To view the figures and tables associated with this article, please refer to the flipbook above.
In November 2024, I presented at a PDH lunch-and-learn for a Midwestern structural engineering firm about the relevance of moral theory to practical engineering concerns. After the talk, a small group stuck around and shared some details about the nature of their vocation. One retired engineer in the group recalled a project in which he immediately knew the building was unsafe. The engineer told me that he was unable to be precise, but something seemed off about the columns. In general, the whole building just felt off to him in a way that was difficult to articulate. He couldn’t—at that moment—back it up with an official analysis, but his gut was telling him that everyone had to get out of the building immediately. Even though it upset and offended his client, he used his position of authority to ensure everyone got out. Afterward, he thought he’d lost a client forever and his reputation was damaged because he had irrationally trusted his gut. Three days later, a colleague casually mentioned to him, “You know that building you were looking at a few days ago? It just collapsed.”
The retired engineer’s story resonated with the younger engineers there. They told me that when it comes to newer buildings, they have lots of data to draw on. They review the as-built plans, perform a structural analysis, and determine the safety of the building by proving that its structural capacity meets current building codes and design standards. But not every job, they said, is like that. Certain buildings, especially very old buildings, are difficult to evaluate since they do not have documents describing how the building was built and what is unseen in the building. Maybe they can point out a few things that indicate something is wrong. But at a deeper level, they have to intuit whether the building is safe or unsafe.
When these young engineers told me this, I sensed some embarrassment. It was as if they thought that they were supposed to do everything by the book using hard math. It was as if they were admitting to a dirty secret of the profession: that instead of using math to prove the building met current codes and design standards they were merely relying on their intuition. The truth was, their knowledge and experience was informing their gut instinct. It was clear from the conversation that in some contexts their trained intuition put them in better contact with the integrity of the building than running through the relevant formulas. This reminded me of research I had seen on the nature of expertise. At the highest level, expert intuition can often put one in better contact with what one is investigating than running through the math. Consider:
- Chicken Sexing: Professional chicken sexers are able to reliably distinguish between male and female chickens. But they have no idea how they do it. (Horsey 2002)
- Radiology: Radiologists are able to reliably detect cancerous tumors by briefly looking at an x-ray. They trust their gut rather than identifying concrete features of the x-ray and saying that that feature implies the presence of cancer. (Bilalić et al. 2022)
- Chess: Expert chess players are able to reliably identify good chess moves in the middle of a match. They are often unable to explain why a move is good or bad. (Chassy et al. 2023)
Structural engineering demands rigorous math. But as the hardest cases show, the relevant math is not always available. Just like the other experts discussed in the examples above, seasoned structural engineers have the ability to detect the integrity of a building by intuition when the data for doing the relevant math is unavailable to them. To acknowledge this is not to acknowledge a weakness or a “dirty secret.” Gut instinct instead is what often goes along with the highest form of expertise. ■
About the Author
Scott Hill is a member of the Philosophy Department at Wichita State University, where he teaches ethics to engineers. He is a co-author of Beyond the Code: A Philosophical Guide to Engineering Ethics (with Heidi Furey and Sujata Bhatia), and the article “MIT’s Moral Machine Project is a Psychological Roadblock to Self-Driving Cars” in the journal AI and Ethics (with Heidi Furey).
References
Bilalić, M., Grottenthaler, T., Nägele, T., & Lindig, T. (2022). Spotting lesions in thorax X-rays at a glance: holistic processing in radiology. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-022-00449-8
Chassy, P., Lahaye, R., Didierjean, A., & Gobet, F. (2023). Intuition in chess: a study with world-class players. Psychological Research, 87(8), 2380-2389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01823-x
Horsey, R. (2002). The art of chicken sexing. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 14, 107–128. http://cogprints.org/3255/1/chicken.pdf
