Can't wait for governors to say that, out of abundance of caution, they won't accept engineers into their state. https://t.co/MZsVp3tH9y
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) November 17, 2015
NEVER ARGUE WITH THE NUMBERS, THAT’S JUST SCIENCE. True, they tend to be rigid conformists with severely limited interpersonal skills, but with patience and understanding most engineering majors can be trained to enjoy happy and even socially useful lives… I get a strong whiff of “tongue so firmly in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice.” From Henry Farrell’s Washington Post article:
… In a forthcoming book published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta, a renowned sociologist at the European University Institute in Italy, and Steffen Hertog, an associate professor, provide a new theory for why it is that engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. The following post is based on their earlier article for the European Journal of Sociology.
Engineers are much more likely to become fundamentalist terrorists
… More than twice as many members of violent Islamist organizations have engineering degrees as have degrees in Islamic studies. Nearly half of those terrorists who had degrees had degrees in engineering. Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance. They find a similar pattern among Islamist terrorists who grew up in the West – fewer of these terrorists had college degrees, but even more of those who had degrees were engineers…This isn’t because engineers are technically skilled or belong to certain social networks
Terrorist organizations don’t seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy. They don’t actually need many people with engineering skills. Many of the engineers in Hamas, for example, play administrative roles. Nor is the abundance of engineers explained by social networks (in which, for example, a couple of engineers might have been recruited initially, who would then recruit friends who would also be more likely to be engineers).It seems that engineers are common in clusters of terrorists that sprang up independently from each other, suggesting that there is some underlying factor that makes engineers more likely to be militants.
Engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of mindset and lack of opportunity…
Survey data indicates that engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists.Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it. They quote the famous right-wing economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argues that people with engineering training “react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar.”…
While many of my life-long friends and acquaintances are engineers of one stripe or another, I certainly don’t think any of them could be called terrorists. Quite a few capital-L Libertarians, and a second outsized cluster of committed Marxists, but then who doesn’t experiment with exotic impractical ideologies during their college days?…
***********
Apart from picking on engineers (and Repub pants-pissers), what’s on the agenda for the day?
Late Night Open Thread
Baud
It always struck me that most terrorists and criminals were men, but there’s never been a movement to institutionalize discrimination against men.
But even the slightest disparity based on race, religion, or nationality gives rise to an entire discipline on how we must deal with the threat.
OzarkHillbilly
Speaking of a lack of self awareness:
Wasn’t it just yesterday I read about another fine upstanding example of good old fashioned white Christian(?) Texas values? You know, the one that ended up with 6 dead people?
Also: Hundreds of thousands of Texas women attempted self-induced abortion – study
Because it’s Texas.
Schlemazel
@OzarkHillbilly:
When the day comes that we finally are sick of Texas’s shit and let them go be their own (third world) nation we will need a wall around the asylum. We have to make Texas pay for it.
Satby
I do see some pushback from people against the “no refugees” crowd on FB, and the usual people echoing rightwing talking points have been pretty quiet. I’m sure they’re just waiting for better talking points, but for now, on my feed people reject the notion we need to refuse refugees. And that gives me some hope, however slim.
Zinsky
Now that you mention it, I don’t recall ever reading about a homicidal accountant!
BillinGlendaleCA
Couldn’t take any more of “Morning Republicans”, they really do seem to over estimate how much planning goes into something like what happened in Paris.
The Other Bob
One piece of (unsolicited) advice I give my single, liberal friends who are women: don’t date engineers or guys who listen to country music.
Seems I have been onto something.
Tommy
A few things. One, I made my living working with engineers for Fortune 200 firms. EDS, Lucent, AT&T. HP. I was the dude that said I read your data sheet, get we are supposed to produce a few more for you, but could you explain your optical data switch? It seems pretty cool. That I seemed to care what they made for a living, asked about it, well that worked well for me.
Sidebar: I saw some of the most kick ass tech in the world by just showing a little interest.
My state, what I think is the great state of Illinois, has said we don’t want any Syrian immigrants. WTF!
Dad, who is not what you’d call a liberal, but I got mom and dad to vote with us at this point. We got in a heated debate about immigrants yesterday. Dad said to me, “Tommy I hate to disagree with you, but I can’t disagree with you more. We shouldn’t let these people in.”
I think this was right after said parents asked me to find a distant family member on Facebook and reach out to her. Saw this post:
Think that would be the parents of Jesus. I was like “Like,” “Like,” can I “Like” this post a few hundred more times?
Starfish
@Baud: It’s called radical feminism.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: I love the “while on foreign soil” horseshit from Steele.
Schlemazel
@Tommy:
I have worked with engineers and computer geeks all my life and found a slightly higher than average number of socially awkward guys in the mix. Maybe autistic or maybe on the spectrum but defiantly not good at personal interaction. Accounting was the next largest pool of those types. Maybe that is part of the explanation for their propensity to show up in terror activities.
BTW – I see that Anonymous has declared war on ISIS. I guess they really will be screwed by 72 virgins!
