I’m confused by this: “In the USA, engineers are seven times more likely to be right wing and religious.” More likely than what? More likely than non-engineers? Really?

Dawkins: “In a recent survey, 40% of US scientists said they believed in God; however, when the sample was narrowed to those in the National Academy [the US equivalent of the Royal Society] the figure was down to 10%.”

In my experience, technical people are more inclined to be skeptical than most any other group. As iconoclasts, they are often attracted to less-mainstream perspectives, such as atheism, libertarianism, and even anarchy, so I can’t say I’m surprised to see them over-represented among extremists (not to suggest that atheists or libertarians are extremists, but they’re outside the commonplace), but that they’d be especially religious I would find counter to my experience.

it’s why the Dems lost the IT battle to Rove. GOP election machinery is pretty slick.

VL, between being religious and being fundamentalist and / or religious terrorist. you would find religiosity among all majors, to greater or lesser degrees.

The combination of religious fundamentalism and religious terrorism is the strongest among engineers (precisely because they are NOT iconoclasts)… now, granted, by definition, terrorist groups present a small sample (imagine here a lengthy discussion on methodology… I’ll spare us all :-)) but the trend is unmistakable. Al Qaeda does not recruit among soc majors!

When you believe so strongly in one set of norms that you violently reject another set of norms, I suppose that’s simultaneously extreme orthodoxy and extreme iconoclasm.

While strong in sciences, engineers are very different than scientists. It would not surprise me that scientists are less likely to believe in God or are more likely to question things. Although an oversimplification, scientists are seeking to explain phenomena using techniques that test theories. These theories either pass the tests or they don’t. It’s a very reality-based inquiry system, where questioning is a lot of the point.

Engineers don’t do this, at least not the engineers I know. They use science to build things, improve things, or make them work. They aren’t the questioners, discovering answers, they apply those answers. So it’s easy for me to see how such people could be more likely to believe that you can make people work according to set principles (just a machine would) and that they like rules and things clean and neat and tidy. I remember taking one of those personality tests for a leadership course and there was a category for folks like engineers and tax lawyers - people who want to know the rules and apply them. While I doubt that always leads to religious fundamentalism or conservative politics, I can see how that way of thinking might make the “rules” inherit in religious fundamentalism more appealing. Just as my litigation training makes me more likely to want to argue a point just because I can.

One, Engineers are likely to have higher salaries and while that is not causal with party affiliation, I think it plays some part.

Engineers like order and plans and efficiency. I think a lot of them have swallowed the bullshi- about Dems = bigger gov’t and higher taxes and gov’t programs.

They may also have trouble half-assing a belief systems. If you are going to adhere to the stuff in the Bible, then you have to take it word for word. It would be like reading a physics book and picking and choosing only the equations you like. You just can’t do it, so if you are going to play by that rulebook, you have to follow all of it.

The very way a democratic government works is an affront to engineering principles - it doesn’t work based on the best policies or most efficient practices. The entire thing is a series of compromises, bureacracies are often designed to be inefficient to promote larger values (like no consolidating too much power in any one agency), and so on. No engineer would design the government to work the way it does and, to the extent one’s thinking is affected by one’s training, no engineer is going to look at the U.S. Government, pre-Bush anyway when it acted more like it was supposed to, and think what a masterpiece of engineering.

a scientist who worked as an engineer and now I’m just plain confused. If I have one gross oversimlification to make about engineers and scientists, I would say they generally do not tend to be “people persons”.

I’m an engineer!

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

I’m an electrical engineer just outside Portland, Oregon (one of the most liberal parts of the country), and my company is chock full of right-wing religious fanatics who are also electrical engineers.

It was a really fun time starting in ~2002 when everyone was talking about how we have to murder people like me. And the french. And anyone with brown skin. Right-wing talk radio used to be all the rage in the engineering labaratories, and I was even blessed enough to hear the 2004 Democratic Convention speeches with Nazi music overlayed in the background.

On the religious side, these people are equally fucked. If you were to x-ray some of the chips we make, you’d find little Jesus fish made out of metal lines, or references to bible quotes.

Being the subversive that I am, I’ve dedicated my entire work existence to pissing people off. My cubicle is a living effigy of George W. Bush. I have a life-size Bush cardboard cutout, a talking Bush doll that I made an origami Pope hat out of, etc. I once went out of my way to solve a problem using a technique known as a “genetic algorithm” just so I could get up in front of an audience of people and talk about how awesome Darwinism is.

