Talk:Engineers and woo

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Null hypothesis

Whoever wrote this is an idiot and should be mocked. If you're going to wax pretentious like this you should have some slight preliminary idea of just what the fuck you're talking about. There are vastly more MBAs, medical professionals, teachers, and lawyers with post-grad degrees. Engineering is in a distant fifth place. Jesus Christ. Of course he's a LessWrong weenie too. Pls ban for idiocy 76.66.127.252 (talk) 00:53, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, and thanks for making our article less idiotic. =) FᴜᴢᴢʏCᴀᴛPᴏᴛᴀᴛᴏ﹐ Esϙᴜɪʀᴇ (talk/stalk) 01:40, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Engineers and terrorism

Perhaps engineering provides the means for those who have the motives - whereas those who have studied eg paleontography and postmodern literary may have the motives but not the means; and those with the motives may actively choose the more practical courses. 86.191.127.12 (talk) 14:04, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

True to some extent, although if you wanted to handle explosives you're probably better getting a job in construction. And while there's a link between Islamist terrorists and engineering, it seems different for other groups. Most of the Red Army Faction studied humanities, liberal arts, social science, etc (though a degree in cinematography like Holger Meins studied is probably also useful). And most terrorists didn't go to university at all, or at most managed a couple of semesters at one of the Soviet Union's colleges for young marxists. Leila Khaled apparently studied medicine. Annquin (talk) 14:40, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

A possible cause?

Could this be caused because the ones who go the woo way think the physics/whatever they learn is as good as the one a physicist/whatever must muster, that for obvious reasons goes deeper than the former (or at least that's the way I see it)? --Panzerfaust (talk) 22:50, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Horseshoe?

Another right-wing extremist engineering graduate (aerospace engineering, to be precise), though not a terrorist, is 2016 Austrian Presidential candidate Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, in an interesting example of the horsehoe effect.

How is comparing far-right Austrians with far-right religious terrorists an example of the horseshoe effect? Hmmph (talk) 01:15, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Islamic education and terrorism

Mario Bunge in his autobiography comments on an incident he had at an Egyptian university, around 1980: he went to give a lecture on the history of philosophy that was attended by many students and professors. At a certain moment of the lecture, he began to talk about the arguments for the existence of God, making emphasis on the Islamic tradition, and he mocked on them. Then, he was assaulted by a shower of shoes thrown by the students presents there, who were being motivated by a professor of solid-state physics. The lecture ended and Bunge had to be escorted by guards to avoid being attacked by the angry students.

The next day, Bunge found by chance the physics professor who had directed the assault and began to talk quietly with him. At one point in the talk, Bunge asked him how was science education in Egypt and the Islamic world, and why science professors were so religious there. The professor replied that science is taught in an Islamic way, as contained in the Quran, and in the classes it is emphasized that science is based on the Quran and exists to complement the truths of it.

Perhaps this explains the prominence of engineers in jihadist groups? If scientific education is considered as a complement to the truth of Quran, it is probably worse in the case of engineering.--190.174.14.116 (talk) 22:33, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Null Hypothesis

I'm not sure I agree with the explanation behind the null hypothesis. A good portion of masters/doctorates will be disinclined to woo by the nature of what they study - most notably those in the field in science. This would result in a greater proportion of engineers being woowoo, even if not predisposed in any sense.

I don't fully understand how the education system works in the USA. In NZ most students get a Bachelors degree which represents 3-4 years of study. A Bachelor of Engineering would be comparable to say a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Commerce, Bachelor of Law etc. It would make more sense to compare levels of woo within each field of study. For example, "The null hypothesis is that engineers are approximately as prone to woo as other people of comparable educational level. If the null hypothesis is true, it should be expected that levels of belief in woo among engineers should be comparable to those in other fields with equivalent levels of education." Kauri0.o (talk) 03:19, 15 February 2022 (UTC)