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On Jul 27, 7:29 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


Give an engineer a pen or a keyboard, and tell him to write something that
will be published, and that streak of rigor in all well-trained engineers
is
likely to come out. He's almost at likely as not to produce a God-awful
verbal and mental quagmire that's the equivalent of a rat's nest on a
fishing-reel spool. I can't tell you how many I've had to pick apart and
re-organize over the years. By the time he's done, you can't figure out
what
it is that he's trying to explain. I'll guess that it happens one time out
of three.

Many engineers gravitate to math and science because they can not
write well. So it is not surprising that when they are required to
write something , they do not do a good job.

True enough. There is a pattern to their machinations, however.


Engineering is a practical field, not an abstract one like pure
mathematics,
and rigor can be the enemy of understanding about practical subjects.


Rigor is never the enemy of understanding about practical subjects.
Descriptions of practical subjects without rigor simply shows there is
no understanding. For example averaging percentages.

Dan

With all due respect, Dan, you've frequently demonstrated exactly what I'm
talking about. d8-)

Rigor often leads one to involve arcane or obscure relationships. If you're
creating theories, or dotting the "i" on an existing one, it's necessary to
keep the whole theoretical system straight. But it often leads one off onto
issues that obscure the practical problem at hand.

For example, the one involved in this thread. Don can make a case for
accounting for all inputs and outputs together, but it obscures the fact
that there are vastly different carbon cycles involved, which have
significantly different consequences. In fact, that's what the question was
about, and Don's "rigorous" explanation (in which you've also dabbled)
implies that the necessity for some active mitigation of CO2 produced from
burning fossil fuel and that for human respiration should be considered in
the same pot. But that "rigorous" explanation misses the point that human
respiration is already taken care of. You can't emit more carbon than you
consume, and all that you consume comes from plants that have already
absorbed at least as much carbon from the air, or you would have nothing to
consume.

In other words, rigor is the enemy of understanding the key point, and that
point precisely addresses the original question. The "rigorous" explanation
does an end run around it -- in fact, it ignores and obscures it.

--
Ed Huntress