Thread by @wolftivy

What shocks me is how few people there are doing or even checking fundamental work. Half of modern manufacturing management comes from two guys trained in imperial japan. Wings are designed with assumptions cooked up by Prandtl, that even he later realized were wrong.

Works like this everywhere. Science, philosophy, life. Someone comes up with an idea, usually just sitting down and thinking about it for a bit drawing on their experience, and then everyone else takes it as gospel for the next 100 years.

We don't even independently reproduce these core results, even when they are just calculations or arguments. We build billion dollar empires on flawed assumptions that could be checked for thousands of dollars. It's hard to tell what to check, but surely we should check more.

Toyota system comes from these guys, trained in 1930s Japan. They went to America, learned how we do it, and said "this is disgustingly inefficient", and just cooked up a new philosophy of manufacturing. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiji_Toyo…
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiichi_O…

Good industry is a holistic collective moral endeavor that empowers the worker and transforms the manager. They approached it as such, and beat the pants off American management even with American workers in America.

Huge gains from small philosophical changes.

I don't think this is about Japan, but comparing Japanese and American results in many areas, I see a major difference:

Western society has a weird commitment to particular forms of class hierarchy and alienation between philosophers, owners, management, and workers.

Philosophers are regarded as having god-like expertise, and what they do as inaccessible to laymen. Owners, managers and workers are not empowered to think, especially not to come up with concepts.

Owners have to be absentee shareholders, occasionally firing an executive, but certainly never getting dirty or rethinking their concepts or relations to the work. I've noted before how insistence on inefficient class hierarchy causes westerners to lose industries to foreigners.

On it goes for other relations. Philosopher, owner, manager, and worker roles are way too rigid in our society, and Japan is noticeably less rigid with them, so they get better results. But again, this isn't about Japan. Something weird is going on in general.

Meanwhile in aerodynamics, some guy as NASA only just recently showed that the elliptical optimal wing loading assumption was wrong, and it has big implications for why flying wings work, why birds can fly, and making efficient wings in general.

ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/…

Real airplanes designed for efficiency (passenger jets) already are much closer to Prantl's later bell-shaped lift distribution than his earlier ellipse. But this was arrived at by empirical and simulation iterations, not theory. Until 2015, there was no theoretical overturn.