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Weaver's avatar

Totally agree.

I'm a numerate systems analyst working with engineers, and they really are uncomfortable/pyschologically averse to uncertainty. They spend all their time designing-out miniscule risk in a way that massively over-engineers and wastes time and resources.

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Philip Goetz's avatar

I think good scientists seek truth, good engineers seek solutions, and bad scientists and bad engineers seek certainty. Science has a bias towards certainty because of how papers are published, which in turn caters to the limited memory of humans. The right way to do science is to keep track of all the conditional probabilities, but that's too hard for humans to do.

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