The Karl Popper quote: ‘Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.’
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Piecemeal refers to only looking at a small part of a larger whole.
Social engineering is the study of how you can influence people on a larger scale than just you talking to your friends.
Physical engineering is the study of designing and building physical objects and machines.
“The ends” means “the goals” or the end results.
“Beyond the province of technology” means that something is out of scope of the technology involved. The technology doesn’t account for it, so it must be decided/determined by someone or something else.
Taken together, it’s saying that people working on small parts of social engineering are similar to people working on specific machines or technologies, in that they are concerned only about their small part and not what that part will do in the grand scheme of things.
As an example, you may work at Raytheon designing guidance systems for missiles. For you, what is important is that your guidance system is accurate and reliable. You’re not thinking about the people this missile will kill because of your guidance system; that’s not part of the technological aspect you’re working on, so it’s not in your scope.
An analog in social engineering might be the pervasiveness of fake news. The people who write/create fake news (not just the recent surge, but back in the days of William Randolph Hearst and yellow-journalism) are interested solely in getting more people to buy/subscribe to their papers so they can make more money. The larger impact of fake news in terms of creating social divisions among the people isn’t necessarily part of their thought process.
Common phrases that would be associated with this are “above my pay-grade” or “just a cog in the machine,” where the speaker is saying that they don’t concern themselves with the bigger picture; that’s for someone else to decide. They just do their own jobs and let fate deal with the rest.
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