Starfish
I know why this happens!
1) Engineers figure that they can make some simplified assumptions and come up with something better because that is what they do with math all the time. This is why things like Libertarianism are so so appealing. Finally! An easily understood set of rules for politics.
2) Because of job scarcity, there is none of this American follow your dreams nonsense. You are going to be a doctor or an engineer if you are going to college so you can support yourself. No other fields of study are legitimate.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone:)
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Didn’t make it that far, I turned it off when Joe was complaining about SecState Kerry’s comments about how easy it is for a bunch of guys to shoot up a restaurant. The only thing I see that required much technical know how and planning was the suicide vests, and that may be available via teh google.
JO'N
90% of the Chinese leadership (in the Politburo) are engineers, too.
bemused
Jeb Bush said he thought Syrian refugees could prove they are Christian. When a reporter asked him how they could prove they were Christian, he couldn’t answer that, shrugging and saying if they couldn’t prove it, you have to err on the side of caution. I burst out laughing but it really isn’t funny. Jeb is a deeply stupid man.
OzarkHillbilly
@The Other Bob: I like country music, well, real country music anyway, you know, Hank Williams, NOT Hank Williams Jr, I like Willie Nelson and Jonny Cash and Mother Maybell Carter, NOT Taylor Swift or Garth Brooks. Tho, truth be told, I’ve never listened to anything by Taylor Swift or Garth Brooks, they might be fine artists, but… They get airplay on today’s country music radio and I can’t stand 95% of what gets played there. Makes me wonder how that 5% gets on.
Tommy
My family tree:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/webranding/23079900502/
I get really emotional about immigration. Family came here in the 1870s. Great, great, grandfather was a letter writer. Bet he’d post to a place like this. A letter we here him saying “I dug coal.”
“employment was hard, and “I “worked the rails.”
That is all said in a letter written for an election.
He wanted to be a judge and won. One generation and from an immigrant to elected official. Has to hurt the mind of the far right.
Kay
I know it will continue and there will be governor’s statements and congressional resolutions, but I just think it’s ridiculous. If you want to come into this country and cause harm, there are a lot of easier ways than applying as a refugee. It would be much easier to just come in with this huge group of people who are short stays:
This isn’t a real debate. It’s one of two things- pandering to fear or political maneuvering to promote a national security brand.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: I Dreamed I Was There.
RSA
@Starfish:
I’ve had similar thoughts about libertarians, going in the reverse direction. That is, why does there seem to be an affinity between libertarians and information technology? My uninformed speculation is that computers give you an environment, an entire virtual world, that follows rules, and if you work hard you can understand those rules, even make them. Also, your portion of the world is pretty much under your complete control.
bystander
ABC reporting that a female terrorist was one of the people killed in the St. Denis raids overnight. “She detonated her own suicide belt.”
There’s something oddly redundant about that sentence, but then you wonder how many suicide belts are there in Paris. More sad than scary, but still.
RSA
@bemused:
Doesn’t Jeb read the Bible?
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Tex Ritter, another one.
Another Holocene Human
fuck the server
anyway, so this turned up
Radley Balko, but he’s been reliable lately. I’ve never heard of the place he’s linked but I wonder if it’s been discussed. From previous reporting it should be clear that cops are seizing more cash and other valuables than at any time since WWII. Studs Terkel took GD oral history about cops being thieves and it was apparently common knowledge. Post WWII NYPD which was made famous for its crookery mostly shook down illegal businesses to keep the graft under the radar.
Matt McIrvin
In online fora where people discuss evolution and creationism, there’s a well-known adage called the Salem Hypothesis (after Bruce Salem of talk.origins): a creationist who claims scientific expertise is nearly always an engineer. Electrical engineers seem particularly prone.
Baud
@RSA:
Maybe Jeb would ask them what they think about Obama.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Schlemazel:
I’ll note that in my generation (HS in the ’70s) the socially awkward and the good at math were deliberately steered toward engineering as a career path. The people putting those recommendations together explicitly said that these were careers that didn’t require dealing with the public.
I have so wanted to find those people and ask WTF they were thinking. They obviously didn’t actually know any engineers.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: Well said, Baud. You got my vote.
It’s kind of how each white murderer is a one off and Black murderers are more proof of the disfunction of the Black family and culture, yadda yadda. Even if they’re coated in white supremacist tattoos or killed their mom first when they started their spree.
BillinGlendaleCA
@RSA: I was thinking something along the lines of the “ordeal by water”.
Another Holocene Human
@Schlemazel: We’ll need to organize an evac, though.
BillinGlendaleCA
I told the wife that Bobby Jindal had gotten out of the GOP Presidential race, she said “who?”.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
You told her about me though, right?
OzarkHillbilly
@bystander: I have read that suicide belts/vests quite often have a cell phone trigger just in case the person loses their nerve at the last minute.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Of course, outreach; you know.
Baud
Be careful Juicers.
I blame Obama.
