Ehh, yes and no. I maybe buy that a median human doing a deep dive into a random object wouldn’t notice the many places where there is substantial room for improvement; hanging around with rationalists does make it easy to forget just how low the median-human bar is.
But I would guess that a median engineer is plenty smart enough to see the places where there is substantial room for improvement, at least within their specialty. Indeed, I would guess that the engineers designing these products often knew perfectly well that they were making tradeoffs which a fully-informed customer wouldn’t make. The problem, I expect, is mostly organizational dysfunction (e.g. the committee of engineers is dumber than one engineer, and if there are any nontechnical managers involved then the collective intelligence nosedives real fast), and economic selection pressure.
For instance, I know plenty of software engineers who work at the big tech companies. The large majority of them (in my experience) know perfectly well that their software is a trash fire, and will tell you as much, and will happily expound in great detail the organizational structure and incentives which lead to the ongoing trash fire.
Ehh, yes and no. I maybe buy that a median human doing a deep dive into a random object wouldn’t notice the many places where there is substantial room for improvement; hanging around with rationalists does make it easy to forget just how low the median-human bar is.
But I would guess that a median engineer is plenty smart enough to see the places where there is substantial room for improvement, at least within their specialty. Indeed, I would guess that the engineers designing these products often knew perfectly well that they were making tradeoffs which a fully-informed customer wouldn’t make. The problem, I expect, is mostly organizational dysfunction (e.g. the committee of engineers is dumber than one engineer, and if there are any nontechnical managers involved then the collective intelligence nosedives real fast), and economic selection pressure.
For instance, I know plenty of software engineers who work at the big tech companies. The large majority of them (in my experience) know perfectly well that their software is a trash fire, and will tell you as much, and will happily expound in great detail the organizational structure and incentives which lead to the ongoing trash fire.