And I live in Portland, Oregon. I’d fucking hate to see what it’s like somewhere else.

What do engineers use for birth control?

Their personality.

Of course, I was told that joke by a scientist.

And don’t take it personally, lambert, I’m sure it doesn’t apply to engineers who are also big hunks of delicious, flavorful meat.

It was a gross oversimplification. My bad. Pardon!

((So what are you doing sitting in your jammies banging on a keyboard when you should be out interacting with the masses?))

yep
new
Submitted by intranets on Thu, 2008-03-27 15:42.

it’s why the Dems lost the IT battle to Rove. GOP election machinery is pretty slick.

Nah, the reason is that DLC managers like Terry Mac are lazy, stupid, feckless fuckups who think that they should use their offices as patronage houses while Repukes understand that without the best marketing money can buy, they’d be toast.

As a scientist who has often been led by circumstance to do engineering work without the benefit of rigorous formal training, I want to defend the majority of engineers who work hard at their profession and are decent, thoughtful and competent people. That said, there is a subset of engineers, as in any profession, who take it up not from love but in an attempt to fix some internal defect. Common among engineers are individuals who need a rational, non-intuitive approach to both problem-solving and living life; they find comfort in the notion that rules are rules that must be followed without deviation or questioning.

This thinking leads to building bridges that fall down because the wrong rules were applied for the circumstances, and also selects for exclusion from professional success and power those who cannot exhibit the least critical thinking. The most rigidly extreme individuals will find constructive engineering to be frustrating, and this in turn may drive them elsewhere for self-validation.

Engineers may well be drawn to ideological extremism including jihad for the same reasons that self-selected for the profession in the first place, but not in the proportions suggested in the text selected by FrenchDoc above. Elsewhere in their article Gambetta and Hertog say:

We were able to find the subject of study for 178 of the 196 cases who were engaged in higher education at some point (Figure 2). Unsurprisingly, we found that the second most numerous group was composed of 34 individuals who pursued Islamic studies. Yet, the group that comes first by far are indeed the engineers: 78 out of 178 individuals had studied this subject. This means that 44 per cent of those whose type of degree we know were engineers. They are followed at quite a distance by 14 cases in medicine, 12 in economics and business studies and seven in natural sciences.

– snip –

…we still have [after adjustment for country of origin enrolment and gender dominance patterns in higher education] a ratio of engineers of 38 percent (78-25/178-37) which makes their share in our sample still over twice as large as that which we would have if the proneness to radicalize were even across subjects (p<.001).

So the ratio is apparently 2:1 rather than 7:1, and even that is potentially an overstatement. The authors allow that there may be methodological errors afoot:

One could question the validity of our result. The list of names and the subset of individuals in it on whom we found information are both selected by the public availability of data, which in turn depends largely on whether the individuals came to the attention of the authorities because they were killed, captured or investigated. However, the chances of finding engineers relative to the chances of finding graduates in any other subject should be unaffected by these selection biases. For a bias to occur we would have to assume that engineers are more likely than other educated individuals to be killed, caught or investigated because of greater incompetence. This seems implausible; if anything the opposite should be the case. If they fell into the investigative net they arguably did so because they were particularly active, prone to violence and able to use it, which would indeed show the existence of the correlation that interests us.[Emphasis added.]

Their observation is correct but their interpretation is wrong. It is not incompetence per se but consequence of the pathological engineering mindset which drives a higher rate of interaction with authority, and the investigator’s methodological approach depends on these encounters happening to assign educational background. For a meaningful assessment to be made, all members of jihad or a statistically representative slice should be interviewed regarding educational background. Self-selected group assignments are seldom representative of reality. This is the kind of thinking that has been used to suggest that exercise prevents heart disease when the reality is that people with incipient cardiac insufficiency cannot exercise as well as those whose hearts are healthy. Association is not causation.

My interpretation is that while it is possible and even presumptively likely that there is some higher frequency of radicalization with engineers than for the general population, because they are relatively more active, goal-oriented personalities, there is also a bias occurring in the data collection methodology of Gambetta and Hertog. The dogmatic approach to perceiving and addressing problems that draws some engineers to jihad also leads them to fail to anticipate risk; they are thus over-represented in the proportion of jihadists captured, killed or acting out in ways that draw suspicion.

We all of us need to guard against bias; engineers, scientists and sociologists alike.

but failed engineers?

Hmmm, interesting.

Then again, failed art students…..we know how well that turned out.

among so many spheres of failure for George.