Psychology isn’t so much science as it is engineering – applying ideas and evidence to a purpose

 --- Simon Ings, in a review of The Age of Guilt by Mark Edmundson, New Scientist, 8 Jul 2023

In context

In his Freudian analysis of what we might loosely term “cancel culture”, Mark Edmundson wisely chooses not to get into simplistic debates about which of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s ideas have or haven’t been “proved right”. What would that even mean? Psychology isn’t so much science as it is engineering – applying ideas and evidence to a purpose. In The Age of Guilt: The super-ego in the online world, Edmundson, a literary scholar, simply wants to suggest that Freud might help us better understand our cultural moment.

Another neat excerpt

Arguments from intuition need a hefty health warning, but I defy you not to agree with more than a few of Edmundson’s denunciations: for instance, how the internet has become our culture’s chief manifestation of the superego, its loudest users “immune to irony, void of humour, unforgiving, prone to demand harsh punishments”.

"a gloriously over-engineered stand-up scooter"

--- The Economist's description of the Segway, in a profile of Dean Kamen, "Mr Segway's difficult path", Technology Quaterly, June 12th 2010.  Classic Economist.

In context:

The invention for which Mr Kamen is best known is the Segway Transporter, a gloriously over-engineered stand-up scooter that had the misfortune to emerge just after the dotcom crash in 2001, just as the disillusioned technology industry was looking for the next big thing. Before its unveiling, Mr Kamen’s mysterious new invention was the subject of feverish speculation. Steve Jobs of Apple said it was “as big a deal as the PC” and John Doerr, a venture capitalist, mused that it would be “bigger than the internet”. It was, in fact, a rather clever two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter, using technology similar to the iBot. But after all the hype it could not possibly live up to expectations.