Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-9-2009

[andrewducker]

• One in Four
  Sexual Assault Statistics in the USA
  (tags: feminism statistics rape assault usa)
• Scouts to no longer bring penknives on camping trips
  Oh for goodness sake.
  (tags: news UK safety EpicFail)
• Floating challenge for offshore wind turbine
  A close-up look at the turbine floating in the North Sea. I really hope they can work the bugs out of this one...
  (tags: energy environment technology wind ocean renewables)
• Salem hypothesis - a name for a correlation that has been observed amongst scientists, between subscribing to creationism and working in an engineering discipline.
  A disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" - "why argue when there is one best solution" - and of "simplism" - ˜if only people were rational, remedies would be simple".
  (tags: creationism engineering philosophy aspergers)
• People with engineering degrees are massively overrepresented when it comes to terrorism
  The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12 economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences. The over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant groups in the sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
  
  A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.
  (tags: terrorism engineering aspergers)

Comments

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

It always boggles me that engineers are particularly prone to IDish leanings... the one year I spent failing studying Engineering left a lasting impression that it's a discipline of finding the right compromises to strike given ad-hoc models with significant error bars; it left me with a profound feeling that we've reached our current technological achievements largely through cut-and-try and studying the failures... which, really, is something like evolution. (My faculty really drove into first-year students the frequency and costs of engineering failures and the importance of learning from them... there was even a full-time mandatory course on ethics as applied to the field.)

-- Steve does admit that it's directed evolution, as opposed to natural selection, which perhaps accounts for some of the woo in the discipline.

[andrewducker]

I suspect what you're seeing are a bunch of people who aren't very good engineers - the aspie-types who want a nice simple answer to everything "There's a right way of doing things, and a wrong way of doing things, here's the right way." rather than seeing life as a series of compromises. You get these people everywhere - but I suspect that engineering calls to them, with the idea that they can build something and if they do it right, then it will work!

[robhu.livejournal.com]

No, that's not the case. You get engineers at the level of university professor who are creationists, like Andy McIntosh (Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory at the University of Leeds - is that science or engineering? It's got quite an engineering lean, either way), and he's not alone.

[andrewducker]

Generally speaking academics fall onto the "theoretical" side of things like engineering, rather than the pragmatic side, which means that they tend to prefer nice simple theories to complex realities. Not always true, but it does seem to be a tendency. Certainly happens in comp-sci a lot.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I also suspect (and forgot to note in my previous comment) that the bias towards engineers in the terror sample is largely effect and not cause; MBA and B.Sci degrees lead to obtaining fewer skills useful in making bombs and finding the key load-bearing structures than a B.Eng; those planning mayhem would be drawn to engineering as a result.

-- Steve thinks that there are more terrorists drawn to Engineering than there are engineers drawn to Terrorism. It'd certainly be an interesting facet to study.