Comments on: An Ugly Hypothesis Slain by an Unbeautiful Fact

By: Urinated State of America

Urinated State of America — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 19:12:19 +0000

“Engineers solve puzzles where the pieces are well defined and the answer, if found, is clear. Scientists are more likely than engineers to investigate puzzles where we may lack the key pieces and the shape of the answer is uncertain as well. The two professions breed different habits of mind.” Spot on. I shifted from Physics to Engineering, and found the hardest part was the change in the Gestalt – the hardest part of solving an Engineering problem is figuring out the assumptions you have to make to reframe the problem into something tractable. This book> discusses the topic further. The social function of an engineer – as Herbert Hoover said -an engineer is someone who can do for 50 cents what any fool can do for a buck – is irrelevant to this. The thinking method of an engineer is to ignore the data or concepts that (s)he doesn’t feel are relevant. Powerful in the right circumstances, but dangerous in the wrong ones. Hence the prominence of engineers in pseudoscientific areas – be it ID or amateur [and erroneous] critiques of anthropogenic climate change or in the ranks of Holocaust deniers. Another contribution may be that engineering is a vocational discipline, like law or medicine, but doesn’t have the ‘guild’ status that those two professions have, where the state intervenes to restrict those who can practice it. Hence, law and medicine, although not as conceptually difficult as a lot of engineering, get more $$$ and status. Hence, a lot of engineers have a chip on their shoulder over their lower status relative to those other professions – an engineer is a lot more likely to see the invisible hand of the market giving him the finger than a doctor or a lawyer.

By: Elliott Oti

Elliott Oti — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:48:18 +0000

“Is it possible to learn to speak “unaccented Dutch” if youre not born dutch?” As an adult? Yes, if you already speak a language with Germanic (or to a lesser extent Romantic) roots: Germans, Scandinavians, and English speakers have few real difficulties. Turks also fare surprisingly well. It’s a lot more difficult if your mother tongue is non-West European, though.

By: Giles

Giles — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 21:59:21 +0000

Is it possible to learn to speak “unaccented Dutch” if youre not born dutch?

By: Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 18:17:15 +0000

Sorry, the last word in my post above should have been “Athletics.”

By: Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 17:59:55 +0000

Interesting. I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer, A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer, Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear, I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer. Oh, if I had a daughter, sir, I'd dress her in White and Gold, And put her on the campus, to cheer the brave and bold. But if I had a son, sir, I'll tell you what he'd do. He would yell, "To Hell with Georgia," like his daddy used to do. Oh, I wish I had a barrel of rum and sugar three thousand pounds, A college bell to put it in and a clapper to stir it around. I'd drink to all good fellows who come from far and near. I'm a ramblin', gamblin', hell of an engineer. Heh " Ramblin' Wreck Song: It is doubtful that anything has ever meant as much to an American college as has this Georgia Tech fight song, a curious mixture of words and music that grew out of an old folk ballad, "The Sons of the Gamboliers." Since the early 1900's, it has been one of the most important vehicles in making Georgia Tech's name known around the world and in the development of the school as one of the most cosmopolitan institutions of higher learning in America...The fame of the song spread to such proportions that in 1959 it was sung by Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at their historic meeting in Moscow." Indeed Read more here at Ramblin' Wreck.com - The Official Online Service Of Georgia Tech Aesthetics

By: Elliott Oti

Elliott Oti — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:51:36 +0000

I might add anecdotally, having known a number of North African and Middle Eastern students during my own student days here in the Netherlands, that the single most important factor for their acceptance into mainstream society, was the ability to speak unaccented Dutch. The foreign MENA students who had the hardest times, were those who were very intelligent but had poor spoken Dutch and English skills. Two I knew were so lonely and miserable they had contemplated suicide at some point. I have also worked as unskilled labour, and less-intelligent, less-educated foreigners with poor Dutch skills don’t seem to be nearly as hard-hit.

