Bronze-level articleEngineers and woo

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(sometimes I think Godlike Productions was made to push the boundaries of Poe's Law)
(How engineers think: better word, removing words that explain nothing)
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==How engineers think==
 
==How engineers think==
  
Engineers are not scientists nor are they mathematicians.<ref>Except, of course, when they are also scientists or mathematicians. Professors of engineering do a lot of science, for example.</ref> They are ''engineers''. Every other field of knowledge is interesting insofar as it is useful raw material for engineering. Engineers care about results in the real world, and ''get'' these results; other people are observably utterly delusional about technology and probably shouldn't be let near scissors.<ref name=dilbert>Every engineer knows that ''Dilbert'' is a documentary.</ref> This breeds a certain arrogance.
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Engineers are not scientists nor are they mathematicians.<ref>Except, of course, when they are also scientists or mathematicians. Professors of engineering do a lot of science, for example.</ref> They are ''engineers''. Every other field of knowledge is interesting insofar as it is useful raw material for engineering. Engineers care about results in the real world, and ''get'' these results; other people are observably utterly delusional about technology and probably shouldn't be allowed near scissors.<ref name=dilbert>Every engineer knows that ''Dilbert'' is a documentary.</ref> This breeds a certain arrogance.
 
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Some philosophers have drawn a distinction between epistemic and instrumental Rationality. Michael Huemer explains it as follows
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"''Instrumental rationality'' (or “means-end rationality”) consists in choosing the correct means to attain one’s actual goals, given one’s actual beliefs. This is the kind of rationality that economists generally assume in explaining human behavior.
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''Epistemic rationality'' consists, roughly, in forming beliefs in truth-conducive ways—accepting beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, avoiding contradictions, revising one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence against them, and so on. This is the kind of rationality that books on logic and critical thinking aim to instill."<ref>[http://atheism.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=atheism&cdn=religion&tm=82&f=00&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//home.sprynet.com/~owl1/irrationality.htm Why People Are Irrational about Politics]</ref>
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Conservationist John Waugh has suggested that "Engineering, as I see it, is an agency of instrumental rationality in the critical theory sense of the term ([http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/instrumental_rationality]). I interpret instrumental rationality to be linear, reductionist and deterministic, being narrowly focused on the achievement of specific ends to the exclusion of information extraneous to predetermined objectives. Engineering embraces simplicity. Biology, on the other hand, is the apotheosis of complexity."<ref>[http://www.theresilientworld.com/biologists-as-engineers-of-the-living-world The Resilient World:Biologists as engineers of the living world]</ref>
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If Waugh is correct, then the mode of pragmatic reasoning that engineers excel at may not be particularly suited to understanding the sort of deductive inferential reasoning that underlies the biologists search for the understanding the underlying causes of the world.
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Similarly, Caroline Whitbeck argues that "engineering design stands out among college subjects in giving sustained attention to the synthetic reasoning necessary to construct good responses to practical problems. Engineering appreciates the importance of practical as well as theoretical problems, of engineering designs as well as engineering theory, and of synthetic as well as analytic reasoning. Devising a good response requires synthetic reasoning."<ref>''Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research'' by Caroline Whitbeck p. 137 Cambridge University Press, 2011</ref>
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The vast majority of engineers are perfectly reasonable and are fans of science and mathematics, even though those fields are not what they do. But respecting science is not in any way a requirement of the job. Engineers can get away with all manner of gibbering delusion as long as the stuff they design still works.
 
The vast majority of engineers are perfectly reasonable and are fans of science and mathematics, even though those fields are not what they do. But respecting science is not in any way a requirement of the job. Engineers can get away with all manner of gibbering delusion as long as the stuff they design still works.

Revision as of 02:33, 3 May 2012

Best answer: Science doesn't have access to truth, engineering does.
—Anonymous Coward 14535673, Godlike Productions[1]

An engineer is a professional trained in engineering; the design and construction of devices or other works. They put science into practice, designing the stuff that makes civilization.

Most engineers are as sensible and reasonable as anyone. But engineers as a group have a noted, and indeed quantified, tendency to pontificate on things well outside their area of expertise, to the point of actual fallacy.

This phenomenon is so prevalent that users of talk.origins have come up with the Salem Hypothesis, which predicts that any creationist claiming scientific expertise or advanced degrees is likely to be an engineer.[2] This does not mean that engineers are likely to be creationists, of course.

