(I originally published this on Facebook on January 24, 2017, in an attempt to explain why a techie such as myself would concern themselves with politics and be worried about the state of the world. It got a lot of reposting, and so I thought it should be part of what is in this blog site.)
This might surprise folks because I’ve been posting about political crap for a while, but I really hate politics. If you take a step back, you will understand why. I’m a tech, very specifically an engineer, and if you know many techs, real techs, you will realize that most of them f***ing hate politics.
We techs are problem solvers. We like to frame a problem, get facts about it, study different solutions, and manage the tradeoffs. We may weight things differently from each other, may have a different understanding of the data, the problem, etc. and so we disagree, long and often (imagine a Kirk vs. Picard debate, but about something real). If you ever were in a meeting with me and my two closest colleagues, it would seem like a colorized Three Stooges movie. We argue, we don’t agree, we have different things we can do, but through all of that, we don’t make s**t up. We don’t dispute observable facts. We are all trying to solve problems, to make things work, to make something better. And you know what, at the end of an hour, we have a better path to the solution, and we all know that.
It is how most techs are wired. The purists become mathematicians. They want fundamental truths that can be applied anywhere. Slightly less pure are those scientists who do math to help them understand the universe. And even less pure are the engineers, who do math to do something about it. (Yeah, some of that stuff from “The Big Bang Theory” actually happens.) And it’s hard work. The engineers were the ones who barely got out during the week in college. They are the ones who still grind on things at work, only to come home and be tech support for the family’s IT needs.
But in the end, truth and knowledge win out. If you know something deeper, can make something better, can write code in a more effective way, have an algorithm that produces a better result: we all go with that. It’s how we are wired. They say that A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Well, techs like to be around folks who can give them better insight. Nobody likes to be wrong, but it’s better that someone show you the math error early than to have your Mars probe obliterated due to an “English units to metric units” bit of confusion. (Yes, that happened.) We establish facts, talk about the constraints, plot the feasible solutions with their tradeoffs, and then argue from our own perspective which of the feasible solutions is best. (Then we then have to deal with the marketing folks who insist that we need “7 red lines, all perpendicular” .) When techs work on big problems, we get better answers. It may not be cheap — but it’s probably cheaper than the cost of not solving the problem. It may not be perfect (probably isn’t) but on balance it’s better than what it replaced. Engineers also have this very strong sense of crap working, and so we are reluctant to abandon what’s worked before until we know we can do it better.
Politics is the opposite of that. Let’s face it, the folks running for office had a lot more time (and a lot more fun) in college than we did. Facts don’t seem to be as important, or as concrete. Politicians use the most rosy projections for their own plans and the worst projections for those of their opponents. Folks from different part of the spectrum don’t sit down, agree on some fundamental facts, hammer out the constraints, and then argue about which feasible solution is best from their perspective. Instead we get folks who ignore data, ignore basic math, ignore history, ignore what’s been tried before, and talk in broad, unsubstantiated statements about deeply difficult problems that they claim they can solve with trivially simple means.
People get vitriolic, too, about not needing to pay attention to “your facts”, about how the source is biased because they don’t like that source (rather than checking how often that source actually is factual). It is annoying and frustrating. Quite honestly, I was really, really hoping to not have to deal with much in the way of politics for a while. I was hoping that we would have a smart, experienced, capable, and boring President, a rational Congress, and a judiciary not packed with know nothing ideologues. Just make things a bit better, don’t be crazy, invest in our country, be rational about big issues, and I can go back to making s**t work.
Instead, we have a Tea Party Congress that doesn’t believe any science because it says stuff they don’t want to believe (climate change exists, pollution is bad, trickle down doesn’t work) and a scam artist as President who is more obsessed with the crowd size at his events than doing the job he was elected to do. We get his folks clamping down on knowledge and science, muzzling the agencies there to protect the people, saying stuff that contradicts itself (“I am the champion of the working man” and “workers are paid too much”). You get all this crazy crap being pushed as legitimate points of view. (“Your ‘facts’ are your point of view!” “Science doesn’t have all the answers!”) Knowing what you are talking about is viewed as “elitist”. Well, excuse me, but when I go to the doctor, I want some elitist who knows what the hell they are doing, and when I get on an airplane, I want an elitist pilot who knows how to fly the damn plane.