Another Holocene Human
@The Other Bob: I’m not sure the country music thing works in the South. I know a couple of women who are members of minority groups (hated, even) who have dated white guys who listened to country music with fair results. They paid more attention to how the guy treated them.
Country has changed, too. What’s playing these days is this bro-country which is about exactly as misogynistic as what’s on the pop and R&B channels (unless it’s a woman singing, then with country as with the others the lyrics might be more feminist or even directly critical of what the guys are singing–or not). The really tribalistic stuff still gets rotation, but the towering hypocrisy-themed music of the 70s, 80s, 90s-ish isn’t as dominant. (“I’m a Kriss Chin, but I’m addicted to adultery.”)
It is also musically bland, which many people have complained about.
The Other Bob
@OzarkHillbilly:
I also tell women to avoid guys who drive large pickup trucks, even though I drive one…its a symptom, not a rule. As far as country music: Its the modern pro-southern shit that drives me nuts.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human: Or the genderedness of sucking at math. It’s always members of the marked case or non-dominant group who get their faults attributed to the group they’re in.
bemused
@RSA:
Jeb and the others who would allow only Christian Syrian refugees here need to get serious with a Q&A religious test for refugees to fill in to prove they are actually Christian. Of course, there would be a lot of squabbling among them about the questions. I can’t picture any of them agreeing on what constitutes a proper Christian, not when they interpret the Bible to suit their beliefs, cough agendas.
Republican governors and candidates who are against accepting Syrian refugees, Christian test or not, are ignorant, stupid and self-serving, but mostly self-serving. They are deliberately ratcheting up the xenophobia in this country and I think the inevitable increased hatred and violence towards non-white immigrants here should be laid right on their doorsteps.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Thanks. I figure that if every Juicer does outreach to their spouse, and then those people do outreach to their spouses, and so forth and so on, I got a real shot at this thing.
NorthLeft12
@Satby: I am new to Facebook, and take every opportunity I get to comment against those foolish memes that want to stop Canada from bringing any refugees in. There appear to be a lot of like minded people, although I am finding that FB seems to work like an echo chamber…..you only see posts that fit your profile. I have not had any back and forths with any of my FB contacts.
My step-brother in law did pull one idiotic meme, when I reminded him that my Dad was a refugee. Although the sad part is, I think my Dad is likely an anti-refugee advocate too. He thinks the people currently trying to enter Canada are not doing it for the same reasons that he did and are therefore not the “right kind of people”. Yeah, we had a pretty animated discussion about what that meant.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I blame Charlie Sheen.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I think that may only work in Utah.
OzarkHillbilly
@The Other Bob: Damn! That’s 2 strikes against me!! Please don’t tell my wife. ;-)
Calouste
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz all studied political science. They are the cause of a lot more deaths than a few Islamist engineers.
Kay
@Baud:
What happened with ebola, BTW? I haven’t heard a word about it after the 24/7 breaking news coverage of the crisis. The crisis must be solved. Putting that one nurse under house arrest did the trick.
Another Holocene Human
@Schlemazel: People on the spectrum are often drawn to “lotsa numbers + limited social interaction” jobs, but you’ll have to do better than anecdata to convince me that that particularly learning disability leads to black/white rigid thinking.
I went to engineering school (for grad, though–did science undergrad, science is very different), I ran into a lot of dull souls there, dull in every way. (Let’s cheat on tests even though we’re in grad school. Sure, that’s legit.) They weren’t on the spectrum that I could tell, and I’m pretty good at sussing out the signs, after all, I had them too.
Being on the spectrum could push you that way because of social anxiety that conditioned because of all of those social learning problems early in life leading to shall we say negative feedback from your age mates. But I personally think engineering EDUCATION is a lot of the problem.
Also, I haven’t met too many people on the spectrum in accounting. It seems to attract a lot of normies.
I note that the GP states that Islamic studies majors were half as likely to be found among the terrorists as engineers. It’s pretty well known that studying religion and religious texts seriously tends to shatter fundamentalism for all but the most block-headed/dedicated/dishonest.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: Speaking of Utah: Jackie Biskupski elected as Salt Lake City’s first openly gay mayor
Baud
@Kay:
Obama didn’t take it seriously enough and we’re all dead now.
Balloon Juice is heaven.
NorthLeft12
@The Other Bob: Funny, I tried to discourage my two daughters from becoming Engineers or being involved with any too. My youngest married an Engineer a couple of years ago and they now have a one year old boy scooting around the house. Frankly, IMO it was the best decision she has made in her relatively young life. The guy is a real keeper.
By the way, I am a Chemical Engineer.
OzarkHillbilly
@bemused: The problem they have with coming up with a test for Christians is that it has to be simple enough for them to pass too. Imagine how embarrassing it would be for JEB? if he failed. Would that mean he has to leave?
Starfish
@Another Holocene Human: Well said! I had no good way of explaining the modern crap that is considered country music. Every time I see it, I wonder “What the hell happened here?”
bemused
@NorthLeft12:
Two of our kids are engineers, one chemical and the other electrical/computer, neither of them fit the geeky, socially awkward engineer stereotypes and have never been drawn to libertarianism or other ideologies. They do like precision as they keep meticulous records of their batches of beer brews.
