OK, techies have their limitations

The post before this was triggered by David Aaronovitch's article in The Times arguing that a Cabinet of scientists might be a good thing. However, there are contrary points of view on the contribution that the scientifically or technically trained can make outside their immediate field of knowledge. One appeared in the Washington Post at almost the same time as Aaronovitch's. This piece, by Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, was headed Silicon Valley needs humanities students and is worth reading in full, but these extracts give the gist of his argument:

Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. …. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?  

The theory goes as follows: STEM degree holders will get higher pay upon graduation and get a leg up in the career sprint. The trouble is that theory is wrong. … Yes, gaining a degree made a big difference in the sales and employment of the company that a founder started. But the field that the degree was in was not a significant factor. Over the past two years, I have interviewed the founders of more than 300 Silicon Valley start-ups. The most common traits I have observed are a passion to change the world and the confidence to defy the odds and succeed. …  

I’d take that a step further. I believe humanity majors make the best project managers, the best product managers, and, ultimately, the most visionary technology leaders. The reason is simple. Technologists and engineers focus on features and too often get wrapped up in elements that may be cool for geeks but are useless for most people. In contrast, humanities majors can more easily focus on people and how they interact with technology. A history major who has studied the Enlightment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire may be more likely to understand the human elements of technology and how ease of use and design can be the difference between an interesting historical footnote and a world-changing technology. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people or to understand what users want. …  

Don’t get me wrong. The world needs engineers. And no, I am not actually advising people to quit their jobs and get PhDs in philosophy. For some people, it might make sense, but for others it wouldn’t. The point I’m trying to get across is more nuanced: We need musicians, artists, and psychologists, as much as we need biomedical engineers and computer programmers. For tech entrepreneurs and managers, there is no “right” major or field of study.…

Although Wadhwa is focussing on techies in the context of Silicon Valley, are his views general enough to extend to all STEM graduates and to the transferability of their skills to politics as Aaronovitch was proposing? I note that Wadwha's claims for the abilities of “A history major who has studied the Enlightment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire” are hedged with “may” and “can”.  But, on the other hand, I have to accept that “Technologists and engineers focus on features and too often get wrapped up in elements that may be cool for geeks but are useless for most people”. In my last post I settled on the preparedness of engineers to deal in “hard data” when making decisions as their best quality. But does that equip you for a career in politics where, among other things, you have to argue the party line? Consider this part of a speech from a Labour MP (with higher education in politics, history and law) during the debate on Business and the Economy following the recent Queen’s Speech:

Let us put the Government’s proposals in context. There has been zero economic growth over the last year, and the economy is now smaller than it was in 2010. Living standards are being squeezed to breaking point. Families are being forced to choose between petrol and new school shoes, or between a pack of ham for their children’s sandwiches and making do, for another week, with cheese spread—and those are the fortunate ones. Mums—and, I appreciate, some dads, but let us be honest: it is mostly mums—who were just managing to juggle work and child care, with the help of much needed child tax credits, are now having to give up work, as they are unable to secure an additional eight hours a week, at a time when most employers simply are not recruiting. Consumer spending is inevitably held back, with families deciding to forgo their summer holiday or make their child do with last year’s raincoat—no one will notice the three-quarter-length sleeves. All this is compounding the downward economic spiral.

At this point some readers may be recalling Oscar Wilde’s comment on the death of Little Nell: it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. But that would be to miss the point, which is that the only hard numbers here were referring to sleeve lengths. The chart below, and I’m afraid it’s the sort of thing that techies lap up, immediately provides a rather different perspective:

The editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson, put this data on twitpic on 23 May with the comment “Cameron has little to boast about on deficit, which he's now reducing MORE SLOWLY than Labour's pre-election plans”. Mindful of this, and the grim reality that if they had continued in office Labour would have been making much the same cuts, even the most articulate STEM type might find it a challenge to deliver the rollicking stuff required of a party politician in opposition.

A Cabinet of Geeks?

