What I find is that people who focus on one word out of context are over-eager with their precious opinions.
Then perhaps you should clarify what you mean by the word ‘denier’ and why you didn’t use a less loaded term like ‘skeptic’. Consider you equated them with Crackpots it was obviously intended as an insult. If you didn’t actually mean what you said, then you can retract it.
I’m not sure what this means. Scientists use computer models quite a bit.
Not true at all. Simulations are used every day across most if not all engineering disciplines.
Hey, my fashion sense is just fine, thank you very much. I have more than one color T shirt. That’s fashion, right? Right? No? Crap.
I was forced to buy a pair of dress pants once when we had customers visiting our facility for a holiday party during work hours. One of our managers saw me in my office and said “You’re not wearing jeans! Stand up!” So, I stood up, and she took my picture. Apparently me not wearing jeans and a T shirt is enough of an out of the ordinary occasion to warrant a picture of the event. I guess it was the only time in about 15 years that I wasn’t wearing jeans and a T-shirt or sweatshirt.
Fashion. Meh. Who cares. I have more important things to worry about. I don’t dress to impress, and I have all of the social skills of your typical garden slug anyway. I’m not going to impress people with the way I look or the way I speak. If I had to be judged on looks I wouldn’t have a job. I’m judged on what I do. What I wear while doing it doesn’t matter.
Needless to say, I am not exactly management material, and I have made it very clear that I never want to go into management anyway. I already have to supervise junior engineers. That’s more management than I ever wanted to do. Me wear a suit and spend my day using Microsoft Project? No freakin’ thanks. I don’t care that there aren’t any more rungs on the corporate ladder for me without going into management. I’ll stay down here with the worker bees. I like it down here.
My office is a mess, but it’s an organized mess. It may not seem that way to the untrained eye, but I tend to put things in piles, and I remember what pile stuff is in. Even though my office looks very cluttered, I very rarely lose things.
I actually don’t like clutter, and I will clean my office if I have time to do it. Most of the time though, I am too busy doing work to clean. If my office starts to get clean, either I’ve gotten fed up with the clutter or I don’t have enough to do. And I very rarely don’t have enough to do.
Some of the clutter on my desk is there for my own sanity. I have a rubik’s cube and several wooden and metal puzzles. When I’ve been staring at wiring diagrams or assembly code for too long, I mess up my rubik’s cube and solve it. Some people take smoke breaks. I take a cube break. It helps keep me calm. I also have a yo-yo, an oversized plastic quarter, a C3PO that talks if you push his button, a disassembled disk drive, some homemade things like an electrical motor and a pop-pop boat, and a bunch of other junk on my desk. Ok, I’m weird. What’s your point? It’s clutter, but it makes my office feel more personal.
Engineering isn’t just about organization and order. There is plenty of that, but there is also plenty of creativity involved, at least in my job. Put me in a sterile environment with tidy desks and my creativity gets stifled and my productivity goes to hell in a handbasket. I need my clutter.
If it matters, I’m an electrical engineer who designs hardware and software for industrial control.
The late great Bob Pease, an analog designer, published a great column about neatness, which I hung up over my messy desk when it came out.
My desk is messy since I’m usually working on things quite a bit more urgent than a clean desk. If I am between stuff, or bored, or wasn’t able to find something I will clean up - but not before. Not that my office is 1% as messy as Bob’s.
After he passed away someone posted a video of a tour through his office, which showed an office as piled with papers as his desk.
As an engineering “idiot-savant” my facility with programming languages is orders of magnitude greater than my facility with English. 
Had “skeptic” occurred to me I’d have used that term rather than “denier.” I’ve devoted huge efforts to copy-editing of papers and books, but am afraid I don’t devote that much care to SDMB posts, especially when my meaning seems clear.
As to whether these skeptics are crackpots, I’ll note that even in the technical group one hears gibberish about Al Gore; “It’s snowing! Ha! Ha! Must be climate change!”; and the strange claim that CO2 isn’t causing warming because “it’s present in the atmosphere only in trace quantities.” (OTOH, it isn’t fair to argue only against one’s stupidest opponents.)
I hope this retraction suffices.
I was working insane hours when Williams and Pease passed. I only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. Damn! Anyway there is a box in my garage from when I emptied my desk 3-4 jobs back that has a big manila envelope full of info Bob Pease sent me. He also published an email I sent him. I met Jim Williams a couple times…very abrasive in person, but didn’t cool my admiration for his work.
Anyway to the OP: I knew a good engineer once who was very neat. He was also bipolar. In general, though the really neat engineers are not worth a crap at engineering.
My guess is that neat people keep what they know in mental file drawers, and often don’t connect thier knowledge to the problem at hand, because it is filed away under a label that makes it seem unconnected. Like the clerk at the hardware store that tells you they have nothing that will do what you want… Then you wander around looking at everything they have and find something intended for a different purpose, but with an added hose clamp and drilling one more hole in it will work perfect. Or people that tell me calculus is not useful in daily life because they dumped that knowledge into a mental file drawer labeled “useless stuff I had to study in school”.
