Kindle Notes & Highlights
“It’s just a case of sitting down and thinking out every possible solution, step by step, one after another, and also having confidence that there’s a solution out there and you can find it,” Laurer said. “Not saying, oh well it can’t be done.”
“It’s the rigorous, systematic problem-solving capability that separates engineers from other people who are perhaps more philosophical, argumentative, or blue-sky in their approach to life.
The first is the ability to “see” structure where there’s none.
The second attribute of the engineering mind-set is the adeptness at designing under constraints.
The pressures are endless. The third attribute of the engineering mind-set involves trade-offs—the ability to make considered judgments about solutions and alternatives.
If the core of science is discovery, then the essence of engineering is creation.
we were tool builders before we were discoverers.
“Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst.”
Engineering, as it should be clear by now, is not only about technology—that is, replacing manual labor with machinery. In equal or more parts, it’s about strategy.
The second concept is mechanism design—which is considered “the ‘engineering’ side of economic theory”—as economist Eric Maskin put it in his 2007 Nobel Prize lecture.