It is nauseating that we have to keep talking about this obviously false crap. When representatives of the President say that they don’t have to agree with the facts, or that they are presenting “alternative facts”, you wonder if they have any mirrors at home, or if instead they have a portrait in the attic that gets ever more hideous. When you are against the facts, you are either wrong or you are lying. (Wrong means you don’t know, lying means you do but you don’t care.)
I really hate it. It’s just that I hate bullshit more. I hate folks screwing things up and justifying it with alternative facts. James Carville might seem like the body double for Voldmort (or the physical inspiration), but his writing is a populist defense of the middle class and what government’s role is in helping everyday citizens. He made the analogy in one of his books that if you got a cold, you might take aspirin, and it might make you feel better, but it wouldn’t make the cold go away. To listen to the extreme positions on the right — and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are great examples of this — to listen to those folks, you would think the aspirin gave you the cold. So, while Democrats are saying the aspirin helps and maybe we can find something better — say ibuprofen — Republicans are running around saying that not only did the aspirin give you the cold, but the regulations that keep folks from selling you Strychnine pills as medicine are what is keeping you from getting healthy. (To be sure Strychnine would end the cold.)
So, I post a lot of political stuff. The most factual stuff I can find (good newspapers, actual videos of people saying crap, pictures that show comparisons) and then funny stuff (because the comedians are doing a better job at pointing out how ridiculous this crap is than the news does, and cause I need to laugh some). Because facts matter, history matters, solving problems matter, science is real — even if it tells me that chocolate pecan pie is not good for me. Non-factual stuff on the left doesn’t get off easy, but let’s face it, the crazy left was only about 20% of the non-fact universe in the previous few years. They haven’t shrunk, but the non-fact right has exploded with Trump.
I’m gonna keep posting news articles, comedy stuff, keep calling bullshit where I see it. I get it if that offends some of you. You can unfollow me (we’ll still be friends, but you won’t see the stuff I post in your news feed), or you can tell me and I can put you on a list that doesn’t see most of my posts (just the football stuff and dog pictures), or you can defriend me. My promise is that I will try to back up what I say and argue rationally with stuff based on facts. As long as you can discuss stuff rationally and actually back up what you say with some facts, your discussions on my wall are welcome. If you choose to go all irrational, well that’s what that other list of friends is for. If you get insulting because you can’t come up with factual data to support your claims that I’m full of crap, well, that’s when we usually will have a Spock-McCoy type moment.
I also promise try to post stuff that is more in depth. I grew up in a deep red state (Alabama) and went to college in another deep red state (South Carolina) and still call friends many people who strongly disagree with me. Ironically, many of these people will be hurt more by Ryan/McConnell/Trump policies than I will. You would think that would make me care less, but nah — I hate seeing my friends get screwed and I hate seeing them get conned. As Bill Clinton said, “They’re my people, and they are getting played.” I think there are some fundamental things that people feel, but can’t figure out how to get a handle on. I work in automation. I teach machines how to do stuff that people do, and I can tell you that there is plenty of work to be done in the world of robots and self-driving cars, and life will be better. We just have to adjust in the same way that folks who made a fine living off of making buggy whips or owning stables had to adjust to the car. We should talk about stuff like that.
But just know this: I hate this political crap. Like most techs, I like solving problems and getting on with my life. It’s just that these days, being silent to this BS, turning a blind eye, is complicity. And as one of my “a lot smarter than me” friends said, “These days, rational thought may be the most fundamental act of defiance.” The resistance, our prosperity, and maybe our very survival, requires that we be honest with each other, learn as much as we can, and really, really think.