Whoa! Hold the drugs dude. That wasn’t my wife. That was your mom!
Bubbadog EE
I just read thru this whole zombie thread and I gotta say, on whole there are more funny posts here than in most threads. Engineers are not only cool (and humble), they’re funny as hell some of 'em!
Here’s another funny engineer: An Engineer’s Guide to Cats
Amazing how much people can age in 8 years.
There were funny bits? Damn. Now I’ll have to go back and read it instead of just forwarding to see how the resurrection happened. And I’ve already been sidetracked trying to find a name for the cognitive bias of thinking that expertise in one area makes you an expert on everything. Didn’t find it.
Found this in rational wiki, though.
That isn’t quite the same thing.
I thought it was Carpenters whose problems all looked like nails!
That was Pete Seeger, not the Carpenters.
I work with younger engineers in the energy industry who assume that they are smarter than the people around constantly. While that may be true in certain cases, their areas of expertise are often so narrow that they fortunate that they found a role in which these talents were useful.
The old engineers usually have worked around others long enough to realize that intelligence is a spectrum and they aren’t always on the highest of of that spectrum.
Usually.
In the context of a job, it often isn’t important who’s “smartest”, but who has the information and experience that’s needed to get the job done. If you can, always get feedback from the operators or installation guys or whoever has on the ground experience with that location, that kind of job, that kind of finished facility. If you don’t, you’ll miss things and the screw-ups can be spectacular.
I don’t care how smart you are, ignorance is the list of things that you don’t know and it’s always a long list. You shorten the list when you respect other people’s experience.
Usually being the operative word there.
curlcoat
married to an Engineer
RationalWiki on Engineers and woo.
Nails aren’t the problem. They are the solution.
Just because they get to drive trains, that shouldn’t make them any better than us!
I never noticed it on message boards. I have noticed it in real life. What a bunch of ignorant, arrogant assholes. They know everything about everything, and are better than any expert on any subject. At least lawyers know that everybody is on to them. Engineers are completely clueless. I suppose their area of real expertise might be an exception.
You may have a floating point.
The response to your post has been here all these years waiting for you to read it.
At the end of one of the hyperlinks is a claim that engineers and doctors are prone to mistake themselves for scientists. Not all engineers and doctors, of course. I’ve never seen a study, but this seems like a plausible initial hypothesis to me.
I’ve met a couple of engineers (decades back) who treated their wives as if they were idiots because the wives didn’t approach every discussion as if it was an engineering problem. Although that may be a version of You’re Always Wrong, just played with an engineering slant. It doesn’t take an engineer or a man to play You’re Always Wrong.
Since my last post a few posts ago (I did not read this whole thread) I do remember encountering a particularly dense engineer on these boards who is under the impression of self-omniscience and everyone who disagrees is an idiot. My personal idiocy is not evidence that the person I disagree with is not also an idiot. I haven’t generally seen that from engineers on this board, so one anecdote does not a set of data make. I am also making allowances for engineers thinking that the meltdown of the-government-knows how many cores at TEPCO Fukishima is no big deal and neither was Chernobyl. But I suppose that since these many anecdotes do constitute data points, that perhaps engineers should be presumed to be lacking in common sense until proven otherwise.
Well, I’m no engineer, and I sometimes…heeeyy, wait one minute!
You’re right. Your personal idiocy shines through like a beacon. I’m having a hard time seeing that in some of these engineers.
I guess its because I didn’t use your shrewd statistical analysis method of taking a few data points and using it to define all engineers.
Well Done!
You are most welcome.