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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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Glenn Reynolds
Said the engineer to the engineers.
Well, Glenn Reynolds is a law professor.
Fair enough, heh. But I wouldn't want to idealize the epistemic purity of engineering. Amusingly in this context, often engineering decisions are based more on precedent than science (has somebody else done things this way?), and it sometimes happens that there is a "bottom line" for which evidence is post hoc deduced (e.g., by relaxing the stringency of assumptions in a model in order to get the "right" answer).
Granted, such rationalizations usually affect risks only at the margin, but still...
I guess the bottom line is that engineering is not just science but also aesthetics, economics, and group coordination. To the extent that those things involve cognitive biases et cetera, engineering does too.
I disagree. Unless we are talking about sofware engineering then it seems to me that what you select is based on previous projects but the choices themselves are based on tested scientific models with predictive power.
To clarify; the use of precedent in engineering is not objectionable (on the contrary, it is quite sensible); it merely runs counter to this popular idea that engineers are forever deciding everything via Science.
You seem to be saying that any engineering precedent must ultimately be based on a scientific model somebody used in the past. Well, maybe... if you're willing to call "we tried it this way and it seemed to work" a scientific model, then okay.
Every subsequent use of an engineering technique could be seen as a scientific experiment testing the validity of an abstract principle. It's just that by the time a principle gets to the engineering phase these experiments are no longer interesting - or they had better not be, anyway. (It would be very interesting if a bridge failed because the gravitational constant over that particular span of river were higher than in the rest of the known universe, for instance.)
Science explores the phenomenon and develops the principle. Engineering exploits the principle and provides a degree of diverse and rigorous demonstration of it. Edited to add: This process does not always occur in this order.
Precedent is evidence that "doing things this way" works. This is generally a better basis then new, and hence speculative, science. Especially when the price of getting it wrong is frequently high.
As I was saying to Remontoire, I wholly agree. But (a) precendent is not "Science", unless you want to be very semantically generous, and (b) precedent is one primary method by which the law does its "rationalization", which the OP was attacking.
(You put the closing quotation mark one word too early.)