this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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It's the pinnacle of MBA evolution.
In their worldview engineers are a material, and all that matters in the world is knowing how to do business. So it just makes sense that one can guide and use and direct engineers to replace themselves.
They don't think of fundamentals, they really believe it's some magic that happens all by itself, you just have to direct energy and something will come out of it.
Lysenko vibes.
This wouldn't happen were not the C-suite mostly comprised of bean counters. They really think they are to engineers what officers are to soldiers. The issue is - an officer must perfectly know everything a soldier knows and their own specialty, and also bears responsibility. Bean counters in general less education, experience and intelligence than engineers they direct, and also avoid responsibility all the time.
So, putting themselves as some superior caste, they really think they can "direct progress" to replace everyone else the way factories with machines replaced artisans.
It's literally a whole layer of people who know how to get power, but not how to create it, and imagine weird magical stuff about things they don't know.
I am a black box
Yeah, that's what I mean. Black boxes are a concept to accelerate development, but we can't blackbox ourselves through civilization. They are also mostly useful for horizontal, not vertical relationships, which people misunderstand all the time (leaky abstractions).
This actually should make us optimistic. If hierarchical blackboxing were efficient, it would be certain that state of human societies will become more and more fascist and hierarchical over time, while not slowing down in development. But it's not.