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I feel like this ties in with a bunch of other ideas that have been kicking around in my head for the last couple weeks. I'd started writing an effort-post on the different concepts of credibility and legitimacy tentatively titled "Dammed Science" with the "Dammed" in place of "Damned" being an intentional pun, but it's still, just not there yet.
That said the bit I think is relevant is something that my boss' boss' boss said during our end-of-year townhall meeting/pow-wow. She said (and I am paraphrasing here) I don't like science and I don't like scientists because there is nothing stopping a scientist from spouting bullshit. The only people who might call them on it are other scientists and scientists are a cliquey bunch. Meanwhile an engineer works under much more rigorous circumstances. An engineer cannot bullshit the way a scientist might because any lay-man can look with their own two eyes and see if the airplane flys, the bridge stands, or the gadget works.
The conclusion of the speech essentially boiled down to "and that's why you're here" careers in Science and Academia are masturbatory, it's engineering that pushes the boundaries and drives progress.
I've caught a lot of shit, admittedly not without cause, for being "anti-intellectual" but I feel like that criticism of misses the point. I'm not against intellectualism per se as much as I am skeptical of "the intellectual" as a class. Oh, studies say X? It would be a shame if someone actually put that theory to the test. ;-)
As a Science person with engineering degrees who doesn't like to do engineering1, I am suuuuuper skeptical of other Science people. More of them are simply actively bad at their jobs than is remotely acceptable, and you are 100% right that many of them face no repercussions from this due to the fucked up way the system evaluates work. Furthermore, totally agreed that the engineering folks have a much more visible benchmark for things working, and that is incredibly useful.
That said, if I were to defend those among my people who are good, I would say that one cannot reductively claim that it is only engineering that is pushing boundaries and driving progress. The story I once heard that might resonate with you was that if you were wanting to invade and occupy a country, you need four different types of people: spies, marines, army, and police. The spies have to be there early, get the lay of the land, a sense for what's going on, background information that informs choices of what it is that you're going to try to do and why. Once you have some idea, the marines have to go establish a beachhead, so that you can start to bring serious resources to bear on the problem. Then, the army has to very practically churn through huge piles of materiel, kicking in skulls and establishing concrete facts on the ground. Finally, once you've occupied the place, the police need to maintain order and keep everything somewhat functional.
The analogy is that the Science types are the spies. We try to figure out the lay of the land, when you don't even have a clue as to what types of things may be possible or not. The experimentalists who bridge the gap, pun possibly intended, between the scientists and engineers are the marines; they are often operating on shoestring budgets, trying to read our shit, figure out which ideas are most plausible, and cobble together at least some sort of proof of concept that it could actually work in the real world. Then comes the literal army of engineers. I admit that I'm a little jealous of how they get to see their stuff actually work, but maybe it's their ridiculously fat budgets that I'm more jealous of. They have to very practically establish routinized ways for the idea to consistently work in practice. Finally, you have the cops who maintain the whole thing and are more supposed to interact with the 'customer' to make sure that their needs are being met. Presumably, if you just try to dive in to a country with just your army, with no intel and no established beachhead, one could see the inherent difficulty of pushing the boundaries and driving progress. Maybe you could still get there, but damn if the endeavor isn't likely to blow even fatter budgets of even more obscene amounts of materiel, possibly toward goals that simply don't make any sense and are eventually doomed to failure, which you might have known if you had a proper understanding of the lay of the land.
Now here's the part of the analogy that I've come to add, but which I think makes sense. Not only do you need different types of people for these different jobs, but the way you evaluate the work that is being done in each stage is completely different. There is no sense in which you're going to evaluate a pre-invasion spy by the same sort of metric that you're going to evaluate the face-kicking army. It is, frankly, an unfortunate fact of reality that the nature of the work of spies leads to the possibility that they could totally bullshit you, and it can sometimes be very difficult to tell truth from falsehood. I don't know any honest-to-goodness real life spies, but I really wonder if they have some sort of similar dysfunction/skepticism toward each other that we Science types have toward our own. I also wonder if there just is a significant population of them who kind of suck at their job, the way many of ours do, but don't face many consequences because of the inherent difficulties of evaluation.
1 - I do math, and it's a tossup on whether reviewers will actually pay close attention to whether my proofs do, indeed, prove my theorems... or if they'll even bother reading the proofs and instead make their judgment entirely on the basis of shit like how many of their own papers I've cited.
EDIT: After reading @TheDag's comment, I would amend this by saying that your spies have a very analogous failure mode that is really really bad for you - double agents. They're actively working against you, against providing you knowledge of the truth, and for the adversary. This can be widespread, but also sort of localized. For example, if the Soviets totally convert your spy network there, they can completely wonk up your knowledge of what the hell is happening there, but maybe you still have perfectly good coverage of China. I would agree that there are vast swaths of the social sciences who have been entirely captured. They're worse than just having an evaluation problem; they're an adversarial problem.
I like this analogy specifically because spies are famous for their insane fuckups due to lack of oversight and a conviction that their ends are more than important enough to justify their means.
Shit like MKUltra or the way multiple separate US agencies have financed and supplied various militias and cartels without any control over them are public knowledge, but by the very nature of spying there's probably 5 fuckups for every one that goes public.
And that's the big ticket items, a spy who just collects a steady paycheck while not gathering any useful info and/or sends back fictional info because that's way less risk is too common a WW2 story to even be notable.
But, like science, this doesn't mean that spying isn't a useful job, just good luck controlling it.
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Some professions requires the public trusting that you will prefer defending their interest over defending your in-group. Doing these jobs properly require taking a skeptical, sometimes even adversarial stance towards your colleagues. Cops, judges, journalists, doctors and scientists come to mind; any hint of wagon-circling from these harms society greatly.
Agreed
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