Best of Twitter - Week of March 8, 2021
^ I prohibited myself from using the words “I should” a few years back and have been enjoying it a lot. Only, “I want”, “I will”, etc.
^ thread…
Chris X Edwards comments on the tweet about economics becoming "social sciences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering
Most people - including me before I got my degree in this field -
think it's strictly "dirty factory stuff". Ick! But in fact, that's
completely not true. How do millions of people move through airports
ever day with only a very small percentage of them being severely let
down? It's not economists or social scientists; it's industrial
engineers. How does a place like Disneyland keep people spending
maximum dollars while subjecting them to a perfect threshold of line
waiting torture? Industrial engineering. Forget vaccine distribution -
how do you think food distribution is orchestrated? Industrial
engineering.
Industrial engineering was invented in WW2 when people realized there
were serious problems (e.g. a lot of people are dying because we can't
properly distribute essential materiel, or, there is clear
inefficiency and confusion in our processes but we lack a way to
quantify it and choose the best solution).
During the pandemic, it has been horrifying to me to see politicians
and economists struggle to use their inappropriate skills to solve
what are, to me, industrial engineering problems. See also (a subset
of I.E.):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research