Bases of Estimates

Some things are more apparent from a different perspective.

I open this blog with disclaimers, which are not necessarily gripping literature, but are needed to start a discussion. In engineering, I was taught to call disclaimers 'bases of estimates' as in the plural of basis. These are the known facts and assumptions needed to complete a given problem.

And that is my first basis, i.e. I am an engineer, and because of that, I look at things and people differently. I admire things that work, and want to fix things that don't. I don't know how to emphasize that enough. I am conservative - in that I want to know why something works before trying to fix it. I am suspicious of opinions and theories - even and especially my own - until lots of data is collected and key experiments conducted.

But I am not a scientist. I hope my fellow practitioners of both broad disciplines will forgive me when I generalize: Scientists seek complete understanding; Engineers have to make something work with current, incomplete knowledge - and make money while doing so.

So that leads to a second basis: I will use correlations and analogies when data is lacking. Engineers have spent a lot of time, trouble and effort collecting and correlating data for many and varied situations. These are presented in handbooks, papers, memos, and owner's manuals. In absence of directly applicable data or correlations, engineers go and find something that might fit and provide the needed insight - all the while being skeptical of the tool they are using.

Which leads to a third basis: I try to always examine the overall balances. Maybe the details aren't known, or an approximation is being used, or a correlation from another field is being tried - so the engineer will check for overall reasonableness. That is, calculations are made on the larger scale, often called order-of-magnitude, or maybe the engineer checks the goes-intos and the goes-outofs, or perhaps high school Newton physics are revisited, just to make sure that whatever logic was followed to do the details, the big picture still makes sense.

Which leads to a fourth basis, which is really the first basis stated another way: I seek to understand the underlying structure. I need to satisfy my engineering intuition. Perhaps that statement needs further explanation. There is a Dilbert animated short film that implies that engineers are born. Which is largely true from my experience. Engineers like things, understand things, and study things. "Things": mechanisms, equations, objects, doo-hickeys, contrivances, systems, software, etc., are understandable to engineers as well as fun and enjoyable. These "things" resonate with an engineers soul, align with their training, match their experience, and are simply beautiful. I seek such moments of insight - of resonance - of beauty...

On the other hand, we sometimes have trouble with people. And thus my blog...