this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

someone’s self awareness of the limitations of their own knowledge and willingness to defer to experts.

This is a cornerstone of ethics in engineering and many other discipline that I feel is being shouted down daily by a crowd that clearly never took a philosophy or ethics class. Even among engineers it seems to be an increasingly unpopular attitude. It seems to have become popular to praise the braggart and shun the ethical self aware.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

In my ethics in engineering class, we spent a lot of time talking about things like the Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapsing. The takeaway for me was "Depending on what you are doing, people might die if you are too confidently doing things the wrong way."

Most people, even a lot of engineers, don't have lives on the line in their day to day. Things means that most people don't have the "What if I am wrong about this and people die?" part of their brain firing 24/7. For most people, the "consequences of getting things wrong" means either a lecture from their boss, or literally nothing. When people never have to face consequences for being wrong, they feel very empowered to be wrong.