By: Elliott Oti

Elliott Oti — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:33:49 +0000

Sebastian Holsclaw wrote: I think Armed Liberal’s point on the University experience bears repeating. Are we asuming that you can’t reinforce high levels of anti-Americanism outside of the classroom yet still at the university? You are, I think, assuming correctly that anti-Americanism (or anti-Westernism) can be reinforced outside the classroom. Though, I suspect, not quite in the manner you think. German universities are not the same all-encompassing environments that many American colleges are. Student dorms, fraternities etc. are present, but in much smaller numbers and play a much less important role. Many community elements that Americans take for granted, such as college basketball or football, are entirely absent. Universities are also mostly state-sponsored; the US phenomenon of alumni pouring money into libraries, societies, sports etc. is largely absent. German universities are simply not very big on extra-curricular activities. Self-identification with their universities is not a defining characteristic of the German student, the way (say) Ivy-league graduates identify with their alma maters. The university you went to is the university you went to, nothing more, nothing less. Undoubtedly, to some extent the milieu in which a (potential) al Qaeda sympathizer finds himself in, will define his ideas and beliefs. In Germany, this milieu will consist largely of the students such a person chooses to associate with. My personal experience with foreign students with a religious bent is that in their cases, like very much attracts like. It’s the only way to find warmth in a surprisingly hostile world, sometimes. If they speak with a marked accent, or speak the language poorly (passive listening and written skills being more important in a university environment than active spoken), if they look different (swarthy complexion, beard, yarmulke or what have you), foreign students will be subjected to ostracism. Non-intentional, perhaps, on the part of the white middle-class students doing the ostracism, but they will be ostracized nevertheless. They will not get dates with white girls. They will not be asked, and they will not dare to ask. They will not get asked to parties. People will not have the patience to hold long conversations with them while they try and explain their (complex) thoughts in halting, painfully accented German. Outside the classroom people will automatically mistake them for dumb janitors and cleaners, not for smart students. This breeds disillusionment and very deep resentment. After a year of this shit, it isn’t particularly surprising that they gravitate to the group that shows them the most warmth and companionship, a group where they are taken seriously, as equals, by peers who have walked the same miles in the same shoes.

By: Henry

Henry — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 15:10:21 +0000

I think Armed Liberal’s point on the University experience bears repeating. Are we asuming that you can’t reinforce high levels of anti-Americanism outside of the classroom yet still at the university? Sebastian – would you care to (a) describe the precise mechanisms through which this might happen. (b) speak to how these mechanisms might have applied, say, to, Arabs at technical universities in Germany, who don’t seem to have associated much with non-Arabs. (c ) Actually provide some evidence showing that this happened in the case of the 9/11 hijackers? Given that there’s a good counter-theory as to where they got their orientations, which actually has strong empirical support, your statement has the same epistemological value as the statement that we can’t rule out the possibility that the 9/11 hijackers were brainwashed by Mossad provocateurs. And like the latter, it says more about the willingness of the individual making the statement to grab onto a rather offensive theory regardless of the lack of any factual evidence, than it does about the likely causal factors that made the September 11 hijackers into terrorists. As I said to AL a couple of days ago, the “it’s wrong to exclude the possibility that” line of argument has been advanced by some incredibly nasty people – most particularly neo-Nazis who don’t want to exclude the possibility that the death camps didn’t exist, or that Jews didn’t deserve what they got. I honestly don’t think you want to find yourself in that company – but fact-free and untestable assertions that suggest that we can’t ignore the possibility that x group of individuals is somehow responsible for the death of several thousand people are pretty disreputable things, which a reputable righty really shouldn’t be associating himself with.

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:43:29 +0000

Were there leftist professors who advocated terror attacks on Western targets as a sensible way to oppose Western imperialism? If so, and if Atta and company knew about them, then there might be a connection. Otherwise not, because mere harsh criticism is not taken as justification for mass murder by rational people.

By: pedro

pedro — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:34:06 +0000

I do find the speculation that engineers are more prone to become terrorists rather annoying, for the very same reason that Armed Liberal's unsubstantiated musings strike me as irritatingly silly. It is likely that many of the Al-Qaeda engineers actually decided to learn technical subjects partly because of fantasies about acquiring the necessary know-how to inflict pain upon their enemies. To suggest that engineering school nurtures terrorism is not much better than to suggest that tenuous contact with the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, et al, nurtures terrorism. It may be more amusing, and much less divorced from the evidence, but it is certainly not brilliant.