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
lol
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish: That’s because a physicist already did all the work for them. That’s why that bullshit works.
Some things AREN’T overengineered, though, and don’t work. Then they fall back on “if everyone’s doing it, they can’t sue us for doing it and prevail.” Even though the common method is provably stupid.
See? It’s the schooling. They train engineers to be incurious and callous.
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish: Hip hop happened. Seriously. They are trying to compete. Hip hop was the #1 genre in the early 2000s. Outkast was the #1 group.
Starfish
@NorthLeft12: I am also new on Facebook, and the lifestyle and culture section under ad preferences is interesting. Facebook can decide your politics, your ethnicity, and your religion.
Darkrose
@Another Holocene Human: I kind of love messing with people by turning up the Sturgill Simpson REAL LOUD when I’m driving, Or better yet, the driving mix that includes Gloria Gaynor, the main theme from Skyrim, the “Dies Irae” from Mozart’s Requiem, and Johnny Cash.
Another Holocene Human
@OzarkHillbilly: If you have a test for Christians, a holy war will break out. Iron law of Christendom.
Another Holocene Human
@Darkrose: From some reason, popular music fans love to rock out to Dies Irae.
I have some death metal Handel that I prefer. If you would translate the latin lyrics into English, it is very death metal. Old Testament wrath kind of stuff. (Dixit Dominus)
bemused
John Kasich has a terrific idea! We need a new federal agency to promote Judeo-Christian values throughout the world as a way to combat the Islamic State. Oh right, that’ll work. He wants to beam messages about the Western ethics of freedom, opportunity, respect for women…
Hey, John, how about we clean up our own backyard before lecturing the neighbors over the fence on values.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Holocene Human: According to JEB?, Cruz, Huckabee, and Trump, the holy war has already broken out.
Starfish
@Another Holocene Human: I went to engineering school.
And the hiphop thing… I guess that with anything that is popular, there is a bunch of derivative material in the same genre until the last cent has been made, and then everyone complains about how whatever it was that was popular is now completely crap.
What bothered me about hiphop was all these young people who probably have no money and no hoes singing about how they have money, hoes, cars, and booze. It is just not believable that you, the 25-year-old dude, singing on the TV in some section of some department store (that is branded as edgy) have any of the things you are singing about. If anything, your song is just there to advertise the cars and the booze like “Sex in the City” was there to advertise expensive shoes.
Gimlet
@bemused:
Can we spread those Judeo-Christian values the way we spread “Freedom” with bombs and stuff?
Baud
As president, I would establish a new federal commission to promote pastafarian values across the globe.
Another Holocene Human
@OzarkHillbilly: Ah, but the internecine war has been laying dormant for a while.
The Syrians I know are Catholics, and not American Jesus racist conservative Catholics either, more like Syrian Rite “we have the oldest liturgy” Catholics. JEBbers is a convert, Marco has been living in sin with other religions, so who does that leave, Santorum? More importantly, how can he make a buck off of it?
Starfish
@Baud: Would the pastafarian headdress be mandatory? What would you do to increase the number of pirates in order to fight global warming?
bemused
@Gimlet:
Why not, it went so well previously.
raven
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Better than getting “steered”to the green machine,
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish: All of that “look at my luxury brands” hip hop makes me want to gag. It does seem like it exists to sell shit. Of course it’s also selling the aspirational brand of the hip hop artist in question. There’s plenty of hip hop, even very commercial hip hop, that doesn’t suck, but the “go through life drunk and stupid” stuff seems to get a lot of air play.
Maybe it IS underwritten by General Motors Corporation.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Another Holocene Human: Plus the whole “let’s recycle 1970s rock and call it country” fad in the ’90s. Every time we went back to Tennessee, WSM was wall to wall covers of Dr. Hook and Creedence.
I forget the song now (it was something from Dr. Hook), but my father-in-law asked us at one point “Don’t you think this song is great?” and my husband replied, “Eh, I thought it was OK when I first heard it back in the ’70s.”
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish:
What’s your opinion of the education you received? How does it compare to other flavors like humanities, science, and vocational?
Baud
@Starfish:
Yeah, I’m gonna punt those questions to the commission.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gimlet: We haven’t been able to spread them here without so maybe we should try that here first?
Iowa Old Lady
Despite having a PhD in English, I’ve spent most of my life around engineers–taught them, studied them, married one, gave birth to one. I have no explanation for them.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@raven: This was post-Watergate. Not much of that happening any more.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Here’s the chair for your commission.
debbie
@bemused:
Glenn Beck’s got a private campaign going to bring Christian Syrians into this country (He’s raised more than $10 million so far). Yesterday, he said he had a very careful vetting process for ensuring they’re really Christians: Interview their pastor/priest/minister. If they’ve been baptized, etc., in Bekc’s mind, they’re guaranteed to be safe.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish: People who have no money or power are going to like fantasies about having lots of money and power. It’s the same reason James Bond behaves the way he does: in 1950s-60s Britain, it was a particularly incredible fantasy just to have a job where you got to go to live like a high-roller, drive a fancy car around and go to exotic places on your expense account, even before you get to the fabulous women and the license to kill.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Iowa Old Lady: I was raised by a EE. While not an Engineering major, half my undergrad major was Engineering courses.
