Last week I ended the post by stating my belief that Engineers’ tendency to think unscientifically is caused by 3 distinct factors: Education, Job Functions, and Career Advancement.
Today, I’ll dive into each of those areas in an attempt to support my own (admittedly biased) root-cause analysis.
Oh and while I’m at it, Ayn Rand still sucks, and it turns out she’s a hypocrite.
Continue reading Why do Engineers prefer to think unscientifically? Part 2 of 2
This is a topic I’ve been mulling over for quite some time. It’s a hard concept to express, since it hits so close to home for me. But after recently reading a discussion about the topic on Reddit, I felt I needed to use my “bully pulpit” and speak my mind.
So here’s the issue. Engineers are, without a doubt, trained in hard science. My education consisted of math topics up to Partial Differential Equations, and physics topics ranging from chemistry, thermodynamics, materials science, aerodynamics, and space physics. I think it’s safe to say that most engineers understand Newton’s Laws of Motion, along with many other core scientific theories outside of their personal scientific discipline.
With that being said, why is it that engineers often fall into the logical traps of the un-scientific mainstream media and pseudo-scientific topics? This is, in fact, a quantified effect, and has been given a name, “The Salem Hypothesis”, and is discussed in various forums online, including RationalWiki.
This is part 1 of 2 of my analysis of the assumptions in the Salem Hypothesis, and let me just begin by saying that I, for one, blame Ayn Rand.
Continue reading Why do Engineers prefer to think unscientifically? Part 1 of 2