Imagine being so small-minded, so pitifully constrained by …

Imagine being so small-minded, so pitifully constrained by your own lack of imagination, that your argument reduces to:
"I can't figure out a solution, therefore the system must change."
That is not engineering. It is surrender dressed up as analysis.
The history of progress is the history of people working within constraints that lesser minds declared impossible. The wheel, the bridge, the aircraft, the microprocessor—none emerged because someone demanded reality be rewritten. They emerged because someone understood the rules well enough to exploit them.
When confronted with a fixed system, the engineer asks, "How do I solve this?"
The mediocre mind asks, "How do I change the system so I don't have to?"
And then, having exhausted its imagination, it mistakes its own limitations for universal limitations.
The most amusing part is the certainty. Not merely, "I don't know how." But, "Because I don't know how, nobody else can know how."
What extraordinary vanity.
The inability to conceive of a solution is evidence only of the limits of the person doing the thinking. It tells us absolutely nothing about the limits of the system.
Written by S. Tominaga