We should all remember that “history’s greatest monster” is an Engineer.
Applejinx
@Gimlet: They called it the Crusades.
Heck, they STILL DO. Apparently ISIS statements harp on ‘crusaders’. Gotta love how the right wing xenophobe Christianist nutjobs absolutely play into their hands. Muslims are astonishingly tolerant of this garbage considering how many wingnuts are eagerly ramping up exactly the sort of Christian Crusade thinking that was a problem in the first place.
DAESH is exactly as wrong as our homegrown Crusaders, and neither properly represent the majority of people.
My hope is that, with global information across the internet, enough little glimpses of cooperation and sanity sneak through the battle walls that it becomes untenable to carry on global religious wars beyond these splinter groups. I think it’s nice that President Obama is not shy about calling out Crusades bullshit (though not refering directly to it) as bullshit.
Maybe next it will be necessary to openly call it out, because just as Fox News will do anything to avoid airing anti-jihad Muslim sentiment no matter how important the speaker, the Jihad media will do anything to avoid airing a Westerner refusing to engage in Crusading. It’s a little more difficult to silence the US President, his words will get out there. Maybe he needs to use the specific words in question, to say something like the following:
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Another Holocene Human: As with everything, it depends on the school. I attended two engineering schools and have dealt with graduates from at least three more, and it very much depends on the school.
bemused
@debbie:
Only a few questions? That doesn’t sound very “Christian” unless Beck isn’t a fundamentalist type. I don’t know what type of Christian he claims to be.
I would think a fundamentalist Christian test would have to include the question, have you been saved and how many times? More points for multiple times God saves them.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human:
The accounting majors I knew in college were genial dudebros who were heavily interested in partying and getting laid. Sales and marketing seem to attract similar types: when you go on a business trip with them they’re the ones who want to go out and get hammered every night, and the software engineers turn in early.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Applejinx: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@bemused: I believe Beck is LDS.
Another Holocene Human
@debbie:
Straight outta the middle ages.
Another Holocene Human
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: He did too much of it in the 70s.
Starfish
@Another Holocene Human: Well, I don’t know about vocational training because I never did any of that. I did take some humanities courses because I had to and some science courses because I had to.
As an undergrad, I was a biomedical engineer, and it was odd because it was more difficult than some of the other engineering fields with more science courses. At the time bio-informatics didn’t really exist in a formalized way so biomedical engineers either a) went to med school or b) got Ph.D.s so the M.D.s would take them seriously so I c) added enough electrical engineering courses so I could get a job.
The engineers were sad when there was not definite answers to things or if the answers to things were tricky. There are places where engineers do not have the breadth requirement that schools in the US have; and without those, you don’t get the creativity to actually come up with anything new. I borrowed the book “Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945” from some humanities person. In it, a lot of engineers end up as draftsmen, and that is still about right. There are people that flesh out ideas that were developed by other people and think that they can rise to the top and become captains of industry. And for most people, it does not happen.
Another Holocene Human
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Fair point.
debbie
@bemused:
If nothing else, this proves Kasich is GWB all over again.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Another Holocene Human: At Berkeley.
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish: You hit something with that lack of creativity thing. Don’t know how to evaluate a problem. Don’t know how to judge results. Don’t know how to think. Can’t (don’t don’t don’t don’t) think outside of the box.
Of course, in architecture, thinking outside of the box can have some seriously negative consequences, so you can see why it’s discouraged. When research scientists are total morons only some lab rats pay the price.
Baud
@debbie:
For someone whose only constituency was reasonable centrists, that seems like a dumb move. Does he think he’s going to get Carson supporters? Maybe he’s hoping to be an acceptable VP pick.
Satby
@RSA: bingo.
And also the fact that in libertarian thinking every man is an island so we shouldn’t need to pay any taxes out of our (formerly) higher than average earnings.
Never underestimate the influence of selfish.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve heard good things about the Hank Williams biopic but I guess we have to wait until 2016 to see it.
Baud
@RSA:
FYWP begs to differ.
RSA
@Another Holocene Human:
I work for an engineering school. This may be your experience, but I think you’re wrong in general about engineers’ schooling.
RSA
@Baud: Burn. Yes.
MattF
@Another Holocene Human: I agree (mostly) with the ‘on the spectrum’ hypothesis. Many engineers smart enough to come up with interesting explanations for events, but aren’t able to interact with others enough to really understand opposing arguments.
That said, being an engineer from a different culture is sort of a simulation of autism– you have difficulty communicating what you think, you can’t relate to what’s going on around you.
bemused
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Hmm. I didn’t think LDS was generally considered a Christian religion.