Given the disgruntled tone of some of my past posts about attitudes towards “techies”, the way the terms engineer and technician are abused in the UK and the realities of STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) training – the “math-science death march”, I suppose I should have been pleased with an article by David Aaronovitch in The Times (£) last week, Enough placebo politics. Vote for the geeks. Inspired by a new book, The Geek Manifesto, written by a former Times colleague, Mark Henderson, Aaronovitch set about arguing that “There are too many lawyers in Parliament. For less rhetoric and more rigour we should take the scientific approach”. About the former he said:

I love lawyers. I love their intellect. I love their forensic skills. I love their persuasive capacities. I love the way they take the complicated and make it sound almost comprehensible. I adore their lack of self-doubt. … But lawyers are not, in the way that scientists are, truth seekers. When lawyers test the evidence, they do so not to get as close to the truth as they can, but to make an argument or to decide whether a law has been broken or upheld.

whereas:

Scientists are not super-people who are beyond the tug of ego and the capacity for error. But the scientific method — the process of evaluation and re-evaluation, of test and experiment — is a vital discipline. It is no disgrace in science (as it is politics and occasionally even in journalism) to be proved wrong. The new results are studied, validated and incorporated and the circus moves on. Whether the issue is drugs policy or the introduction of phonics into schools, we don’t apply the methods that we could to help us to make better decisions. Rather, we rely on selective evidence, persuasion, rhetoric and crossing our fingers and hoping like hell.

Noting that:

Of 650 MPs there are 158 from business, 90 former political advisers, 86 lawyers and 38 journalists. Just one MP worked as a research scientist and two have science PhDs.

he ended by anticipating:

a Cabinet table presided over by Stella Creasy (Labour, PhD in social psychology), or Therese Coffey (Conservative, PhD in chemistry) or even Julian Huppert (Liberal Democrat, PhD in Biological Chemistry). And, if the evidence points in that direction, they might even let a lawyer or two in to join them.

So what can there be to dislike about this? Well firstly, I’m not too struck on his explanation of the scientific method (“evaluation and re-evaluation, of test and experiment … new results are studied, validated and incorporated and the circus moves on”). I’m certainly not an authority on the philosophy of science but Karl Popper’s concept of conjectures and refutations seems to get a bit closer to what goes on. Particularly if it is combined with Thomas Kuhn’s insight of that a conjecture, so well-established as to have become a paradigm, will take a revolution to shift – the circus doesn’t always readily move on.

Secondly, Aaronovitch is right to say that lawyers are not truth seekers –they are deliberately selective in their use of evidence in order to support one side of a case or proposition. That the other side might be right and yours wrong is not a professional consideration for a lawyer. When Galileo was put on trial in 1633 and found guilty of the heresy of heliocentrism one would like to think that he had legal representation, but the legal process was ultimately irrelevant in that his scientific conjecture endured and the papacy’s didn’t. In 1926 two lawyers, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, fought enthusiastically over evolution in the Scopes trial. No doubt lawyers could, and perhaps will, be found to argue the case for teaching creationism in schools, whatever the prevailing scientific opinion may be.

However, it has to be accepted there are certain areas of government policy which are not particularly amenable to resolution by a scientific approach. For example, according to the Financial Times (£), the Ministry of Defence is reconsidering the value of the “Moscow Criterion”:

Under the criterion, UK planners assume if a major world power, such as Russia, were to attack the UK, Britain should be able to retaliate by destroying the independent capability of that aggressor, by destroying targets deep inside that country. … Abandoning the Moscow Criterion, however, would open up a major debate on what capability the UK needs. As Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute think-tank puts it: “The UK could adopt a new doctrine which assumes that it would be sufficiently threatening to maintain a capability to destroy a significant number of important targets on enemy territory ... So you could have a smaller nuclear weapons capability.”

