Why are Engineers always lunatics? -

[ICametoLurk]

Among Islamic terrorists trained in the West, nearly 60 percent came from engineering, Many prominent figures in the creationism movement are or have been engineers. Pol Pot studied electrical engineering in Paris. Ahmadinejad (who was literally early /pol/ in a person) had a Ph.D. in transport engineering. Petr Beckmann was an engineer who believed that Albert Einstein was wrong and spent his life trying to prove it. Burt Rutan the legendary aircraft designer attacked the concept of science itself, Several members of the Flat Earth movement were engineers, the majority of climate change denial is from engineers. The Dark Enlightenment was made by engineers.

Is the Knack (as Scott Adams called it) make engineers insane?

 

[NIGGO KILLA]

Engineers want to build IRL mecha to take over the world

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Among Islamic terrorists trained in the West, nearly 60 percent came from engineering, Many prominent figures in the creationism movement are or have been engineers. Pol Pot studied electrical engineering in Paris. Ahmadinejad had a Ph.D. in transport engineering. Several Fascist members during World War 2 were engineers, several members of the Flat Earth movement were engineers, the majority of climate change denial is from engineers.

Is the Knack (as Scott Adams called it) make engineers insane?

Engineers are the people that take the theoretical bullshit into the real world. So part of the job is the mindset of cutting through the bullshit, because at the end of the day, the thing has to actually do something.

The experience of doing this for a long time leads to a type of Dunning/Krueger type thing where the engineers start to believe they know much more about how things work than most people, and apply that thinking outside their areas of expertise.

Engineers also know from experience a lot of the accepted theory stuff is complete bullshit because they're the ones who have to actually make stuff work. It's basically a sense of self reliance taken to the extreme.

And part of the problem is, they're not wrong. The majority of people have no fucking idea what they're talking about. If you don't have to make it work at the end of the day, it's a lot easier to believe in theory than when you're the guy actually applying the theory and seeing it not work. You also get shitloads of hands on experience that all the other supposed experts are fucking idiots who are wrong half the time.

You've also got to keep in mind, engineering is applied science. Engineers are deeply familiar with the scientific method as they are using it constantly to do their job. Engineers thus know a lot more about proper experimental design than the average person, and thus are more able to call out poorly designed studies. Again, this can be taken too far.

It's funny you mention the flat earth movement, because on that Netflix special that was recently made, the focus of the whole thing was a mechanical engineer trying to prove the earth was flat. And, to his credit, the dude knew what he was doing. He designed a number of great experiments that flatly would prove or disprove that the earth was spherical. He actually performed them. Unfortunately, for him, his well designed experiments proved the earth was NOT flat. Repeatedly. Actually, that particular group created a number of good experiments, they just abandoned the scientific method when it kept telling them they were wrong. AKA publication bias.

Now, on the climate change denier thing, I have a bit of a beef, but before I get into it, what do you mean when you say "Climate Change Denial"? Is that the position that the climate does not change? Or is it disagreeing with the specific claims of anthropogenic global warming?

The generic term "climate change" is something only the stupidest person on earth would disagree with. We have outrageous amounts of evidence that the climate does indeed change. Similarly, denying the global average temperature has been trending upward for a while is a silly position.

See, I'm an engineer, and I can't help doing just that. Part of the problem is I'm constantly confronted with evidence that yeah, 90% of people have no fucking clue what they're talking about. It's impossible not to internalize that to some degree.

 

[дядя Боря]

not everyone with an engineering degree is an engineer, especially now that companies need to fill quotas and that shit started at least 20-30 years ago.

before you go call someone an engineer, you have to consider what did that person actually built and which problems did he solve? And I am not talking about beeing a "team leader" or "scrum master" engineer bullshit. You fucking show me the person actually was able to hack his way out of a paperbag, because a whole lot of engineers can't fucking solder two wires together.

But yeah, engineers solve problems and make shit work. "Engineers" sperg bullshit and go into design or leadership roles.

On the subject of Islamiac engineers, there was only one ... "The Engineer" was the dude who actually designed how 100% of the successful suicide vests worked .... and he was droned.

 

[дядя Боря]

also good engineers tend to be at very least mildly autistic and fuck with normies.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Among Islamic terrorists trained in the West, nearly 60 percent came from engineering, Many prominent figures in the creationism movement are or have been engineers. Pol Pot studied electrical engineering in Paris. Ahmadinejad (who was literally early /pol/ in a person) had a Ph.D. in transport engineering. Petr Beckmann was an engineer who believed that Albert Einstein was wrong and spent his life trying to prove it. Several Fascist members during World War 2 were engineers, several members of the Flat Earth movement were engineers, the majority of climate change denial is from engineers. The Dark Enlightenment was made by engineers. My dad was an engineer for BP and believed in everything ranging from Holocaust Denial to that Oil is literally the blood of the Earth.

