I bought Wicked Problems: How to engineer a better world by Guru Madhavan because of a column by the author in the FT, The Truth About Maximising Efficiency: it argues that governments, like engineered artefacts and indeed our bodies need some redundancy and safety marging. How true!

I enjoyed reading the book but in terms of analysis didn’t get much out of it beyond the FT column. It advocates a systems engineering approach even to ‘hard’ problems ie. well-definable ones. It classifies problems into hard (solvable), soft (only resolvable) and messy (need redefining) and takes wicked problems as the union of these categories. It was interesting to me to read a critique of engineering similar to the one I apply to economics, namely that engineers too often ignore the normative or political context for their solutions. The book sort of makes the case that engineering is social but not in a particularly clear way.

Having said that, the book has lots of examples of messiness and wickedness from the world of engineering, and particularly aircraft training and engineering. It focuses on the career of Ed Link – whom I had never heard of – who went from making player pianos to inventing the first on the ground flight training simulator to inventing and building submersible vessels. The book is full of the kind of fact that pleases me no end – for example that black boxes are orange and were created by Lockheed Air Services along with food company General Mills and a waste disposal company, Waste King. Also – tragically relevant – that engines are tested for resilience against bird strikes by lobbing chickens at them – real birds rather than imitation ones, and freshly killed rather than frozen and defrosted. A cited paper by John Downer, When the Chick Hits the Fan, observes that birds have adapted to devices meant to scare them away, so there is a sort of arms race between engineers and birds. (The paper is fascinating – there is an expert debate about how many birds of what size and being lobbed in how fast constitute an adequate test. The resulting pulp is known as ‘snarge’.)

Most of the examples of wicked problems in the book involve engineering rather than social problems. On the one hand, that’s an issue because we tend to think of wicked problems as social and political – paying for the groing need for adult social care, for example, On the other hand, the one main example of that type, reducing homelessness among veterans in the US, discusses how to get the different agencies and stakeholder to talk to each other and respect their differences. but doesn’t in the end describe a solution. Perhaps the moral one is meant to take is that wicked problems don’t have a solution?

All in all, an enjoyable read, and I for one am on board with systems engineering approaches, resilience and organisational flexibility.

The house is full of slightly random books. I picked up one sent to Rory, Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen McCulloch, a few years old now. She’s a linguist and the book is about the way being online has been changing everyday use of language. It was a surprisingly enjoyable read, very engagingly written and full of interesting observations and ideas. A few examples:

“We’re all writing for the unblinking eye of Data.” Even truer now in the era of LLMs.

The idea of ‘context collapse’ from danah boyd. A new phrase to me: “[a] term for when people from all your overlapping friend groups see all your shared posts from different aspects of your life.” The opposite of a concept I’ve found useful, ‘privacy in public’, when in the offline world we would willingly share sensitive information with certain other people but not everyone, and not in a way that different bits of information could be joined up. For instance, my GP is welcome to know details about my health but Palantir not so much unless I’m sure they can’t do me damage with it.

Ray Oldenburg’s concept of ‘third places’ (from his 1989 book The Great Good Place), social spaces where you can meet and chat with others. The local cafe or pub, the hallway at a conference. (One thing not I’ve not seen much discussed in the hype and counter-hype about Jonathan Haidt’s new book is that one reason teens are online so much is that modern society has removed all the places they used to be able to hang out in.)

And my favourite: texts and textiles have the same root, the indo-European teks (‘to weave’). (So does technology.) I’m from a Lancashire cotton mill family and thought that was why I collect blankets, towels, fabrics. It turns out that and accumulating books are essentially doing the same thing.

Others would surely pick out other things. There are chapters on emojis, memes, tone online and much else. A very nice book for anyone who likes words.