Technology critic and journalist Marques Brownlee was once trying to use an analogy to review smartphones. made Here are some thoughts on the Porsche 911:
Have you ever heard a car critic describe the latest generation Porsche 911? It’s a car that has looked pretty much the same for the past 50 years, with slight evolutions with each generation. And literally every time I see or read a review, they always say: This is a masterpiece of engineering perfected over generations. This is a formula that has been developed in the same direction over the years. ”
This, in a nutshell, describes what certain aspiring social engineers are aiming for. The main proponent of this approach to social engineering was Karl Popper. in his book poverty of historicismPopper proposed what he called “fragmentary social engineering.” In contrast to utopian social engineering, which aims to redesign society according to grand blueprints and five-year plans, piecemeal social engineering seeks to make small adjustments, learn from the results, and use that information to The focus was on using it to make new adjustments. As this process is repeated, small improvements and refinements to social institutions accumulate, improving the conditions of a particular society. Mr. Popper said:
This is the characteristic approach of fragment engineers. Perhaps he cherishes some ideals that concern the welfare of the “whole” of society, that is, society as a whole, but he does not believe in how to redesign society as a whole. Whatever his objectives, he tries to achieve them by small adjustments and readjustments that can be continuously improved…The fragmentary engineer, like Socrates, knows how much he knows . God knows we can only learn from our mistakes. Therefore, he will move forward step by step, carefully comparing the expected and achieved results and always being aware of the inevitable undesirable consequences of reforms. And he will avoid embarking on reforms of such complexity and scope as to make it impossible to disentangle cause and effect or know what he is actually doing.
But how optimistic should we be about this fragmented engineering outlook? There is widespread agreement that America’s health care system is deeply flawed. But this came about as a result of the piecemeal engineering that Popper describes. in their books We’ve got you covered: Restarting America’s Healthcare, Amy Finkelstein and Rylan Einav explain how exactly this kind of piecemeal engineering resulted in existing systems. Over and over again, some problem is recognized, a policy is put in place to deal with it, the policy itself has problems, leads to new reforms, and new problems to be addressed by new policies are created along with the new reforms. I did. And the end result of this process is not a Porsche-style “engineering masterpiece perfected over generations.” The result is that people who don’t understand home repair at all take on DIY projects, keep fumbling their way through readjustments and rebuilds, and end up with huge, messy results that are both overly complex and overly fragile. It’s similar to producing. (The above description may be based on my own attempts at home DIY projects. I neither confirm nor deny such speculation.)
Finkelstein and Einav therefore argue that further piecemeal engineering is not the way forward and that the entire system needs to be rebooted. Their proposal ultimately unconvincingthey are correct in explaining how the current system arose as a result of the kind of piecemeal engineering advocated by Popper.
But it’s clear that small improvements and piecemeal engineering can work in some situations, such as the Porsche 911 or the Apollo space program. So what makes the difference? Here are some points that come to mind.
First, there is the question of whether social engineers can have adequate knowledge of social issues in the same way that automotive engineers understand car design. Popper’s view builds on the idea that social engineers can design reforms in a way that avoids “the complexity and scope that makes it impossible to disentangle cause and effect and know what you’re really doing.” dependent. That social engineers can do this is in itself a pretty heroic assumption, and one that I believe Jeffrey Friedman shattered in his book. power without knowledge.
The second is the type of learning environment. in discussion David Epstein spoke with Russ Roberts on EconTalk about the difference between “friendly” and “evil” learning environments. In a hospitable learning environment, there are clear and reliable methods of feedback that provide useful information, and methods that have worked well in the past will continue to work in the future. In a poor learning environment, feedback may be absent or pointing in the wrong direction, and lessons and outcomes will not be repeated over time. as epstein explained These days, “a hospitable learning environment can be thought of as a situation governed by stable rules and repetitive patterns, where feedback is rapid and accurate, and next year’s work is similar to last year’s work. In a poor learning environment, the rules may change if they exist at all; the patterns may not just be repetitive; any feedback may be absent, delayed, or inaccurate. There may be some kind of complex human dynamics involved, and next year’s work may not look like last year’s work.”
Importantly, a “friendly” learning environment does not necessarily mean that certain tasks are simple or easy. Automotive engineering can be very complex, but it still takes place in a friendly learning environment. A manned mission to Mars will similarly be a very difficult feat, but it will still take place in a conducive learning environment. Learning about the human body and treating disease is complex but relatively benign. But social engineering of the entire health care system of an entire civilization, whether large-scale or partial, will take place in a very poor learning environment.
Finally, even in a hospitable environment, accurate feedback alone won’t do you any good. The recipient of that feedback has no incentive to respond in a productive way. In the market, price signals provide feedback and provide incentives. Even if you don’t understand anything why If market prices are sending a certain signal, that’s fine. You don’t need to understand why, as long as you just react.
Therefore, piecemeal engineering occurs in a contained, comprehensible context, within a hospitable learning environment, in a context where engineers have both accurate feedback and an incentive to respond to that feedback in socially beneficial ways. It seems like it could work. However, when thinking about social policy in terms of engineering, this combination of factors seems far from the norm.