MomSense
@Kay:
She had to leave the state. Her partner had to leave nursing school. They received a considerable number of death threats! Way to go Maine.
JerryN
If you assume that engineers are small-c conservative, that translates to being about 10 years behind the rest of society. So, when I went to engineering school in the late ’70s we were reliving the ’60s – I think that might explain the cluster of Marxists noted above.
Anyway, the engineers that fit the stereotype of rigid, incurious, convinced that there’s one right answer? They got a piss-poor education or they were too dense to understand what they were being taught. It was drummed into us that there were almost always many solutions that would work technically for any given problem, so you had to consider non-technical aspects – cost, material availability, even aesthetics – to come up with the best overall solution. Which meant that you had to at least be aware of things outside the confines of yor discipline.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
It’s not a constituency you can win with anyway. Kasich’s probably just rolling the dice at this point, trying to see if something hits.
I remember Forbes magazine touting him as their favorite dark horse many months ago. Money guys like him, and he’s always the one that Democrats name as the one they’d support if you held a gun to their head and made them pick one. But this position isn’t currently a way to get the Republican nomination.
MattF
@debbie: And somehow– he doesn’t see what a government-sponsored agency to make everyone more Christian looks like to a non-Christian.
Satby
@bemused: it is by them.
Germy
@Baud:
Well, going by internet comments I’ve seen, a common refrain is “The media highlights all the cute kids and frightened women refugees, but in reality the VAST MAJORITY are single young men with no job prospects and an aggressively violent sense of entitlement.”
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@bemused: There are a number of things that would have gotten them burned for heresy a few hundred years ago, yes, and lots of finger pointing and cries of “cult!” during the 1970s, but they’ve been very useful as political allies since. So they are now kinda sorta Christian, just really really weird.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Holocene Human: He was more into Peruvian Marching Powder.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish: James Nicoll made a mildly famous old Usenet post about why so many engineers become scientific cranks, in which he speculated that it had partly to do with them being exposed to scientific concepts through simplified toy models:
Germy
@Darkrose: do you have a youtube link?
I like Sturgill Simpson. Reminds me of Hank Williams meets the Beatles Revolver.
Starfish
@JerryN: You went to engineering school in the late 70s. Things have changed a lot. Most people dealing with materials in any way has had their jobs outsourced unless they are dealing with very special materials meeting rigid specifications for use in medical devices, space, or the military. It is far less costly to buy a thing that already exists and modify it than it is to build anything from scratch or just design the thing and get someone else to build it.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
And since I can’t edit:
That’s an outside view, of course, based on fundies I have known. Obviously, the LDS consider themselves to be the True Christian Church.
bemused
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Very weird.
Starfish
@Matt McIrvin: I had never seen that.
Thanks.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s why it depends so much on the school. The first engineering university I attended hammered that into the students. “OK, so this is the absolutely more precise way to do this that we know. But that’s a very complicated equation, full of things we don’t really need to determine experimentally every time.” And also lots of “At this order of magnitude, these variables are so close to zero that they can drop out.”
The second school? Not so much.
Wyliecoat
Sorry to say this but I’ve tried to be open to this new design and get used to it, but it SUCKS. I find myself coming to this page a lot less often than I used to and it is particularly bad on the laptop and only a little better on the mobile.
The print is too small, the default picture is unnecessary, and the way the articles are stacked on top is just disconcerting. Looks like it was designed by an engineer
Germy
@MomSense: I remember when George Hamilton played him in 1964’s “Your Cheating Heart”
Amazing bit of casting.
RSA
@Matt McIrvin:
Thanks for the link! I’d never see that before. I think Nicoll paints a misleading picture, though, because all models are wrong (with some being useful). A much bigger problem, in my experience, is applying an inappropriate model to a given situation.
Starfish
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: The day that I learned that most random number generators could not pass the tests for randomness, I was very sad and confused.
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: To be perfectly fair: Physicists (I was trained as one) are notorious for doing a similar thing when they dabble in non-physics fields. In that case, they’ll notice that some system in the other discipline can be modeled roughly by a system they know from physics, and they’ll crank through it and present it as an amazing novel discovery without doing the literature search to see if the Fooists already have an equivalent or better version of that approach, perhaps under a different name. They’re physicists, so of course they just came up with something brilliant.
amk
meanwhile, in the real heathens world
ABC News
✔
@ABC
NEW: Pres. Hollande commits to taking 30,000 refugees in next 2 years; says France has duty to honor that commitment. “Life must go on.”
6:12 PM – 18 Nov 2015
Paul in KY
I also think some already depraved engineers gravitate towards that shit, cause they get to build ‘cool’ bombs & whatnot.
Starfish
@Wyliecoat: People were talking about “The Other Chuck” having a CSS stylesheet. Can someone give us a link to that?
A kludge for the posts would be to take the URLs and paste them into readability and use their link to see if that gives you a better experience. You won’t see comments; but drunken balloon guy goes away, and the fonts become nicer.
