TIL there was a briefly popular social movement in the early 1930s called the "Technocracy Movement." Technocrats proposed replacing politicians and businessmen with scientists and engineers who ha...
TIL there was a briefly popular social movement in the early 1930s called the "Technocracy Movement." Technocrats proposed replacing politicians and businessmen with scientists and engineers who ha...
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I read about this before. I do believe there is some merit in it. I work for a company that has traditionally moved engineers into management and I can say it has worked very well. That said, a government is not a corporation and there are human aspects that may be overlooked by some engineers. Or that would at least be some people’s concern.
The worst bosses I've ever had were highly technical people put into those roles because they were perceived to be the best with those skills. There was repeatedly little-to-no regard for their soft skills and working for those people was miserable.
I’m sorry to hear that. The way we have managed it has worked but some of that could be that the engineers that were promoted have always or mostly been able to empathize.
Old Boeing (vs New Boeing).
The thing about technocracy is that there need to be human concerns and philosophies driving whatever scientifically-driven policy-making it's being done.
Do it wrong and that's how we end up with eugenics. It's incredibly easy to justify horrible stuff using metrics, the essential questions that cannot be overlooked is what metrics ought to be valued and why, and science is not the right method to make the ultimate judgement of what the values of a society ought to be.
Absolutely! The human aspect needs to always be weighed side by side with actual “metrics”.