. Plus tendency to disregard the general role and importance of human, social, emotional, or practical aspects.
- Mathematician's bias toward elegance and simplicity vs data or explanation pointing to a complex conclusion (still controlling for Occam's Razor) - thus oversimplification
- Bias toward analytical perspectives and solutions
- Salem Hypothesis
- Premature Optimization, Bike-shedding (Law of triviality), and Perfectionism
- Software development is better understood as applied mathematics as opposed to anything else. It is more in the realm of mathematics than technology even since technology is so grounded in practicality and pragmatics and actual manifestations as opposed to the professional software developer who usually spends the vast majority of time in a code editor, a zoom call, a slack chat, or a meeting. Same for science - science, is a second-class citizen to modern-day professional software development.
- Overconfidence and expertise overreach
- Overconfidence effect
- past success justifies all future success unmoored from any justification.
- Fallacy of misplaced expertise
- Dunning–Kruger Effect and thus a form of Anti-intellectualism by dismissing the experts from these fields.
- Overconfidence effect
- Zeitgeist of technology taking over the world creates all this energy focused on it and creating this cringey semi-fascist tech bro libertarian monstrosity.
- Einstellung effect
Mitigations
- epistemic humility, intellectual humility
- Principle of Charity, Know that you don't know some things and never will be able to know or for it to ever make sense to you. People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do. There are unknown unknowns. empathy
- Diversity, get out of the bubble, talk to non-technical people
- Kaizen, the real world
- test hypothesis, measurement while being aware of Goodhart's Law, lean on iteration
- Counter mathematical bias for simplicity and elegance by cultivating continual appreciation for the profound complexity and vastness of humanity, society, and cultural dynamics.
Inbox
- Night Owl Fallacy: Believing that working long hours or through the night consistently leads to better results, ignoring the importance of rest and work-life balance
- Loudest Voice" Fallacy: Allowing the most technically articulate team member to dominate decision-making, potentially leading to suboptimal outcomes for the broader group
- Visualization Fallacy: Believing that creating dashboards or visual representations of problems automatically solves them
Engineer's fallacy
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Engineer's fallacy
Aspects
Mitigations
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