"Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty"
About this Quote
Calling something "rocket science" has become a cultural shorthand for the absolute peak of human difficulty, a way to shut down argument and elevate certain kinds of expertise into near-mysticism. Carmack punctures that inflation with a programmer's impatience for vibes masquerading as facts. The line is deliberately deflationary: not anti-intellectual, but anti-myth.
The specific intent is to demote "rocket science" from sacred category to solvable engineering problem. Carmack is pointing at the way institutions, media, and even other engineers use the phrase to launder complexity into prestige. If rocket science is imagined as an occult art, then the people who do it get treated like wizards, budgets and timelines become less accountable, and outsiders are discouraged from even trying. Myth is useful that way: it protects hierarchies.
The subtext is classic Carmack: hard things are usually hard for mundane reasons - coordination, iteration speed, testing discipline, incentives - not because the universe has declared them unknowable. In software, he watched "impossible" problems turn into checklists once teams had tools, feedback loops, and the will to grind. He imports that worldview here. Rocket science is difficult, sure, but it is also documented, mathematized, industrialized; it lives in textbooks, standards, and failure analyses. The mystique lingers because it flatters our narratives about genius and because it's a convenient metaphor in a culture that loves to dramatize competence.
Context matters: coming from a builder who repeatedly shipped bleeding-edge systems, it's a claim about agency. Stop worshipping the hard thing. Start instrumenting it.
The specific intent is to demote "rocket science" from sacred category to solvable engineering problem. Carmack is pointing at the way institutions, media, and even other engineers use the phrase to launder complexity into prestige. If rocket science is imagined as an occult art, then the people who do it get treated like wizards, budgets and timelines become less accountable, and outsiders are discouraged from even trying. Myth is useful that way: it protects hierarchies.
The subtext is classic Carmack: hard things are usually hard for mundane reasons - coordination, iteration speed, testing discipline, incentives - not because the universe has declared them unknowable. In software, he watched "impossible" problems turn into checklists once teams had tools, feedback loops, and the will to grind. He imports that worldview here. Rocket science is difficult, sure, but it is also documented, mathematized, industrialized; it lives in textbooks, standards, and failure analyses. The mystique lingers because it flatters our narratives about genius and because it's a convenient metaphor in a culture that loves to dramatize competence.
Context matters: coming from a builder who repeatedly shipped bleeding-edge systems, it's a claim about agency. Stop worshipping the hard thing. Start instrumenting it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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