Programmers, just get out your checkbooks and stop trying to help.

Often the PE is more of a lawyer than an engineer. They typically do have an engineering degree, but are years out from any hands-on engineering work. They do final legal sign-off, and are knowledgeable about statutes and insurance policies, but rely on people with more recent technical experience to do any technical work.

Which is significantly stronger than the state of software engineering.

So, a medical device engineer.

I agree programmers are not on this level.

That said - the vast majority of developers are nowhere near that.

It's a really long tail.

Anyway reinventing the wheel is underrated. Taking actual wheels as an example, there’s a long and impressive history there and we’re not close to being done yet. And so with most other things.

At its core, these are all variations of Pascal’s wager. I believe what would be most useful is pointing out that using the scientific method does not automatically lead to multi-year 3-phase trial requirements. It’s perfectly possible to use the statistical methods we usually do, but adjust parameters such as cutoffs for significance or weighting of side-effects to better match our preferences and increased risk tolerance.

An important factor here is also the unfettered, obnoxious arrogance that seems to be ubiquitous in tech culture. It's not so much "I don't believe in science" so much as "I'm above science, and therefore already understand all of it."

It's the idea that if you have a sufficient mastery of software engineering then, by extension, you have a mastery of the technical aspects of literally every other field, whether it's medicine, science, psychology, law, or even art. (Or, at least can easily master it after reading a few Wikipedia articles on the topic.) And if only the experts in that unrelated field would listen to the ingenious ideas that you thought of just now, then the crisis would be averted.

But, I'm being uncharitable here. It also comes from a place of genuinely wanting to help during an unprecedented global crisis when we're all frightened, isolated, and feeling helpless.

On the other hand, sometimes they do upend industries by remaking things, usually by finding and banishing some devastatingly huge false assumption the legacy players have built everything around, and exploiting the opportunity that this opens up.

So yes, uncharitable.

I've been yelling this at the top of my lungs across a range of platforms. I understand the hubris created by the Dunning-Kruger effect. We all fall prey to that at some point or another in life.

That said, just because people don't know what they don't know it doesn't magically endow them with supernatural powers to be able to create solutions to problems that have decades of development, a complex history of evolution and are the result of intense development, testing and manufacturing by dedicated multidisciplinary teams over years of dedication.

You cant Superman ventilators.

Please stop.

Find other ways to contribute. If you must work on ventilators, call established companies making them and ask how you might be able to help. Ask to work for them for free if you are able to.

Anyone doing this should consider the possibility that the answer may be that there's nothing they can do on a useful timeline except write a check.

If you want to help, you gotta swallow your ego.

-H. L. Mencken

I guess that makes your comment Dunning-Kruger about Dunning-Kruger.

"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability."

Engineers who don't know they don't know what it takes to design, manufacture and test a life-critical medical piece of equipment at scale. Yup, very much Dunning-Kruger. They think they know far more than they actually do. There's was a link HN just a few days ago from a bunch of physicists who set out to design a ventilators using, among other things, Home Depot parts. Let me put it this way. We have someone in my family with a PhD in Physics. Super smart guy. He has never built anything and can't build anything, much less life saving devices by the thousands.

DK doesn't just apply to "dumb" people. I have worked with dozens of engineers who don't understand just how much they don't know.

Maybe not the strict intent of DK, but very much the same kind of effect.

Let's not split hairs. I think you know what I meant.

hardware also fails in the field in unpredictable ways. Especially to anyone without long practical experience.

I calm down when I realize none of the people asking the questions understand manufacturing one bit. And then I get rattled again because they are communicating falsehoods to the general population. We don't have enough masks, test kits or ventilators because you can't Superman hardware production.

It isn't Trump's fault or anyone else's. It takes time --lots of time-- to setup a manufacturing process and start to produce product at scale with consistent quality and performance. Weeks for the most trivial of products, years for more complex hardware. Yet people don't have an understanding of this.

Ventilators? Holy cow. Talk about not being able to Superman something into existence.

If people understood they would realize that we made a massive mistake over the last 50 years by allowing our industrial base to evaporate and migrate to China to the extent it has. Consumers are as much at fault as the decades of incompetent politicians who allowed this to happen. While we bothered with nonsense (wars, etc.) China quietly went from an agrarian society to the second economy in the world. And, even worse, the world's factory. We, quite literally, cannot make anything in the US or Europe without Chinese components and, in some cases, all we are able to do is design in the US or Europe and have no choice but to manufacture in China.

I suspect things might change over the coming years. The money we wasted in wars would have been far better spent keeping industry alive locally. Yes, subsidies, no taxes for manufacturers, relaxed regulatory burden, etc. Either we do those things or the next pandemic will, once again, find us not being able to even manufacture face masks at scale. How laughable is it that people have to sew face masks at home in the US? Sad.

BTW: In Spain they just woke up to the reality that they received 340,000 bad test kits from China.

Sure, ideally we'd want the certified equipment, built by the professional knighted safety engineers, stamped by the right bureaucrat, with 1000 pages of documentation proving how thoroughly expert-approved they are, but when you run out of these, what do you do?