Paul in KY
@Schlemazel: Snare drum roll on that last quip!
Germy
Anyone here from San Francisco?
Here is a brief, wonderful clip of Market Street, taken from a trolley. Filmed before the big quake, around 1901 or so.
Musical accompaniment by Cliff Edwards, who I wish someone would make a movie about.
RSA
@Starfish: Here. The Other Chuck has done a stellar job.
Paul in KY
@NorthLeft12: What was the ‘right’ reason? Want to experience great maple syrup? Drink lots of beer with polite people? Really, really, really enjoy snow?
Paul in KY
@Calouste: I studied Political Science too. Make of it what you will…
Paul in KY
@NorthLeft12: Obviously, it was all pheromes…
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: Have seen Outkast 3 times. Great, great act. 1st time, had only ever heard ‘Hey Ya’. Now I’m somewhat of an expert on them.
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: Check out a band called Babymetal. All the rage in Europe right now.
Starfish
@RSA: Thanks. I installed Stylish and the CSS file for stylish. Things are much improved. I am not quite sure how to install the Javascript part on Chrome.
debbie
Glenn Beck’s saying Obama’s statement yesterday made his head explode, so that’s a good thing.
He’s outraged about the reference to 3-year-old orphans and widows because he hasn’t seen them in the news reports about refugees. Even worse, having used for more than a year the example of the St. Louis as a rationale for letting Christian Syrian refugees into the US, he’s incensed that people are beginning to dare to use that same analogy for letting in Syrian Muslim refugees.
He’s also predicting another terrorist attack within 2 weeks. Hopefully, this prediction suffers the same fate as his prediction of 18,000 American deaths from Ebola by January 2015.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Starfish:
Install Tampermonkey first.
schrodinger's cat
The propensity of many Balloon Juices FPers and commenters to castigate all people working in certain professions is weird.
So far we have:
1. MBAs are evil incarnates
2. Engineers are socially challenged.
What are Balloon Juice approved majors? Tunch studies?
Paul in KY
@Starfish: If you see them on TV, singing in a video, chances are they do have money, hoes, etc. etc.
Uncle Cosmo
@Starfish:
For 8.5 years I worked as an engineer (logistics, then reliability) off an MA in Applied Math for a major US defense contractor that no longer exists in any recognizable form.
When we’d get a new batch of recent engineering grads I would take them aside & explain The Facts Of Life:
1. Price & politics rule everything; competence & good design mean nothing unless the customer is willing to pay for the product.
2. You know those school assignments that were challenging as hell to complete but you knew there was a correct answer out there waiting to be derived if you just worked hard & long & smart enough? They don’t exist in the real world. All assignments will be either trivial or intractable. You will complete the trivial ones in order for the Corporation to justify paying you out of contract funds. You will undertake (& almost certainly fail) to solve the intractable problems because no one else has managed it & hey, you might just get lucky.
It was an eye-opener for most of those kids, & it bred cynicism like raw meat breeds maggots.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodinger’s cat: Several of the people in this thread are engineers, or went to engineering schools. I’m a software guy who trained as a physicist, and God knows those fields have their pathologies (software engineers have most of the same weirdnesses as real engineers only worse).
Actually, most physicists and software engineers have not-very-unusual personalities, and that’s probably the case with engineers too. But people who are eccentric in certain specific ways tend to pop up more than usual.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: XKCD also noticed that tendency, several times.
Starfish
@schrodinger’s cat: There is not anything wrong with being socially challenged. It is why we are commenting here instead of out there talking to people.
We are having really high winds right now so being out there talking to people could poke an eye out anyway.
And this thread is the most socially respectable that I have ever been on Balloon Juice. I should get a sticker for good behavior.
JerryN
@Starfish: I studied civil engineering. I’ve been out of the field for decades, but I’m pretty sure that even in the 21st Century you still have to actually build a new building mostly from new parts. Even in the case that you describe there are probably several options to choose from in terms of existing parts that fall within the design space, so the decision will probably be governed by something like the tradeoff between cost to acquire vs. time / cost to modify, which in turn means having the ability to design and estimate the modification needs. Which still takes us outside the stereotype of black / white thinking.
Starfish
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Thanks.
The only problem that I had for the Stylish was that the username links are stripped out. For example, @schrodinger’s_cat’s username links to something, but Stylish takes that away.
schrodinger's cat
@Starfish: It links to my blog
MattF
@Uncle Cosmo: Many years ago, I had a conversation with an ex-chemical engineer. He recalled all the time and energy he spent learning the various canned methods for solving linear differential equations– and then the first ‘real world’ differential equation he had to deal with was non-linear. Ooopsie.
schrodinger's cat
@MattF: You have to know how to solve linear differential equations before you can tackle non-linear ones.
chopper
@RSA:
just show them some parsley! wait, that’s not it…
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Today’s XKCD is about the software-engineer version.
