Why are Engineers always lunatics?

raymond said:
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.
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ah you've never used EPIC or meditech.
people die because they're so shitty.

this thread is already plaqued with engineers trying to defend stupid beliefs. I think it's periphery blindness. they only really know anything about what's right in their face, they have no brain left over for anything else.
 
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It's not my fault the OP spelled "right" as "lunatics".

Also, what exactly are you talking about? Which stupid beliefs are being defended in this thread?
 
Engineers aren't lunatics, but most lunatics tend to be engineers. Not the same.

ICametoLurk said:
Among Islamic terrorists trained in the West, nearly 60 percent came from engineering,
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My guess for this would be that these people would assume that a real career has more chances to earn a good payment rather than, say, social studies. They aren't wrong. A sociologist is eevn more useless in the Middle East than in America.
 
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MuuMuu Bunnylips said:
Scotty-scotty-8484425-720-530.jpg


I always thought the little bastard was untrustworthy.
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He cannae change the laws of physics!
 
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ICametoLurk said:
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?
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Autistic people tend to become engineers.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361397011010

ColtWalker1847 said:
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.
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This includes western educated Muslims.

Islam is a communal religion so most Muslims just learn from their Imam - who is expected to have a mastery of Islamic history and an understanding of traditional Islam. Engineers cut through the bullshit and go right to the Quran like Protestants.
 
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I have regular interactions with engineers in my role. The amount of practical engineers who understand the actual operation of the things they design are few and far between.

Unfortunately the amount if God complex engineers I come in contact with outway the good ones. An engineer should always be paired with someone who knows what and how the design from the engineer should work and then translates that into a real life construction.

The ivory tower thing is real. And its not helped by the thousands of poor quality civil engineers being churned out by shitty third world institutions every 2 years calling themselves "qualified." strangely even with only 2 years training these same engineers are more than capable of arguing a point almost like all engineers are trained to argue with each other over the smallest things.

Tldr: engineer god complex is real and already present in this thread. The real engineers are being pushed out by cheap pajeets and quality of work is being compromised.

Don't forget most civil engineers only focus on the strands they are trained in for a few months at a time during their training. They then move to the next discipline. This is why they design things and move on and very little thought is given to what is practical and the build is given to others. As it should be.
 
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On NPR, they were saying that most of those Islamic engineers-turned-jihadists are not so much products of the engineering curriculum as they are products of the international student culture shock phenomenon. Most of the jihadist engineer types did part of their degree in the US or Europe, and they developed an adverse reaction to the socially liberal Western society which, combined with exposure to the concept of fundamentalism vis-a-vis Protestant Christianity, convinced them to bring radicalism back to their home country.
 
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Most engineers I've known personally have been very weird people, and I've often assumed it's a combination of engineering drawing socially stunted people who do well with extremely technical subjects and normal people turning into weirdos thanks to the extreme social isolation you need to do well in that field, unless you're some sort of natural math and science genius.

I could see these things correlating with antisocial behavior and beliefs.

I also wonder how much of this is the draw of being the only person smart enough to see the "truth". A lot of reasonably smart people buy into really stupid conspiracy theories because they think it validates their intelligence and makes them special.

In the long run, I don't care that much about randos believing in stupid shit, but I do hate fake experts. Bill Nye needs to shut up about evolutionary biology and let his ghostwriter(s) take the actual credit, and engineers have no business claiming expertise in climate science.
 
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Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
It's not my fault the OP spelled "right" as "lunatics".

Also, what exactly are you talking about? Which stupid beliefs are being defended in this thread?
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about half the things people claiming they are engineers have posted are foolish beliefs.
everyone saying they're an engineer... who cares? it's like saying "as a true & honest woman"
 
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cuddle striker said:
about half the things people claiming they are engineers have posted are foolish beliefs.
everyone saying they're an engineer... who cares? it's like saying "as a true & honest woman"
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The only person I saw posting foolish beliefs or saying they are an engineer was me.

Yeah the god complex is real, but hard to avoid when 90% of people really don't know what the fuck they are doing and you have to fix their nonsense while they insist it works perfectly.

The "Smartest guy in the room" complex is definitely inherent. Of course, actual good engineers avoid acting this way, since actual good engineering is all about gathering information and logically making sense of it and designing experiments to figure out more of it. So a good engineer listens to non-technical people talk about things they are actually familiar with, even if they don't understand the inner workings.

You do get the assholes who will flat out tell a mechanic he's wrong that two parts physically don't go together, then 4 hours later conclude that the parts actually don't go together, and explain it in excruciating (and often completely wrong) detail to their boss, taking credit for figuring out the problem. But then you also get the operators insisting a machine did something you flat out know is impossible...

Engineering is a wide discipline though. In my experience in the controls engineering world, we're the weirdos of the weirdos, normal engineers think we're all crazy.
 
raymond said:
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.
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Whoa there. I worked for a medical company you would recognize writing a clinical information system. It was the most buggiest piece of shit I have ever seen.

We were also under FDA oversight and the FDA can shut you down overnight. I prayed for an audit. Though to be fair we were classed as an investigational tool only, the lowest ranking.

Things like hamilton ventilators or marquette trams were a different class, but they also had their code fuck ups.

We only had one MDR (medical death report, required report to FDA) while I was working there, but we were able to mitigate it away.
 
Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
The only person I saw posting foolish beliefs or saying they are an engineer was me.

Yeah the god complex is real, but hard to avoid when 90% of people really don't know what the fuck they are doing and you have to fix their nonsense while they insist it works perfectly.

The "Smartest guy in the room" complex is definitely inherent. Of course, actual good engineers avoid acting this way, since actual good engineering is all about gathering information and logically making sense of it and designing experiments to figure out more of it. So a good engineer listens to non-technical people talk about things they are actually familiar with, even if they don't understand the inner workings.

You do get the assholes who will flat out tell a mechanic he's wrong that two parts physically don't go together, then 4 hours later conclude that the parts actually don't go together, and explain it in excruciating (and often completely wrong) detail to their boss, taking credit for figuring out the problem. But then you also get the operators insisting a machine did something you flat out know is impossible...

Engineering is a wide discipline though. In my experience in the controls engineering world, we're the weirdos of the weirdos, normal engineers think we're all crazy.
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there's a handful of people saying they're engineers. and I said "half the beliefs" I think. so, half your post, half of whatever they posted.
 
millais said:
Most of the jihadist engineer types did part of their degree in the US or Europe, and they developed an adverse reaction to the socially liberal Western society which, combined with exposure to the concept of fundamentalism vis-a-vis Protestant Christianity, convinced them to bring radicalism back to their home country.
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I mean, an adverse reaction is really the only logical one to have to that shit.
 
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