Bridge engineer is a very specific kind of structural engineer and nobody who is licensed to be a bridge engineer is going to risk their license tothrow in their .02
Has “Dear Ashley” not been online during the start and height of the Covid-19 pandemic? It’s not an entirely new concept.
On the other hand, just because you got a title to your name doesn’t make you intelligent or apt to discuss a topic. I have seen many PhD students in my time as one, who shouldn’t have received a PhD in the end as they really weren’t very good at what they were doing. E.g. manual counting of things in images and using the only statistical test that gives you significance, those sort of things in Life Sciences…
💯% the title ought to be immaterial or at most a loose guide to credibility. We examine the measurements and observations and propose a hypothesis that doesn’t need to violate the laws of physics to explain what we saw. Anybody can do that but scientists and engineers are the obvious choice. Everyone else go look up the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It’s hard because… you don’t want to dismiss legitimate concerns from uneducated populations. But then there’s a flip side to that where… do you have to hear them out if they’re too far wrong. Maybe it’s less about education and more about someone’s self awareness of the limitations of their own knowledge and willingness to defer to experts. I don’t think you have to be educated to be self aware and curious, and also express things and be heard.
someone’s self awareness of the limitations of their own knowledge and willingness to defer to experts.
This is a cornerstone of ethics in engineering and many other discipline that I feel is being shouted down daily by a crowd that clearly never took a philosophy or ethics class. Even among engineers it seems to be an increasingly unpopular attitude. It seems to have become popular to praise the braggart and shun the ethical self aware.
In my ethics in engineering class, we spent a lot of time talking about things like the Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapsing. The takeaway for me was “Depending on what you are doing, people might die if you are too confidently doing things the wrong way.”
Most people, even a lot of engineers, don’t have lives on the line in their day to day. Things means that most people don’t have the “What if I am wrong about this and people die?” part of their brain firing 24/7. For most people, the “consequences of getting things wrong” means either a lecture from their boss, or literally nothing. When people never have to face consequences for being wrong, they feel very empowered to be wrong.
this isn’t necessarily true. people who have more knowledge or reasoning generally have higher confidence in their abilities than those with less, although people with less knowledge tend to have a higher disparity between their confidence and their actual performance. people with more knowledge still think they know more than the people with less knowledge, even though despite the higher confidence they still underestimated themselves.
To be more clear, I was incompletely referencing only the left side of this curve:
since it seemed closer to what the person I was responding to was speaking about. Ofc you are correct that the right side of the curve also exists, though the amount of effort to reach it seems extremely out of proportion to the level of confidence gained - i.e. it is far easier to just be dumb and think that (or rather, act as if) you know everything, than to make yourself smart and actually know everything, about a particular topic.
What exactly are they arguing over? I probably shouldn’t ask, but I’ve been fortunate enough to not encounter any of this controversy on my social media
rebuilding it will actually not be expensive because (some insane shit nobody has ever done before). Elon Musk got in on this one!
Let me guess, they’re going to make a tunnel instead. But instead of underground they’re going to put it above ground, suspended over the water supported by pillars. 🧐
That just might be crazy enough to work, perhaps the tunnel can be made of scaffolding, so people can get some of that sweet sunlight while they go through it?
Oh, you bright and wonderful soul, untarnished by the knowledge of the depths of Musk’s stupidity, I envy you. I envy you and will destroy your blissful ignorance: he suggested reusing the collapsed truss steel.
You know, steel! The material that deals fantastically with being bent and twisted and doesn’t lose any strength at all from it! 😬
FFS that’s dumb, that steel can’t be reused without being reforged (or whatever the term is)
That broken bridge needs removed (hopefully recycled) and then a new one built in it’s place
Hopefully it goes faster than the project to replace a bridge near me. It was built before WWI and it’s still there, the talks have been going on for decades.
There is a bridge near me that was rebuild so cars can cross like 30 years ago. They had plans to repaint it, because it looks weathered. They put on 3 different kinds of paint to see which one would look best. The 3 samples are already weathered and peeling by now.
No one wants to agree on what should replace it though
Basically 2 different jurisdictions want to replace the bridge and then either one will propose a plan that inevitably gets shot down and then it’s back to the drawing board
So the money is being wasted there not on whether it should be replaced or not
A cargo ship lost power and couldn’t steer, ended up crashing into a bridge and took it down. Drivers were stopped from crossing in time, but there was a construction crew on the bridge who fell with it. Several reported dead.
Now Facebook warriors are arguing that it’s some sort of conspiracy.
I think people are saying that the bridge shouldn’t have collapsed like that just from being hit by a barge and that there was some kind of structural defect in the bridge. The fact that investigators went straight to’ “maintenance was just done to the ship” is sus.
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