There is an attitude towards politics that seems to belong especially to liberal arts graduates, and even more, to B authors pushing their next book. You pick up whiffs of it on the discussion threads, in the blog posts and talks. It expresses itself, with the weary arrogance of the guy who fixes your coffee, as a contempt for engineering as hopelessly mechanical. The answers are robotic and don't take humans into account, the implication goes, or at least the route to them doesn't. Public policy ought to be left to the people who know how to get things done: the political science graduates and liberal arts thinkers.

You can understand these feelings, to a certain extent. 'Idea people' deal with people and their imprecise measurements. Authors must look intelligent when pushing bullshit theories. The bailout is either great or not; the country either stands up or it doesn't. Neither matters unless the argument is well written. The endless technical muddle of public life is going to seem despicable to people who are used to pursuing their ends talking about their feelings.

But society isn't a drum circle. Its parts are people, who need struts and circuits. That is why a STEM education is far more useful to the policymaker (and by extension, the citizen) than a liberal arts one. Here are some of the things that the STEM fields, and the habits of alertness that they foster, will teach you: that when people have different but equally valid perspectives you shouldn't give them shit for doing engineering; that Truth just means matching our models of reality, sometimes several values can fit the model, that does not both make them right; that judgments of value are influenced by several judgments of fact in our brains, factors like priming, cognitive biases and learned behaviors affect every decision you make; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine, but proper use of our tools and technology can help.

Blog posts arguing cute but nevertheless wrong all-compassing theories of the world, which appeal to the kind of person I’m talking about, and which are usually far more fiction than science—that is, the human complexity of science—tends to give them bad numbers upholding theories that are way too orderly to be plausible as manifestations of human nature. Perhaps that is why our political discussions often involve the same, tired wrong arguments. We either go Keynes, Hayek, or are replaced by socialists. Not for nothing does the idea of the silver bullet remain the central figure of the liberal arts imagination.

I've never written a post critiquing the idea that we are heading towards a multiplanetary civilization. I have no idea if it's possible or not, and I know enough not to make predictions that far out into the future. It is characteristic of the liberal arts mentality—whose representatives are so often biased enough to throw around statements like 'adolescent of spirit if not of age', to suppose that our fundamental problems are unresolvable. The thinker believes himself possessed of superior wisdom. In fact, he has no expertise. Wisdom is not to be found in an essay; its formula is experience plus reflection. Engineering is the management of human affairs, the never-ending calibration of interests, vanities, and corruptions. It depends on knowing, how things work, and how people do to build a better world.