In this particular argument, it’s not clear how far the scientific role can extend beyond assessing the capability that meets a particular criterion. Nor is it obvious that science would be Aaronovitch’s “vital discipline” in any debate over the choice of criterion, what constitutes a sufficient threat, or even whether the UK should remain a nuclear power.

Thirdly, Aaronovitch uses the words “science”, “scientific” and “scientist” 18 times in his article but makes no reference to engineering or technology – in fact he seems unaware of STEM as an entity. This is a shame, because his geek Cabinet would be much improved if the MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central, Chi Onwurah, who trained as an electrical engineer at Imperial College, were a member. Nor does medicine get a look in.  Perhaps he should reflect on Martin Vander Weyer’s observation in the Any Other Business column in the Spectator after the March budget:

In my own banking days, I once worked for a doctor, as it happens. He was the former chief surgeon of Malaysia, and he had been drafted in as chairman of the local merchant bank to which I was seconded. A lifetime in the operating theatre had equipped him with powers of concentration that outlasted us all in long credit committee meetings, allowing no sloppy thinking or verbiage: each borrower was a patient under his scalpel. Like engineers, doctors deal in hard data, and that makes them better decision-makers than financiers who deal in evanescent notions of money and value.

Perhaps it’s that quality, rather than having been trained in the scientific method per se, that explains the amazing development of China under its lawyer-free, but engineer-heavy, Politburo. But where they will take their country and the rest of us, who knows?

The Times and the cyber techies (a techie gets tetchy)

From the online Oxford English Dictionary:
techie, n.
3.colloq. (chiefly U.S.). An expert in or enthusiast for technology, esp. computing; (also) a technician. Cf. techy adj.
techy, adj.1
Forms: 19– techie, 19– techy
Technologically sophisticated or complicated; characterized by expertise in or enthusiasm for technology, esp. computing. Cf. techie n. 3.

Pauline Neville-Jones’ opinion piece in The Times (£) on 9 March about cyber-security, Wanted: workers to fill half a million jobs, was subtitled In retail, defence, business and the police the hunt is on for ‘techies’. Could you be one? I will come to the rest of her article later, but the use of the term 'techie' intrigued me. I apply it to myself in this blog’s Profile, but I didn’t recall seeing it in The Times very often, if at all. So I searched the Times online database to derive the statistics for its use since 1 Jan 2011:

Bear in mind that over this period there will have been about 60 issues of the Sunday Times and about 360 of The Times, so you would have come across “techie/techies”, in one sense or the other, twice in 28 issues of The Times or in 6 issues of the Sunday Times. As an adjective, it’s often used to describe people: techie types, techie blokes, or even techie nerds. In fact, there is almost always a hint of deprecation about it (yes, by me too!).

The purpose of Neville-Jones’ article was to emphasise the importance of cyber-security and the consequent need for people with the skills needed to combat theft and espionage carried out against IT-based systems. Reading it, the prospects don’t look too good:

Government figures show that we will need more than half a million new IT professionals over the next five years. … The number of British students applying for IT-related courses is going down year on year, while foreign nationals fill the places. …
How can it be that in a field so central to this nation’s future and so potentially rewarding to those in it, we should be staring at a skills gap of daunting proportions and significance? …
The skills gap, which has its roots in the catastrophic decline in the teaching of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, maths) over the past decade, is at last being gripped. The current inadequate ICT curriculum is being radically upgraded and new courses being developed. But will these courses be taught? Today, half the teacher training places in maths are unfilled and far too few British students are filling the centres of excellence in computer science at our universities.

In posts over the last 18 months I have touched on some of the underlying issues. For example: the way the terms engineer and technician are abused in the UK; how different things are in China; the realities of STEM training – the “math-science death march”.   Neville-Jones almost gave the game away when she remarked:

IT jobs are widely seen as being “techie” and dull. Not all of this is wide of the mark.

but then recovered with:

There is a real job to be done by existing professional bodies, universities and the Government to tell people just how broad, varied and rewarding a profession this is.

