This got started from a generalization I made about creationists who claimed to have technical expertise to debate about evolution. It turned out many of the were in fact engineers and that many engineers are not trained to think scientifically, suspend judgement, hold beliefs with moderate humility. This is not to say that scientists don't get arrogant, they do, but because of the narrowness of the average engineer's training, they are susceptable to mistaken beliefs, crack-pot ideas, and are somewhat more influiencial with them because of the status of their careers and a fix-it mentality. It leads some of them to go off half-cocked.
My concern with this is that my name appears in many Internet pieces, so I want to know how my fame proceeds me, and secondly.
I encounter the workings of the idea here in Silicon Valley in the odd and bizzare politics of some otherwise intelligent people who are usually engineers. What I have seen in many cases are fixations on solutions or ideals that don't have much real world applicability. And yet their proponents are sure that they do. One guy I knew was sure that pure domocracy is all that is needed. He didn't know about nullification or opinion-making, The ideal he had in his head was that everyone else was as rational and conscious as he saw himself; he carried a far too simplistic version of how real people are. Reality seems to be far too messy for this guy. Idealistic thinking seems to be a hallmark of this flaw in cognition. Having arrived at a simple solution doesn't necessary make it the right one, in fact it may be dead wrong. The need to remove the anxiety to deal with a problem seems to exceed the restraint it takes to wait and get the best answer or answers. It may be that need for security coupled with a distrust of the imagery that many other types of people use in their persona that drives the urge to fix it quick. This causes one to miss the complexity in the real world. in the political world.
One might pause at the question of how well an investor of technology anticipates the social impact of his idea, or of its engineerred application. More often than not this prognostication misses the eventual impact by a large degree. For example the impact of the Internet and computers may be greatest in giving strategists and investors a much tighter control over capital, in shortening the time to ROI. It may have led directly to the current financial crisis as the sheer volume and rapidity of decisions made is too hard to check. The psychology of markets is much more important under this acclerated trading environment than the basis on which they are made.
