Engineering


I have a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering, so I guess I am qualified to talk about this.


When discussing politics, don't ignore engineering!

I've noticed that, quite often, when discussing politics, people are proposing solutions that would be huge engineering challenges to implement. I think that's not a right thing to do, I think that political proposals should be possible to implement here and now, rather than in some distant future. My fellow libertarians are not immune to this fallacy either. I will illustrate what I mean by some examples:
  1. People proposing powering the national grid with renewable energy sources.
    Sorry, that's a huge engineering problem for two reasons:
    1. Unlike the traditional energy sources where we can control exactly how much power we are producing, renewable energy sources don't allow us to do that. How much energy wind turbine produces depends a lot on how fast the wind is blowing. If the wind slows down two times, the energy the wind turbine produce decreases 8 times, because the wind energy is proportional to the cube of the speed. Similarly, solar panels don't produce energy during the night, right when we need the energy the most. We would need to store electricity, and that's a huge engineering challenge.
    2. Solar energy is very different from the forms of energy we are used to, because it generates direct current (rather than alternating current, as traditional sources of energy do) and it generates constant current rather than constant voltage. Connecting solar panels to a national grid is an electrical and electronic engineering nightmare.
    In spite of all of this, people still tend to think the barriers to powering our national grid with renewable sources are mostly political in nature. I see no reason to think that's the case.
  2. Anarchists are often implying the Internet could work in an anarchy.
    Internet as we know it couldn't work without government regulation, and there are many reasons for that. For example, without government regulation, many ISPs would probably set up their DNS servers improperly, to respond to requests from all IP addresses rather than just to the IP addresses they are supposed to serve. And, since DNS servers often respond with huge responses to short queries, that would make it trivial to implement large-scale denial-of-service attacks which would paralyze the Internet. Perhaps you could somehow pass a law that bans unencrypted DNS and requires everybody to use DNS-over-HTTPS, but how exactly would you enforce that law? Set up deep-packet-inspection middle-boxes everywhere which would filter unencrypted DNS? Wouldn't that slow down the Internet a lot? Besides, how do you make all the devices connected to the Internet compatible with DNS-over-HTTPS? And so on... And in case you think that is a self-solving problem because the Internet will, over time, naturally switch to using DNS-over-HTTPS, well, I think the Internet of the near future will be even more vulnerable to such attacks than the Internet of today is. If the current trends continue, there will be a widespread adoption of HTTP 3 and other QUIC-based protocols. And, since QUIC is based on UDP rather than TCP, there are no TCP handshakes inherent in it to prevent IP spoofing attacks. QUIC does have its own ways of preventing IP spoofing attacks, but those take extra processing power. In an anarchy, what will force the Internet hosting providers (Hostinger...) that, if they support HTTP 3, they implement it properly? An improperly set up HTTP 3 server (that doesn't properly verify whether the handshake has been done correctly or that doesn't check whether the session of some request has expired before responding to it) can be used to implement a DNS-reflection-like attack on steroids. I say "on steroids" because HTTP 3, unlike DNS, has no limit as to how many UDP packets a response might contain. Internet in an anarchy, if possible at all, would be a huge engineering challenge.
  3. People proposing that cows should be grass-fed.
    Well, there is a problem with that proposal: Grass-fed cows emit around three times as much methane per a litre of milk than grain-fed cows (UPDATE: OK, maybe that statistic isn't accurate. I've written about it elsewhere on my blog. Still, I don't think anybody serious doubts that grass-fed cows emit more methane per a litre of milk than grain-fed cows.). Now, some people are aware of that problem, and they respond with something like: "Well, there are bacteria in kangaroos that digest cellulose but emit a few times less methane than the bacteria in the cows that do that. Perhaps we could somehow genetically modify the bacteria in the cows to do the same thing.". Do I even need to point out the problems with that? Like, do you have a solution that works now, or do you have a solution that might work centuries into the future?
  4. People saying that lab-grown animal products will soon solve the problem of superbacteria.
    I am sorry to burst your bubble, but they won't. Most of the antibiotics these days is being used in the egg industry (UPDATE: I've seen some people say that the statistics suggesting most antibiotics are being used in the egg industry are inaccurate, and that most antibiotics are being used for cows and pigs. I am quite sure that's false as 45% of antibiotics used in agriculture are ionophores, that is, antibiotics which are effective in birds but not in mammals. I think that therefore any estimate that puts the proportion of antibiotics used in the egg industry to be below 50% is not credible.), and we won't have lab-grown eggs any time soon. We struggle to produce muscle meat in a lab, and eggs are far more complicated than muscles. Government regulation of the egg industry is a far more realistic solution to the problem of superbacteria than lab-grown animal products.
  5. Right-wingers proposing "backdoors to electronic devices only the government can access" to fight terrorism.
    Sorry, that's just not how computers work. Backdoors in electronic devices will make it significantly easier for hackers to read our data, and therefore very likely make us significantly less safe. Besides, what about other countries, whose government cannot really be trusted to use the information to serve the public good?
Overall, I think the simplest explanation for most of the people using such arguments is ignorance. For the fourth example, I suppose most of the people who say that honestly believe that a significant percentage of antibiotics goes to cows and pigs, and that lab-grown meat will soon solve that problem. For the second example, I suppose that many people indeed don't understand how the Internet works well enough to understand why it needs a government. Though, for the first example and the third example, this is hardly explicable by simple ignorance. I don't think one can be so ignorant as to think that powering our electrical grid with renewables is not an engineering challenge, or to think that genetically modifying the bacteria in cows to emit less methane would be easy. I think that some people are utopian when discussing politics and are dismissing engineering problems.

UPDATE on 08/06/2025: A question I sometimes ask myself is how it is that it's mostly the people on the left on the political spectrum who make this mistake? Hardly any conservative would suppose powering our national grid with renewables, it's the liberals who tend to say stuff like that. Hardly any conservative would suppose tackling the problem of superbacteria with lab-grown animal products, it's the liberals and libertarians who tend to say stuff like that. The only example of this fallacy which is associated with the right is supposing "encryption only government can break": right-wingers are more likely to say that than left-wingers. So, why is that? Considering that engineers tend to be left-wing (liberal or libertarian), rather than right-wing (conservative), that is kind of unexpected.
I think it's partly because a moderate education about the world's problems can be worse than none: Engineers tend to be moderately educated about the world's problems outside of their realm of study, rather than highly educated.