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

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Allan A Friedman <allan () sccs swarthmore edu>
Date: January 31, 2008 3:56:03 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: bob37-2 () bobf frankston com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   Holy War! Researchers say EEs have a  
'terrorist mindset'
Reply-To: allan () friedmans org


> 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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