Is the Knack (as Scott Adams, the engineer that got Trump elected, called it) make engineers insane?

Never heard about the Knack. You mean this:

As for why this is, I am not sure. Obvious this a bit a hyperbole, as most engineers probably a beliefs similar to people of the same class and education status, and many believers of non-consensus scientific theories are non-technical lay people. Still the predominance of engineers in these fields is still pronounced enough to require explanation. My guess is two fold. First, engineering is a good path for young men from upwardly mobile upper lower to middle class families, like medicine. Engineers are required for rapidly industrializing society, where traditional beliefs are often rapidly left behind. In such a world, such people will often feel lost and latch onto beliefs that help reconcile the traditional beliefs of their ancestors and the modern world. Also, both by upwardly mobile nature and by virtue of their education, they often will end up in predominate roles in these organizations.

Secondly, the education they get is both technical and limited, so engineering both attracts people and trains them into being very precise within very limited domains. As well, @Corbin Dallas Multipass suggest, there is an element of unwarted arogance involved here as well (see often physicists in other fields of science). Finally, unlike scientists, social scientists and humanists, almost all engineers will go of into "real world" and be disconnected from the world of academia, which allows their scientific knowledge to become out of date and gives them the freedom to explore fringe ideas.

Engineers want to build IRL mecha to take over the world

Elon Musk.
Here's a paper on the phenomenon:

We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-level perspective.

Razib Khan (who have mentioned previously) has written on the subject.

My own working model is that engineers (and quantitative scientists) tend to go crazy because their mental outlook is relatively rigid. You don’t want to be that creative if you’re an applied scientist, you need to take the truths of science as givens and derive practical results. The same tendency can result in a naive fundamentalist outlook when the truths of religion are taken as givens. Additionally, it seems to me a sociological reality that aspirant sub-elites are also the best recruits due to their resentments against an “unjust” order (their talent running up against the fact that they lack culture in the snobby sense as well as connections to leverage their professional competence maximally).

Related: Nerds are Nuts.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Secondly, the education they get is both technical and limited, so engineering both attracts people and trains them into being very precise within very limited domains.

What do you mean? They get the same basic education as anyone else with a degree. I guess I disagree with the fundamental premise that engineers are completely wrong in this. Tesla was an engineer, he had lots of fucking crazy ideas that went against the scientific consensus. It just so happened he was right. But the isolation of this means it's very easy to buy into your own competence, and that along with all the usual cognitive biases means it doesn't always result in good science.

Finally, unlike scientists, social scientists and humanists, almost all engineers will go of into "real world" and be disconnected from the world of academia, which allows their scientific knowledge to become out of date and gives them the freedom to explore fringe ideas.

Haha, that's a very backwards take from my point of view. The people who go out in the real world are the ones whose knowledge is disconnected and out of date? The people who never see the results of their theories put into action are the ones who are up to date? No, as an engineer you have to keep up with the latest developments, you don't just use the shit that was current when you went to school. This is such a strange and 'ivory tower' point of view, it's not the theory that's wrong, it's the reality that refuses to conform with the theory that's wrong, and that wrong reality causes engineers to not believe the theory.

 

[дядя Боря]

Tesla and Edison are good examples to discuss. One was a brilliant engineer but ultimately not "successful" at life, dying poor and alone, the other had hordes of assistants and money to make and market products that were commercially viable.

 

[UE 558]

As someone going to uni for an engineering degree, I can confirm that I am indeed a spergy faggot who likes to poop himself in adult diapers and jack off to pics of Tony the Tiger getting buttfucked by Anthro Simba

 

[Coolio55]

also good engineers tend to be at very least mildly autistic and fuck with normies.

My thoughts exactly. I think the answer is simple. People with extremely technical knowledge generally have some form of the -tism.
That's why they are so easily manipulated into joining cults like the Islamic State. The ability to function in normal society seems to be semi variable though.
It's like asking why most emulator or homebrew devs are trannies/furries.

Just realized. Do engineers count "software engineering" as an actual type of engineering?
I always thought programming was the bottom of the barrel even for engineers.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

My thoughts exactly. I think the answer is simple. People with extremely technical knowledge generally have some form of the -tism.
That's why they are so easily manipulated into joining cults like the Islamic State. The ability to function in normal society seems to be semi variable though.
It's like asking why most emulator or homebrew devs are trannies/furries.