The phenomenon also applies to some fields of computer science, such as software engineering, which are more applied mathematics than science as such.

Contents

How engineers think

Engineers are not scientists nor are they mathematicians.[3] They are engineers. Every other field of knowledge is interesting insofar as it is useful raw material for engineering. Engineers care about results in the real world, and get these results; other people are observably utterly delusional about technology and probably shouldn't be allowed near scissors.[4] This breeds a certain arrogance.

The vast majority of engineers are perfectly reasonable and are fans of science and mathematics, even though those fields are not what they do. But respecting science is not in any way a requirement of the job. Engineers can get away with all manner of gibbering delusion as long as the stuff they design still works.

Religious conservatism

Engineers are measurably more politically conservative than scientists. A 1972 study[5] showed professors of engineering describing themselves as "deeply religious" and "strongly conservative" more than those in any other field. Applying the same analysis to data gathered in 1984 found 46% of male American engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22% of scientists.

Creationism

Many prominent figures in the creationism movement are or have been engineers, for example, Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research.[6] One hypothesis is that creationists single out their engineers in an attempt to pull off argumentum ad verecundiam, and they haven't many in their ranks more reputable than an engineer.

When petitions have been sent out that say "these scientists reject evolution" the majority aren't qualified biologists or cosmologists but of completely unrelated professions, such as engineers, medical doctors or even veterinary surgeons. (Creation Ministries International's List of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation is a good example.) Importantly, this certainly isn't "elitism"; there are people who you'd expect to have studied the evidence in great detail and thus are expected have more intellectual clout on a subject, knowing what the latest research is and knowing how the theory actually works, rather than a simplified version taken from blogs and bad popular science books. People wouldn't argue that someone with no formal law training is as qualified as a lawyer to make a prosecution or defence, right? Similarly, you'd expect anyone with a valid comment on evolution to have formal biology training.

Terrorism

Similarly to creationists, there is anecdotal evidence of a disproportionate number of terrorists being engineers.[7] In one paper that did the numbers[8], nearly 60 percent of Islamic terrorists (even those raised in the West) had engineering backgrounds. And even corrected for demographics, the numbers are disproportionate.

Phil Goetz on LessWrong hypothesises[9] that they failed to compartmentalise irrational religious memes, and took the dangerous and stupid bits of their religions entirely seriously rather than treating them with the casual hypocrisy most people do.[10] Alternately, it could mean that engineers are especially recruited by terrorist organizations for useful skills, more fundamentalist children wanting to be engineers rather than scientists, or a variety of other explanations.

Engineers out of their depth in other ways

  • Ray Kurzweil - being a brilliant computer scientist means all other fields, particularly biology, can be treated as subtopics of computer science. He also claims that nutritional supplements and "alkaline water" do something useful.
  • Mohamed El Naschie - an engineer who believes he knows much more about mathematics than most mere mathematicians.
  • Eric S. Raymond - his knowledge of and work in software engineering remains brilliant. His batshit insane wingnuttery, not so much.
  • Richard Hoover, who wrote the meteorite bacteria paper for the Journal of Cosmology.
  • Far too many youthful Ayn Rand casualties.
  • The leadership of China - China is currently run not by revolutionaries or politicians, but by technocrats. They seem to be attempting to solve everything like an engineering problem (more force here, more repression there, and we will have a harmonious society!) and, although they have good sense enough not to ignore the laws of economics, they are still somewhat incapable of understanding the full complexity of the social tensions within their country.[11]
  • Dewey Larson (1898-1990), one of the numerous engineers who think they can do physics better than physicists.

Footnotes

  1. Frustrated by theories about Earth/Universe
  2. Myers, P. Z. (2006, Feb 22) The Salem hypothesis. Pharyngula.
  3. Except, of course, when they are also scientists or mathematicians. Professors of engineering do a lot of science, for example.
  4. Every engineer knows that Dilbert is a documentary.
  5. Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics
  6. Patterson, J. W. (1982). An engineer looks at the creationist movement. Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science 89(2), 55-58.
  7. Build-a-Bomber: Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees? (Benjamin Popper, Slate, 2009-12-29)
  8. Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, "Engineers of Jihad" (PDF)
  9. Reason as memetic immune disorder (Phil Goetz, LessWrong, 2009-09-19)
  10. "Have you ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not allowed to go to the bathroom."
  11. Engineers and Terrorists Part 2
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