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Engineers love being right. This is not surprising because engineering concerns itself with using math and science to solve practical problems and reality really does not give two flying fucks about your opinions. Whether something works or not only depends on whether you got the math and physics right and on nothing else.
There is no placebo effect in engineering: Believing that something might work, does not make it work.
The importance of being right explains the average engineer’s love affair with factoids. We love factoids and start collecting them at an early age. Whenever I meet fellow hackers, I am always in awe about the random things they know; clearly the result of decades of factoid harvesting, starting in elementary school and sustained through decades of reading science magazines and watching science TV shows.
This tendency to collect factoids can make engineers very tiresome to talk to. It is often impossible to be in a conversation with a fellow engineer without it becoming a factoid shootout: Who knows the most factoids, the best factoids, and the most unlikely factoids. Whenever an engineer starts a sentence with “Well, actually, …” or “Well, technically, …”, you know you are going to be corrected with an arcane factoid.
Technically, no useful sentence ever contains the word “technically”.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about strategic communication and the general rule that whenever you communicate, you should have a goal in mind. Adding factoids to a conversation rarely helps you achieving your strategic goals. Therefore, one of the more effective communication tips I give engineers is to keep their mouths shut if the only reason for the communication is to be correct or to prove someone else incorrect. You might be right, but does it help move the conversation forward? After adding a factoid, is the other person more or less inclined to help you?
One problem with knowledge in general is that it frequently does not age very well.
I started my collection of factoids in elementary school, which by now is a godforsaken long time ago. One problem with this is that science and technology moves on; the truths of yesteryear are the myths of today. Especially if you hold on to a bag of factoids from something that is not your primary field, the factoids might have aged out and have been replaced by newer science. You are probably not aware of this, unless you are a really avid follower of the field. Personally, I find it very hard to keep up with the few fields that I do hold advanced degrees in and it is not surprising that some factoids I learned years ago about biology or geology (to name just two random fields of study that I know little about and do not follow closely) are no longer true. This is especially the case if I learned the factoid a long time ago from a not very authoritative source to begin with.
Like most engineers, I started collecting factoids in elementary school and the source of many of my factoids is some random remark by my teachers; lovely people, all of them.
Except my third grade teacher Mrs. Klaassen, who told my parents that I would never amount to anything. I think this is a terrible thing to say regardless, but especially about a socially inept eight year old boy whose parents had just divorced and who was attending his third elementary school in a year.
Lovely though most of them are, elementary school teachers are not necessarily experts in the fields that they talk about. However, compared to you at that tender age, they are towering intellectuals who seem to know everything there is to know about a wide range of subjects, including history, biology, topography, spelling, and math. It took me some time to figure out that this was not exactly true…
Years ago, my girlfriend (an elementary school teacher) and I embarked on a long-weekend to Oostende, a lovely sea-side resort in Belgium. As we were driving, she was talking to a colleague on the phone and eventually I heard my girlfriend say: “Oostende, ….. No, that’s in Belgium.” I was shocked! This was a person teaching kids basic topography! Surely, knowing that Oostende is in Belgium is not too much to ask from a Dutch elementary school teacher? I hope my third grade teacher knew this!?
Here is an example of elementary school knowledge gone wrong: The other day, Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom and I were walking down the street and the topic of conversation came to hearing your blood flow when you press a sea shell against your ear. Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom reacted surprised: “Is that what you hear?” “Yes!”, I replied with near-absolute certainty, clearly remembering my elementary school teacher telling me that. Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom knows that I can bullshit with confidence like few other people, so once back at home she looked it up.
Turned out to be false.
Or at least, mostly not true. Per ChatGPT: “What you’re hearing is ambient noise being filtered and amplified by a resonant cavity (the shell). The hollow shell acts like a little acoustic resonator: it emphasizes certain frequencies of the sound already around you (HVAC hum, traffic, room hiss), so you hear a broad “whoosh.” It then goes on to say that “In a very quiet room (or an anechoic chamber) the “ocean” sound drops way down, and you may notice internal sounds (blood flow, muscle movement) because the shell also blocks external noise and changes how you hear yourself via bone/air conduction.”
I stood corrected while I was almost certain that I was right. That’s me right there: Often in error, but rarely in doubt 🤣.
Technological knowledge also ages out and given the speed of developments in our field, our knowledge probably ages out faster than it does in other fields. I regularly run into people confidently stating things that used to be true, but that have since been overtaken by developments. The rapid progression of technology makes it so that you need to revisit what you think you know regularly.
Driven by my gradually improving insight into the lifespan of a factoid, I am trying to be less secure in my knowledge of things these days. That has two advantages: First, on the rare occasions that I happen to be wrong, the resulting facepalm won’t be as bad. Second, it will help me not come across as an insufferable knowitall. The advantages of that second aspect should not be underestimated. Even if you do sit on a treasure trove of mostly correct factoids, being open to the fact that you might be wrong makes you more likeable and is the better scientific attitude to boot.
The tough part of this for me is that “knowing things” is a crucial element of my self-esteem. I am not particularly handsome, I cannot dance worth crap, I can’t sing, I am not musically gifted at all, and I am a terrible athlete. For the most part my feeling of self-worth comes from knowing lots of things about lots of things. Accepting that I might not be the human version of Wikipedia means that my self-worth must be based in, uhh, merely existing?
If you are, like me, a certified brainiac who relishes in spouting endless factoids, I invite you to consider this: You might be wrong. Even if you are pretty certain that you are right. Even if you are almost certainly right. Considering that you might be wrong will make it more impressive if you are right and, as a bonus, will make you a nicer person to be around.
