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 had a Ph.D. in transport engineering. Several Fascist members during World War 2 were engineers, several members of the Flat Earth movement were engineers, the majority of climate change denial is from engineers.
Is the Knack (as Scott Adams called it) make engineers insane?
Engineers are the people that take the theoretical bullshit into the real world. So part of the job is the mindset of cutting through the bullshit, because at the end of the day, the thing has to actually do something.
The experience of doing this for a long time leads to a type of Dunning/Krueger type thing where the engineers start to believe they know much more about how things work than most people, and apply that thinking outside their areas of expertise.
Engineers also know from experience a lot of the accepted theory stuff is complete bullshit because they're the ones who have to actually make stuff work. It's basically a sense of self reliance taken to the extreme.
And part of the problem is, they're not wrong. The majority of people have no fucking idea what they're talking about. If you don't have to make it work at the end of the day, it's a lot easier to believe in theory than when you're the guy actually applying the theory and seeing it not work. You also get shitloads of hands on experience that all the other supposed experts are fucking idiots who are wrong half the time.
You've also got to keep in mind, engineering is applied science. Engineers are deeply familiar with the scientific method as they are using it constantly to do their job. Engineers thus know a lot more about proper experimental design than the average person, and thus are more able to call out poorly designed studies. Again, this can be taken too far.
It's funny you mention the flat earth movement, because on that Netflix special that was recently made, the focus of the whole thing was a mechanical engineer trying to prove the earth was flat. And, to his credit, the dude knew what he was doing. He designed a number of great experiments that flatly would prove or disprove that the earth was spherical. He actually performed them. Unfortunately, for him, his well designed experiments proved the earth was NOT flat. Repeatedly. Actually, that particular group created a number of good experiments, they just abandoned the scientific method when it kept telling them they were wrong. AKA publication bias.
Now, on the climate change denier thing, I have a bit of a beef, but before I get into it, what do you mean when you say "Climate Change Denial"? Is that the position that the climate does not change? Or is it disagreeing with the specific claims of anthropogenic global warming?
The generic term "climate change" is something only the stupidest person on earth would disagree with. We have outrageous amounts of evidence that the climate does indeed change. Similarly, denying the global average temperature has been trending upward for a while is a silly position.
See, I'm an engineer, and I can't help doing just that. Part of the problem is I'm constantly confronted with evidence that yeah, 90% of people have no fucking clue what they're talking about. It's impossible not to internalize that to some degree.
