The Technical Irrational

I stopped believing in magic a little over a decade ago. The belief only persisted as part of a survival strategy; when I was no longer financially dependent on religious people, I no longer needed to entertain their delusions, and eventually I was able to let go of my own delusions. I say this to indicate that I'm fairly biased due to a personal rejection of spirituality and magic. First, here's two quotes from two different sections, for contrast:

[W]hen the intuitive and magical spirit of human communities is erased from the Technical lexicon, we can imagine that a modern society must be the product of an ordered, materialist worldview. … An engineer who wants to build a better world must be aware of the stories, memes, and cultural assumptions baked into their project.

Yeah, but the rationalists still believe in sky-father gods and magic, just with different names. Like the author says, they still carry those memes, tropes, and narremes about how society ought to be structured, including how infrastructure should be shaped and how technology should be explained. They aren't orderly materialists; I don't think I can name a single popular rationalist who actually understands physics, but I can name several who have been epistemically mugged by Roko's basilisk. For contrapositive contrast, sociology is a fairly hard science which does lots of numerical analysis, and the same maths which analyze social networks can analyze computer networks too.

Nothing Dr. Hicks said is wrong, but it's worth noting that they never actually define being technical. I think that this is because they don't directly recognize it; further, I think that the culture of psychology deliberately minimizes it. Previously, on Mastodon, I used the following words:

To be technical is to pay attention to details. That's all. A (classical) computer is a detail machine; it only operates upon bits, it only knows bits, and it only decides bits. To be technical is to try to keep pace with the computer and know details as precisely as it does.

We are a pedantic and shallow culture because we operate upon pedantic and shallow machines. This is anathema to psychology, which idealizes the human experience in terms of a holistic qualia-laden mind which cannot be captured or described with mere words and which fundamentally defies physics. Hicks and the author imagine that there is a divide between technical and non-technical people, but I would instead suggest that there is a divide between people who pretend to be technical and people who give up on being technical:

Framed this way, it should be obvious that humans aren't technical and can't really be technical. This fundamental insecurity is the heart of priestly gatekeeping of computer science.

Reflecting on all this, I want to respond to what the author says about the dearth of emotions in technical conversations:

I don’t believe that Technical workers are incapable of empathy or unwilling to contemplate their emotions. They are still human, and if pressed will make an effort to support each other. Rather, the culture does not provide a language capable of addressing the emotional problems its members face.

Facts and feelings can coexist, but we should divorce feelings about facts from fact-finding. The state of a classical computer is a brute fact, as are any diagnostic observations we make. In SRE, we explicitly value the blameless postmortem analysis which explains what happened and who was involved without judging people. We empirically know that blameless culture scales better than an emotion-driven culture; in particular, we know that a culture of heroism and individualism leads to burnout.

I don't have anything nice to say about Dr. Puca's position. They brings no references or even any further reading in her field about the topic. Their slides read and look like they were generated by ChatGPT. They don't even hang a lampshade when they name-drop the Forer effect; do they know what the chatbot is prompting them to say, or is this a Ron Burgundy moment? Instead, consider Carroll 2021, which directly tackles the question of whether science can detect magic, miracles, etc.

I don’t quite understand the argumentative merit of magic here (as being positioned as opposite to logic & science, and paired with “spirit”). However, for those intrigued by those relationships, I will share that I coincidentally bumped into a potentially related book just yesterday, John G. Taylor’s Science and the Supernatural.

(Personally, rather than the “magic” route, I would probably reach for discussions of science versus humanities, for example criticisms, responses, and alternatives to C.P. Snow’s ideas in The Two Cultures. Also perhaps the effects of specialization on work forces and culture.)