Pragmatism on George's Blog

Abundance

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:45 -0500

When it comes to politics I’ve never connected with the vision of a single group. When I do find myself leaning towards a party, it is typically only because I am leaning away from its opposite. Part of this is because as humans we are much better at knowing what we don’t want. Yet I would like to think that the other reason is that I try to value substance over partisanship.

The Things We Make

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:43 -0500

Summary

We are all familiar with the scientific method: observe, theorize, experiment, and repeat. This algorithm is humanity’s most effective tool for understanding the universe. However, Bill Hammack introduces readers to what he calls the “engineering method.” While it’s commonly believed that scientists create knowledge and engineers apply it, Hammack argues that this perspective greatly underestimates the engineer’s role in discovery. He asserts that engineers must be the ultimate pragmatists, unable to wait for perfect knowledge. Instead, they often operate by “rules of thumb” that push the boundaries of what is known. Hammack illustrates this through various examples, from the thickness of cathedral supports to the invention of the O-ring. Unlike scientists, engineers are constrained by cultural contexts, limited resources, and, most critically, the need to deliver solutions within time constraints. A compelling example is the ‘100-year wind’ concept, where engineers must design structures, such as skyscrapers, to withstand rare but severe events predicted to occur within the next century. The challenge is that we often lack a century’s worth of wind data for an area, forcing engineers to rely on modern “rules of thumb,” involving complex, yet pragmatic, statistical predictions based on limited or incomplete data. The crux of Hammack’s argument is that while a mathematician might balk at the imprecision of these methods, engineers must proceed not in a world of perfect knowledge, but in one driven by experiential understanding. Often, the only way to answer a question is to build the answer.

Benjamin Franklin

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:23 -0500

“Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us…”

When we think of Benjamin Franklin today, we picture a Santa Claus character with a touch of mania. We see him flying a kite in a thunderstorm, or perhaps we see him behind a desk penning some of Poor Richard’s famous one-liners like “a cat in gloves catches no mice”. Franklin was indeed often conducting unique experiments, and his witty sayings were legendary, but Isaacson wants to show us the Franklin that has been forgotten. He was the only founding father to have signed and helped create four of the major documents of the American Revolution. His ability to strike a balance between idealism and realism along with his aversion to extremism made him the exact character required to stitch together thirteen disparate colonies into a single country.