On Engineering and Law
Sebastian is absolutely right:
I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.
To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.
It’s certainly been true for me. I also think that one of the reasons that logical engineery people get frustrated with politicians easily is that unlike engineers, they often seem to have no interest in fixing the “bugs” in laws, and flawed laws often remain on the books for years or decades despite widespread knowledge of their existence. It’s the job of a good engineer to fix the bugs in his code or his spec, but the job of a politician entails so much wheeling-and-dealing and the need to please diverse constituencies that a lot of the kinks will never get ironed out. Imagine if corporate engineers were also their own managers — just think of how shoddy most products would be! That’s basically how politics works.
Interestingly enough, this is why early 20th-century social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen believed that the ideal society would be run by engineers, creating what would be known as the the Technocracy movement. Veblen was sort of a crackpot, and despised athletes, priests, soldiers, and others who he viewed as merely predatorily looting what the creative engineers had produced. His ideas never made it very far because, as you can imagine, priests, athletes, and soldiers remain some of the most popular kinds of people.