This is why we need Professional Engineer licenses for software.
There are times when a product design needs to be reviewed and approved by someone who cares more about his license than about his job. It doesn't happen as often with software as it does with civil engineering, but often enough that it needs to become a thing.
And what happens when the licensing board gets politically compromised? You cant fix broken incentives by papering over another layer of administration. If the underlying incentives are opposed, the administration layer will be adapted to fit.
Civil engineering licensing works because underneath it all the incentive structure is aligned with the goals of the license. Its not about imposing morals, its about ensuring that buildings and devices are constructed to not fail, and to not fail catastrophically. The motivations of the ones who hire engineers are mostly aligned, they don't want the devices to fail either, and expose them to liability.
Medical doctor licensing also works because the incentives are mostly for patients not to be dying. But in the pharmaceuticals industry the incentive structure is different, where some rate of fatality is considered an acceptable cost of doing business, we see examples of subversion.
Sure software engineering licenses could be a great addition. But alone it will fail unless the incentive structure for those employing software engineers is aligned with the licensing goals.
The firmware for a diesel engine goes into a diesel engine. The company can be required to get a PE's signify for putting the firmware in. After that, if it's copied elsewhere, that's not their problem.
Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).
Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.
You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. Now (well, 60 years ago) that he has been debunked, we should accept the evidence, not invent arbitrary reasons why it doesn't apply. Especially since the boys in question were "Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa."
You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up.
William Golding was my father's English teacher at school (prior to publication of Lord of the Flies). According to my father, when people talked to Golding at the time, it wasn't based on real children but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.
I take it as a morality tale that applies to all of humans generally and less an indictment of a specific age range. But I may be in the minority it seems.
I think that's clearly the way to interpret the novel. The idea that you could even debunk a piece of allegorical fiction is silly. It would be like trying to make a point by claiming that the tale of the scorpion and the frog was made up, or The Metamorphosis.
Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.
Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.
But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.
He certainly hasn't been "debunked" with a single counterexample, especially one from an entirely different non-Western culture. N=1 isn't a statistically significant sample in any case.
The value you get from the health care system isn't just from the services they provide when/if you need them.
It's from the system existing and being ready to help you.
We're not talking about widgets, onions, haircuts, or pork bellies here. You can't opt out of the system existing. And you can't opt out of the horrific consequences if the system doesn't exist.
So it's a bit silly to talk about health care like it's something that has a free market.
It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.
It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.
Discord servers are half of a good counterexample, since people try to avoid the extreme end of network effects and want their chat partners pre-screened.
But... it's all on Discord, not IRC or jabber or anything.
There are times when a product design needs to be reviewed and approved by someone who cares more about his license than about his job. It doesn't happen as often with software as it does with civil engineering, but often enough that it needs to become a thing.
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