> I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?"
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.