Ian
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t know why, particularly, it should be the case, but it’s pretty clear in both the stats and my own experience (I trained as a physicist and knew loads of engineers) that this is much more a phenomenon of engineers than of physicists. Way, way more conservatives in engineering departments than hard-science departments, for instance. Anecdotally the population of engineers who think they know why climate change can’t be real is vast, while among physicists it’s nearly nonexistent. And so on. I know physicists are famous for wading into other scientific fields with some arrogance, but I don’t think it stretches as far into the real world, or something.
Maybe working in the sciences requires more tolerance for uncertainty? more appreciation for serious scholarship? At any rate, there seems to be something pretty specific to engineering, which I think makes it hard to convincingly explain.
Matt McIrvin
@Ian: People with the particular complex of engineering-worship/right-wing-libertarianism/science-crankery are really common in science fiction fandom, too. Some are authors.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s a thought experiment: if the majority of 9/11 attackers were engineers, and none of them were war refugees, doesn’t that show that engineers are more dangerous than war refugees?
Sometimes absurdity will get through to people where logic will not.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@schrodinger’s cat:
Also, slightly more seriously, MBAs and engineers are frequently accused of having the same mindset, namely that their knowledge and skills are infinitely adaptable to any field, which is why engineers claim to be experts in evolution and MBAs running charter schools claim to be experts in education.
Donald Trump is an MBA from Wharton, and not atypical of the breed. He thinks that his particular expertise in running businesses into bankruptcy means that he’s an expert in All The Things. It’s an attitude that tends to be endemic to both engineers and MBAs.
(Disclaimer: my BFF is an MBA, but she’s one of the good ones. Endemic does not mean inevitable, just common. ;-)
Hob
Engineerism isn’t just a right-wing faith, it welcomes cranks of all kinds. Shortly after moving to northern California in 2003, I met a nice mellow hippie socialist person who soon revealed herself to be a 9/11 truther of the “BUT JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL BEAMS” variety. Unfortunately she got onto that subject while I was a passenger in her car so I couldn’t escape, and she was unresponsive to my increasingly desperate requests for her to change the subject, and when I finally tried to engage her argument on its merits she got very testy and showed emotion for the first time (the rest of it had been very dispassionate as rants go, like it was a logic problem rather than a mass murder) and told me “I know what I’m talking about– I’m AN ENGINEER.” Which she was– of solar panels; never had anything to do with large buildings.
She seemed to forgive me for my lack of respect for logic later, after she found out that I had witnessed the attacks, because of course that would explain why I got so emotional and irrational about a simple technical matter…
NorthLeft12
@Paul in KY: My father was a refugee from Poland in WW2. His father [my grandfather] was executed by the Russians in the Katyn Forest, and his mother with five kids was transported back to Siberia, then to Iran, then to Tanzania, then to England [after the war was over] and on to Canada. He lost two siblings along the way.
I guess he considers himself a real refugee who just wanted a safe place to live. He seems to have it in his head that the new [darker] immigrants [he really does not differentiate at all] are only interested in the “great” social programs and free health care we have here in Canada. For some dog awful reason, he cannot imagine that these people want the same thing he and his mother wanted……a safe place to live and raise a family.
They say as you age, you become more conservative. I’ll make sure my wife and kids know that they should slap me if I start getting more conservative.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: I think this fellow was on to something.
Another Holocene Human
@Ian: Not to harsh your buzz, but most climate scientists are geophysicists. So once the geophysicists had had their giant anthropogenic global climate change row, other physicists tended to accept the results of that.
Uncle Cosmo
@@MattF, schrodinger’s cat: I was a putative astrophysicist long enough ago that I recall fistfuls of standard textbooks on stellar structure–where all the systems of Difficult Equations are large & non-linear as shit–presenting carefully worked out closed-form solutions for highly restricted cases. These were mostly cut-rate Dover editions (photo-offset-litho’d paperbacks but sewn in signatures, which was cool) where the copyrights had been allowed to lapse. Why was that? Because once numbercrunching programmable computers were relatively common (ca. 1960), no one cared about closed-form solutions anymore–program up the equations, plug in initial parameter values, bang out a numerical solution, check how far off the solution is from known boundary conditions, adjust parameter values, lather/rinse/repeat–um, I mean iterate the crap out of the system until it converged.
But sometimes it didn’t. Scientists were flabbergasted but shouldn’t have been. Because they didn’t really understand the fundamental difference in principle between “sympathetic magic” and “science.” They got the former right–
but whiffed on the latter when they defined it as
In fact one cannot exactly reproduce an action, so what they meant was a variation on the old delta-epsilon proofs in calculus:
The problem is that this is only true in general for linear systems–& the frackin’ uncooperative real world is almost entirely non-linear: Initial conditions that are almost indistinguishable can produce wildly different results from a non-linear system. We call this chaos…& it didn’t rear its ugly head until we could actually traffic in non-linear systems because we had those computer programs that could generate numerical solutions for them.
Paul in KY
@NorthLeft12: Appreciate your answer, NorthLeft12. Glad he got to a safe place.