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Comment on Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

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This I can agree with: - People can "rediscover" knowledge that was already established because they don't investigate other disciplines first. - Agent engineering can benefit from decades of studies in management, requirements engineering, operations and process research.

But the article has a big irony: the article accuses engineers of oversimplifying other disciplines and then does exactly that itself.

"Data science was statistics with a cooler name"

The author mentions David Donoho's "50 Years of Data Science" but that work presents a much more complicated concept of data science: one with data exploration, transformation, computing, visualization, modeling, etc. Even the study of data-analysis practice itself.

Look at that XKCD he posted with it.

Horn took a nuance argument and converted it into the "human slop" formula mocked in the XKCD:

complicated subject = simple thing I already understand <new complicated thing> is really just <old familiar thing>

The cartoon is criticizing the same operation the article is doing. Maybe that is the joke?

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