By: Giles

Giles — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 23:09:24 +0000

I think d squared has a point – people in non humanities areas tend to have more rigid political views because they spend less time thinking about them critically. So making the argument that the terrorists were inspired by the left in academia, is not saying that that the left instructed them. So for instance arguing that Hitler was (apparently) partly inspired by the British Empire to create his own is not arguing that the British Empire was a Nazi entity. In the same way the Al Quaedists listened in on leftist discourse and cherry picked the bits they liked in order to construct, and in particular, verbalize their philosophy. But quite clearly they did not adopt the “whole” leftist package. Obviously the Al Quaedists did very much the same thing to Islam – cherry picked the bits they liked and ignored the rest. And this is really the essence of fascism –which is what Al Quaedists are – it involves cherry picking the most “attractive” bits of other philosophy in order to disguise your basic lust for power. Nazisim was dressed initially as a sort of compromise between left and right with lots of family friendly posters. The pan arabist have done the same thing with Al Queada and the left. Interestingly I think that this is more a good reflection on the left than a bad one – it says that their ideas and the way they are expressed are (superficially) internaitaonally attractive. By contrast there’s very little chance that say OBL will appear in his next video talking in the style of Newt Gringich – he’ll stick with Moore speak because its better.

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 23:00:50 +0000

I’d quote the Engineer’s Song in full if I could remember it. I had the wildest year of my life at MIT (not Cambridge), and am tempted to send this thread to an MIT listserv I know. Engineer joke: There’s a fire in the lab. The engineer grabs the fire extinguisher, put the fire out, goes outside and has a cigarette. The phsyicist goes to the blackboard, calculates the exact amount of fluid neeeded, puts the fire out with that, goes outside and has a cigarette. The mathematician (my dad was one) goes to the blackboard, calculates the exact amount of fuild needed, goes outside and has a cigarette. Engineers love to flame but are practical, there’s my generality.

By: rubble

rubble — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 22:24:51 +0000

As an engineer, I think Roger has a point and the other engineers here are being a bit deliberately obtuse. Engineering is about solving problems in a domain of fixed rules. This has several ramifications: * The problem space is completely impersonal. The requirements may be derived from humans, but from the engineer’s perspective it’s just a bunch of numbers. The people who deal with the human interface aren’t engineers, they’re designers. * Solutions can be objectively measured and compared. Answers are either correct or incorrect; the problem is either solved or not solved; this solution is either better than or worse than that one. I think that people who internalize the engineering mindset have a strong tendency to gravitate toward rigid, relatively impersonal philosophies. For example, from my experience, libertarianism is wildly more popular among engineers than among the population at large. In a different cultural context, I can see radical Islam filling the same role. But at the same time, I would not claim than engineer/terrorists are more prevalent due to ideology alone. Engineers are trained to plan and build things, and to stay focused on executing a particular task; from a purely practical standpoint, they would seem to be best suited to this sort of task.

By: Doctor Slack

Doctor Slack — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 22:23:00 +0000

I seem to have missed the class in grad school that suggested that I had all the answers and since I’m genuinely interested in the question, I’m more than happy to argue it and thereby see if we can all learn something. Actually, in the initial instance, you seemed quite happy to pretend you had all the answers, or at least all the significant ones. Given that you suddenly discovered the value of open, fact-based debate in an atmosphere of sweet reason [i]after[/i] you were caught spewing nonsense, it’s hard for the rest of us to take the above at face value. In fact, it seems like exactly the kind of smarmy, pseudo-intellectual posing that eventually soured me (and I doubt I’m alone) on Winds of Change. People might be more inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt if you displayed this pattern of behaviour less often. As it stands, Henry’s characterization looks right on the money. But hopes springs eternal; let’s see what you have to say once you’ve dug into the Sageman study that you claim to’ve known about all along.

By: M.C.

M.C. — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 21:10:35 +0000

It is also interesting that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader, was an architect with a passion for great buildings. Given the target of the death planes, it seems not too idle a speculation to wonder if he didn’t conceive of the destruction of a major building as the most devastating imaginable to Americans. Why am I feeling thrown back to The Fountainhead?