The Engineer’s Frame
To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
-Unknown
Engineers oversimplify the world. Engineers overcomplicate things. Engineers don’t understand people. These can all be true, but they’re fundamentally misunderstanding how engineers perceive the world. Engineers perceive the world through a behavioral lens.
If you’re a biologist, you understand the insane complexity of a tree. Turning air and sunlight into sugar, which trees break down and uses as food. Just the complexity of multicellular organisms or single cells is mind-blowing. We still don’t fully understand every aspect of cells. Even understanding how a cellular membrane will act in 100% of circumstances is currently impossible. You can’t model behavior you don’t understand. At least, from the ground up.
The genius of the engineer’s frame is that they only need to understand the outward behavior of a tree. Trees start as seeds, then they grow when you water them. Their leaves turn color in Fall and wither in Winter. The leaves grow back in Spring and Summer. There are countless chemical reactions and intense processes happening in the background, but the outward behavior we observe is simple, elegant.
If you’re a game designer or engineer, you only need to understand the behavior of the tree. Understand how trees generally react to being watered, how tree leaves look on the outside when the sun shines on them. The sound and visualization of a tree leaf falling. The look and sound of a dead leaf crumbling in your hand. You can construct an artificial tree that from the outside has all the signs of being a tree. People who don’t understand engineering will think engineers created a perfect replica of a tree. In reality, the generated tree is an empty shell.
Engineers understand things by their outward appearances. They grasp the features of products and how they interact with the outside world. They can quickly understand objects and how they work. They appreciate efficiencies. It’s why Larry Page loved how Google janitors put extra trash bags at the bottom of trash bins. Janitors saved time getting new trash bags instantly. This enthralls the engineer mindset.
Engineering is entirely outcome dependent. You do X to get Y. There’s more to life than this, but it’s an efficient, utilitarian way to look at the world.
Understanding the engineer frame helps one understand the future. Virtual worlds are much easier to create than physical worlds. If you know the behaviors, you don’t have to rebuild nature, you can simply mimic behaviors. The same way it’s easier for non-venomous snakes to evolve to look venomous vs evolve to become venomous themselves.
Technological advancements are mimicry at their core. GPT-3 and other general purpose AI is mimicking humans. The AI isn’t cognizant of what it’s doing the same way the elevator doesn’t know what it means to be on the 12th floor. The elevator may even say “12th floor”, but it doesn’t understand how high up it is nor how fast it got there nor how its passengers feel. The elevator doesn’t have to. The elevator doesn’t need knowledge representation. The elevator simply needs to go to the 12th floor and tell you.
The world becomes simplified when you realize you only have to mimic expectations to get there. This is a powerful frame for breaking down and building worlds.