Just realized. Do engineers count "software engineering" as an actual type of engineering?
I always thought programming was the bottom of the barrel even for engineers.

Eh, sorta kinda not really? Not much engineering happens in the typical "software engineer's" career, if we're using the dictionary definition of engineering. They don't utilize the scientific method to design experiments and test their ideas. But then, a mechanical engineer might say that about electrical engineers...

In my experience around automation engineers, I don't see a lot of autistic people. But they tend to be very independent minded and not care so much about going against the mainstream.

 

[Foxxo]

My thoughts exactly. I think the answer is simple. People with extremely technical knowledge generally have some form of the -tism.
That's why they are so easily manipulated into joining cults like the Islamic State. The ability to function in normal society seems to be semi variable though.
It's like asking why most emulator or homebrew devs are trannies/furries.

Just realized. Do engineers count "software engineering" as an actual type of engineering?
I always thought programming was the bottom of the barrel even for engineers.

One of my favorite successful engineering autists on the internet, the Ethical Skeptic, claims that software engineers are politicized dunces packed into the science/engineering wedge solely for scientific consensus bullcrap like (according to him) denying that Roundup on Monsanto crops gives all Americans eye problems and cancer. Oh, and the consensus that autism isn't caused by vaccines.

 

[дядя Боря]

Eh, sorta kinda not really? Not much engineering happens in the typical "software engineer's" career, if we're using the dictionary definition of engineering. They don't utilize the scientific method to design experiments and test their ideas. But then, a mechanical engineer might say that about electrical engineers...

that's because suddenly high demand for software engineers turned most of them into quota hires, lib degrees who learned to code one language and HB1s with degrees on toilet paper from Mumbai Skul of Science.

In older times CS was under mathematics dept and curriculum included both EE and stupid shit like advanced calculus/DfQs, which was probably not so useful unless you are doing benchmarking and you need solid foundation in statistics. Today's software tend to be total shit for a good reason.

 

[дядя Боря]

My thoughts exactly. I think the answer is simple. People with extremely technical knowledge generally have some form of the -tism.
That's why they are so easily manipulated into joining cults like the Islamic State. The ability to function in normal society seems to be semi variable though.
It's like asking why most emulator or homebrew devs are trannies/furries.

Just realized. Do engineers count "software engineering" as an actual type of engineering?
I always thought programming was the bottom of the barrel even for engineers.

lol, yes, lots of that hazing, use to be because butthurt over required courses for EEs and MEchies that included shit that broke brains.

 

[CWCissey]

Because no-one knows that Cool Ranch came first.

 

[QI 541]

that's because suddenly high demand for software engineers turned most of them into quota hires, lib degrees who learned to code one language and HB1s with degrees on toilet paper from Mumbai Skul of Science.

In older times CS was under mathematics dept and curriculum included both EE and stupid shit like advanced calculus/DfQs, which was probably not so useful unless you are doing benchmarking and you need solid foundation in statistics. Today's software tend to be total shit for a good reason.

Today's software is shit because our market prefers buggy crap released now over polished software released later. Software is much less buggy when it comes to things where people die if there's a bug.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Just realized. Do engineers count "software engineering" as an actual type of engineering?
I always thought programming was the bottom of the barrel even for engineers.

My brother was in mechanical engineering and now works at a massive multinational and from what he describes, his work is mostly in programming, though I could be wrong.

As for myself, I got a computer science degree* and was required to take an introduction to software engineering. My impression was that the software engineering has a bad case of "real" engineering envy, with the field full of arrogant poncy try-hards who need to show everybody that they are Real Engineers (cf economics and linguistics with respect to physics).

Spoiler: *

 

[IV 445]

Because people keep yelling at them to move their equipment up even though they keep dying to snipers over and over and can’t protect them while they’re moving their dispenser

 

[ColtWalker1847]

I'd just like to point out that the Islamic "engineers" noted aren't really. The universities in Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and Iran are first and foremost religious institutions. They spend all their time studying the government-sanctioned variety of Islam by rote and get a couple science classes on the side. The reason being that people who graduate get placed in leadership positions in society and the king or mullahs or whoever don't want anybody in a position of power thinking too differently. Especially about the ruling regime.

Most of these guys end up as government rubber-stampers for foreign contractors who actually do the work.

 

[MuuMuu Bunnylips]

I always thought the little bastard was untrustworthy.