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Comment by thowfeir234234 | Hacker News Reader

The parent-poster is a very well known professor in ML/Optimization at Berkeley EECS.

One of the smaller trade journals of EE was Wireless World. (It closed in 2008.)

In its pages you could find EE professors and chartered engineers arguing that Einstein was so, so wrong, decades after relativity was accepted.

I'd trust an EE to build me a radio, but I wouldn't let an EE anywhere near fundamental physics.

All this suggests is that chartership, professorship and shitty journal authorship are poor metrics for credibility.

Keeping EEs and any E for that matter away from fundamental physics is a shortcut to producing a whole lot of smoke and melted plastic.

I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism. Engineers are also unusually likely to be Islamist terrorists, though there are many reasons for that. [1] There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....

What the heck did I just read. It feels like BS - Isn't the sample too small?

https://archive.is/FfEK4

it's sociology- a field which frequently does not provide evidence for its claims.

You mean 400 people? No, that isn't too small. Why would you think it was?

> I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism.

If it's the same thing I'm thinking of, it was kinda flawed, IMO, in that it was a comparison of such beliefs amongst various types of scientists, with, for some reason, engineers thrown in, too. And yeah, it's kind of unsurprising that engineers are more into unscientific nonsense than various types of scientists, because engineers aren't scientists. It would be more surprising if they were significantly worse than the _general population_, but I don't think that it showed that.

> There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.

Lots of failed theorists with that personality type/flaw as well.

Uh huh. And that makes said professor an expert in 1) epistemology, and/or 2) experimental particle physics? Why, no. No, it doesn't.

I mean, I'm as prone to the "I'm a smart guy, so I understand everything" delusion as the next person, but I usually only show it in the comments here. (And in private conversations, of course...)

to be fair, maybe there is a decent overlap of people who saw the original and this. At least that might dispel the 'myths' raised in the original. Also, since this rebuttal article was written by a physicist (much more involved in the field), its also defending their own field

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