Regardless, that's just a nitpick about the article. I'm happy that these businesses are doing what they are doing.
[0] FWIW, the article cited a comment from here, so this place must be important enough to cite as an example of SV attitudes
Regardless, that's just a nitpick about the article. I'm happy that these businesses are doing what they are doing.
[0] FWIW, the article cited a comment from here, so this place must be important enough to cite as an example of SV attitudes
There's a long tradition of political extremism among engineers in cultures around the world; something to do with seeing society as a system simple enough that a single human being can understand the solutions to its problems. Hayek (who I disagree with on many points) even wrote a whole essay on it, with this very lovely point:
"It is this awareness of being part of a social process, and of the manner in which individual efforts interact, which the education solely in the sciences or in technology seems so lamentably to fail to convey. It is not surprising that many of the more active minds among those so trained sooner or later 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."
https://mises.org/library/engineers-and-planners
Gambetta and Hertog tried to quantify this, and found that engineers were over-represented (drastically) in Islamist terrorist networks, and (less drastically) in Western right-wing extremism; and that Western left-wing extremists tended more towards a humanities education. I've read lots of newspaper write-ups of the book, but haven't gotten my hands on a copy, so I don't know their speculation on the causes of the left-right split they observed in studies.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html
They also have older scholarly write-ups, which I should probably take a look at, e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-...
EDIT: So, looked at that paper at last, and it seems the right-wing stereotype of SV people is likely true. They looked at Westerners to try to make comparisons, and while they found no overrepresentation in violent groups, they did look at surveys of political views of educated people by degree. The best data they could find was about faculty members from 1984, so keep the age and restricted subset in mind.
"The results are startling (Table 7). The proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than in any other disciplinary group: 57.6 % of them are either conservative or strongly conservative, as compared to 51.1 of economists, 42.5 of doctors and 33.5 % of scientists, 21.4 % of those in the humanities, and 18.6 % of the social scientists, the least right-wing of all disciplinary groups. Only 1.4 % of engineers are on the left, as opposed to 12.9 % in the social sciences and 16.7 % in law. Perhaps this is an uncanny coincidence, but the four fields at the top of the conservatism scale – engineering, economics, medicine, and science – are the same four secular fields we found at the top of our main jihadist sample."
They also cited a more recent Canadian study (1999) with similar results.
Anyway, there are many other interesting findings in that paper; highly recommended.
There are several computational paradigms that we attribute to minds (and people) that more often than not backfire, finite state machines being the most obvious one. Sometimes it works, and we discover a great mental model to live by. Sometimes it goes really wrong and it all goes the modernist way (Mies van der Rohe and co).
This leads to another nasty effect: being incapable to commiserate with the people around us. If the mind is a deterministic black box and I'm not an alcoholic because I refrain myself from drinking, how come there are alcoholics. The answer must be: they do not try hard enough. Same with poor people, obese people. If things have not happened to me, the fact that happen to other people must mean that they've brought it upon themselves.
It's also noted that engineers are overrepresented among terrorists. [0]
I think it's because engineers believe that there really is such a thing as a coherent, all-encompassing political philosophy that will yield strictly best outcomes for a given set of constraints.
They're basically porting their mindset from a technical endeavour to a sociopolitical one.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/11/theres-a-good-reason-wh...
Funny you say that, as most of the major Islamist terrorist groups were founded by or led by men with engineering backgrounds.