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That I had to make up a phrase shows the problem. I have complained many times about an overemphasis on critical thinking at universities. Sometimes I’d say, “Have you ever heard the term appreciative thinking? No? How many times have you heard the term critical thinking?—
“The Bible,†he said, without pausing.”
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If those pathways of promotion were built, as structures of authority are built in the world of Web 2.0, they would be based on self-selection, enthusiasm and a record of aptitude and contribution in the field.”
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About ten years ago I was at a dinner party where I met an Intel engineer who was working on the design of one of the Pentium series of microprocessors. He told me many fascinating things about the design process, and stated that there was no one person who came even close to understanding the chip in its entirety. Instead, Intel has fashioned a very clever social process where that is not necessary, and the engineers working on the chip only understand it collectively.
I’m wondering if any of my readers know of any illuminating references on the social aspects of the design process for modern microprocessors? I’d be interesting in anything from a few sentences through to an entire book. My immediate need is for a single number – how many engineers are involved in designing a new chip – but I’m also interested to learn more. I’d be fascinated if anyone knows of any connection between those social process and the famous Pentium floating point bug. Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Update: John Dupuis points me to the book The Pentium Chronicles:The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel’s Landmark Chips, which looks very promising. Other suggestions would still be very much appreciated, though!
Update 2: More reference goodness from John Dupuis. This time it’s a paper by Bell and Kastelic entitled “Inside Intel-coping with complex projects”. Many fascinating facts at first glance – the Itanium team involved up to 650 engineers and mask designers, and 4500 person-years of work – but I’ve got to run, and have no time to digest right now.
“That way, we’ll be able to gauge the effect of publication bias, experimental error, misuse of statistics, data fraud, and so on, which will help us understand how serious such problems are in the real scientific literature.”
Isn’t that a great idea?
By an accident of historical chance, we actually have exactly such a control group, namely parapsychologists: people who study extra-sensory perception, telepathy, precognition, and so on.”
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It seems to me that pessimism in the face of major problems is sometimes an act of hubris. I sometimes find myself pessimistic simply because I don’t see any way of solving major problems such as securing the world’s nuclear materials (still a surprisingly scary problem), or solving the climate change problem. But, of course, just because I don’t personally see how to solve a problem doesn’t mean a solution won’t come from a direction I don’t expect, and perhaps have never even heard of. I remember many discussions of nuclear war in my school in the early 1980s, and the mood was always very dark; no-one anticipated that the breakup of the whole eastern bloc was just a few years away.
Taken too far, this point of view can lead to foolish optimism: “someone will save us!†The ideal frame of mind seems to be to balance optimism, on the grounds that there is far more ingenuity in the world than we are aware of, with a certain amount of pessimism, to remain strongly motivated to act ourselves. The sky really has fallen on some civilizations.
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