When I was a kid, I would start pointing out things in the world I would do differently. I think this experience is universal; you may have been most clever and thought “Why don’t they make the whole plane out of the black box?” Some grown-up may have been nearby to pop your balloon: “That shit would be too heavy to fly” or “If you sat in the black box, you’d still be dead.” Comedians probably aren’t beating engineers to the punch, however clever the thought may be.
Even if your or my idea wasn’t met with resistance, it’s still pretty reasonable to think that you or I never had an original thought in this regard. The idea that a 10 year old is going to confront and solve an engineering problem 3 minutes after recognizing something strange in this world is pretty ludicrous to me. Whenever a kid says “They should” or “Why don’t they,” you and I should immediately realize that the kid’s idea was already thought of and ruled out. You and I, for that matter, probably haven’t cracked any grand fucking mystery, either. I am willing to accept that, for the vast majority of things, some professional has made it their life’s work to handle the design and execution. As pointed out on XKCD: We all hate some traffic lights, but odds are, it sucks for a reason explicitly designed/intended.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but even then, some kid inventor usually brings a cheesy labor saving device into this world, like a button wired to drop the toilet lid. Fuckin’ thanks, genius.
This represents a “baseline” philosophy of mine that greatly informs my thinking. I’ll still engage in the exercise of noticing something in the world (at 1am, they should put this traffic light on a trigger so’s I don’t have to wait at a red, I’m the only guy on this road!), or working up a rationale for some concept (what’s the point of a god judging life), but with the caveat that that road has been trod before, and that my own ignorance of the work already done on the subject disqualifies me from asserting my conclusion as some grand, previously un-accessed truth.
You’d think that engineers have already conquered something as seemingly uncomplicated as levees. I have questions that apparently haven’t been solved already, a thought that should make everyone uncomfortable. What should levees be made of? How do you test a levee? See, levees that have roads running through them, not over, have locks, the ones I have seen being made of some type of metal. Would it work to run that “lock metal” all the way along that levee, then encase it in earth? If that’s not how it’s already done, is it because of money?
Also, I am ignorant (thanks, media) about a few things: How many levees, raw number and as a percentage, didn’t fail? How many levees withstood loads equal to or greater than the load they were meant to take? How many levees failed under loads they weren’t rated to withstand? I’m too lazy to research this topic. As such, this topic sits in a part of my brain labeled “Shit I don’t know enough about to have a reasoned opinion on.”
