Re: Holy War! Researchers say EEs have a 'terrorist mindset'

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: January 31, 2008 4:46:30 PM EST
To: <allan () friedmans org>, "'David Farber'" <dave () farber net>
Subject: RE: [IP] Re:   Holy War! Researchers say EEs have a  
'terrorist mindset'

I’ll admit that I didn’t read the paper in detail but if the sample  
set was small we’re dealing with “just so” stories based on little  
evidence and lots of assumptions about the “engineering mindset”. One  
lesson I learned in graduate school was to first go to the conclusions  
to decide if the stuff before is worth reading – when I say a major  
caveat that seems to moot the statistics and then naïve statements  
about engineering I become suspicious. If you’re saying “trained”  
rather than “educated” you would seem to be talking more about  
technicians than engineers
anyway.

Have you looked at the statistics in sufficient detail and with  
sufficient skepticism to say that there is sufficient evidence to  
support the statistics as being significant and indicative of cause  
and effect? Are the statistics normalized for cultural differences it  
the classification of professions? Are doctors engineers – there  
certainly seem to be a number of high profile medical people  
associated with terrorism.

George Lakoff’s Moral Politics dichotomy might be more apropos. You  
should also listen to Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God in which she  
tells about, among other things, recognizing that science actually  
very good at dealing with ambiguity. If we’re speculating I could  
argue that those who are frustrated with ambiguity leave engineering  
for the simplicity of ideology rather than the opposite.

I could reverse the prejudice and not that a good engineer learns very  
soon that you can’t fully debug a nontrivial system. But a policy  
mindset doesn’t get hard reality checks.


-----Original Message-----
From: Allan A Friedman [mailto:allan () sccs swarthmore edu]
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 15:56
To: David Farber
Cc: bob37-2 () bobf frankston com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Holy War! Researchers say EEs have a 'terrorist  
mindset'


> Perhaps I can find a correlation between the lack of an engineering  
mindset
> and the lack of understanding of cause and effect?
>
> People want simple answers and people want to publish papers.  
Perhaps there
> is a correlation there too.


Bob - the paper acknowledges the limitations, and did a fairly thorough
(for their data) job of examining alternate explanations. I think what
comes through is people do indeed "want simple answers" and that  
engineers
have an incredibly good understanding of cause and effect. The paper  
makes
the case that the 'engineering mindset' has an overly  sensitive
understanding of cause and effect. Even when one is dealing with a very
complex social/economic/political/etc problem, some people seek out
a straightforward causal relationship, and those trained to identify
obstacles from optimal functionality are more likely than others to  
see a
single obstacle. They may also have more faith in the ability of
straight forward action to fix things. These are great attributes to  
have
when debugging code, but some folk just don't know when to stop.

Note the paper didn't claim that all engineers are overly
reductive, but that of those who are overly reductive and *then take
action,* a disproportionate percent have engineering training.

allan



Allan Friedman
PhD Candidate, Public Policy
Kennedy School of Government

Fellow, Center for Research on Computation and Society
School for Engineering and Applied Science
Harvard University

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