The Rt Hon. The Baroness Neville-Jones, DCMG (as Wikipedia indicates she should be styled) is a former diplomat who occupied important intelligence and national security posts, became a Conservative politician and then Minister of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the Home Office, and is now (as The Times article stated) “Special Representative to Business on Cyber Security”. Her own degree (Modern History from Oxford) was far from techie, and although she has no children of her own, I would be surprised if any of her godchildren, nieces, nephews and so on have pursued STEM-based occupations. To understand why that is likely to be the case when talking about the offspring of the UK’s elite, it’s helpful to return to the examples from Times online because these reveal their underlying attitudes towards “techie” types:

Who says techie types can’t connect? The Times 7 Feb 12
often the techies are not so hot on writing Sunday Times 20 Nov 11
a proper techie with thick-rimmed glasses The Times 30 Apr 11
Even the techies got excited The Times 19 Mar 11
sounding as emotional as a techie can get The Times 19 Mar 11
which shows that, in techie terms, I’m relatively up to speed The Times 16 Mar 11
(The Secretary of State for Education’s wife, that one)
we had an interval while the techies fiddled around with the communications systems Sunday Times 13 Mar 11
the sort of scientific language beloved of techies The Times 12 Mar 11
some slightly less chic techie types on the mezzanine The Times 19 Feb 11

Not greatly encouraging. But as I pointed out a year ago:

… “high achievers from poor families” don’t just lack material resources, but also … face a shortfall in “social capital” including access to networks, contacts and internships. In these circumstances, taking STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, maths), where what you know matters rather more than who you know, may be a better strategy than taking softer options with a more uncertain access to employment.

Meanwhile in China, a chemical engineering graduate from Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping, is about to become President. While Baroness Neville-Jones probably doesn’t read the New Scientist very often, or even The Times’ monthly Eureka supplement, she is almost certain to be familiar with the prestigious US journal Foreign Affairs. She might then have found Adam Segal’s Feature article, Chinese Computer Games in March/April 2012’s issue, interesting, if a little depressing:

In February 2011, weeks after Google publicly announced that hackers had tried to steal its sensitive computer codes, security experts traced the attacks back to Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a vocational school in Shandong Province. Both schools denied any involvement, and it is possible that their computers were hijacked by others, but U.S. intelligence officials claim that 20 groups associated with the People’s Liberation Army and several Chinese universities are responsible for the majority of the attacks on Google, RSA, and other U.S. targets. Attributing responsibility is often hard. Some hackers drift in and out of Beijing’s orbit over time, whereas others are independent criminals with no links to the state. Overall, however, much of the hacking originating in China can be classified as government-sponsored or government-tolerated. Beijing sees such hacking as a good way to eke out economic and military advantage …

Segal would like to see a consensus built up between the US and Chinese governments, both sides recognising their common interests in an interoperable and high integrity internet. This is more a job for diplomats than techies:

Diplomats should take their cues from the planned dialogue on cyberspace between the United States and Russia, which is to include discussions about how each side’s military views the Internet and an effort to establish a hot line that could be used during a cybersecurity crisis. Washington and Beijing need to have a clear communications channel in case of emergency. To build trust over the longer term, the two sides should also discuss some common threats, such as the potential for terrorist attacks on power grids.

Nonetheless, he concludes:

Assembling an international consensus on norms about cyberspace, however, is a strategy that will probably take a long time to pay off, if it ever does. There is little the United States can do to alter China’s conception of cyberspace, a vision it is actively promoting abroad. With a growing population of 500 million Internet users, it is easy to see why the Chinese believe that the future of cyberspace belongs to them. In the meantime, the most pressing tasks for the United States are to raise the costs incurred by Chinese hackers and to improve the security of networks at home. Yet U.S. officials should be realistic: Chinese-based cyberattacks will not disappear anytime soon.

which all suggests that if you embark on a career as a cyber-security techie, it should last for years.

ADDENDUM 13 March

Anyone who has read all above will probably find this article interesting, particularly the different national perspectives, as were identified by Segal.