I think that I keep everything I know in one big heap, and it all gets tried out for each problem. One time I came up with an improved design for an aerosol concentrator based on what I know about firearms silencers…and I was th EE in the group. I solved a thorny software problem based on how the French cooking class was organized in the movie “Julie and Julia.” I really have trouble filing stuff because I don’t think like that…I have no idea in what context I am most likely to use that information next time, so it has no obvious key value to file it under. And I have no idea if widget x is going to be needed in the future…I do know the company that made it is no longer in business, so if I throw it out I can’t buy another one.
Unlike this cluttered tools and information that has limitless utility, the hardware and software I design has, at most, only a handful of things it is useful for…so that stuff is simple to organize in obvious and useful ways.
My husband is a mechanical engineer and a neat freak (most of the time.) He used to work with an electrical engineer who was SlobMan - his office always looked like it had been ransacked. I’m a retired aerospace engineer - I tended to keep my work space orderly, and while I’m not a Happy Homemaker, I don’t let dirty clothes and dishes accumulate, nor are the corners of the shower furry with mildew. On the other hand, at the moment, my coffee table holds my latest knitting project and a stack of yarn scraps and related items, and this very desk has several piles of papers, random pens, a battery, and a napkin.
My personal experience and opinion - in general, engineers have habits that mirror the rest of the population. I might venture a guess that it has more to do with how they were raised than their career path.
Another engineer checking in here (mechanical)…My work areas definitely become pretty cluttered and messy. In engineering, there is a certain blend of thought, creativity, and problem solving going on. When working, I tend to be deep in thought, and I have laser like focus. I can’t be bothered to stop and tidy up. It often feels like I never really have a chance to stop and take a look at the mess I’ve created, hence habits like setting an alarm to know when it’s time to mop the floor. Like someone else mentioned, I think we live in our heads and don’t really notice the mess.
The two statements above are not mutually exclusive. I use computer models/simulations daily. They are useful, but often wrong, so I’m often skeptical. I know I never like to show my computer results to anyone that is not another engineer, because they either put way to much stock in the computer or misinterpret the results.
I’d guess that it’s the in between that’s missing. I find among both engineers and scientists that they are either disordered or hyper ordered. I have coworkers that will flip out if I rare a vial differently from them. On the other hand, they take very complete notes and follow instructions to 5 decimal places. I’m the opposite. I often get so absorbed in the active research that I look back and find I had written very little down. On the other hand, I can make decisions about conditions on the fly, whereas others seem to stall, and that usually leads to a complete failure. I run more experiments, so I get more results.
That is the kind of stuff I mean. I knew one mechanical engineer who made a million dollar mistake because he had one parameter wrong in his mechanical model. A prudent engineer will figure out various ways to check his results and will often beef up the design anyway to be on the safe side.
Keep in mind that these are simple models. In the real world there are often factors that are unknown or can’t be measured accurately.
Scientists use rockets quite a bit, but rockets are engineering and not science. The important thing is that a model isn’t proof. One saying is,“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
If you will read below, those people who actually use simulations are very skeptical about the result.
The mechanical & aerospace engineers in my life are very neat & tidy. The office is clean and everything has a spot. My husband (mechanical engineer) also has a cleaning lady come to our house to do further cleaning since I’m not as neat or organized as him.
Electrical and Software seem spot on. The Civil is actually the worst. Perhaps he was trying to make some kind of adobe from dirty dishes and the other filth in his room?
Thanks to all for your honest and insightful answers to a question that has nagged me for years, but could never get an adequate response from the roommates.
I don’t think there’s any real correlation between tidiness and order of mind. I tend to have my space in visual disarray, but I seldom have trouble finding things and, in fact, will sometimes have trouble finding things if I’ve recently tidied things up. So, when I need to put things into a particular order, I can do it, otherwise it’s essentially in a state of ordered chaos.
Really, my mind is much the same way. When I’m actually thinking about things, my thoughts will often jump all over the place and I’ll even work on things out of logical order, but when I need to organize my thoughts, like when writing documentation or explaining to someone else, I can generally pull it all together in a meaningful way.
So, I guess the idea of tidiness just doesn’t really make sense to me because things are organized in some sort of arbitrary way (like alphabetical or something) but unless they’re often accessed in that method, then it just makes things harder to find if you need to access them in some other order. So, for instance, I actually do have things that make sense to be ordered in a certain way done like that, like my CD collection, but a lot of other things just sort of are wherever they are, but I just generally know where that is.
That is better. Frankly I find that 1% of the population knows enough one way or another to have a reasoned opinion on AGW. The percentage might be higher among engineers, since they can actually do the math if they are so inclined.
I think you should make a distinction between neat and detailed oriented. I know one engineer who is brilliant in design, but sloppy in execution. A lot of his brilliance ends up kludging around problems that a more through engineer would have anticipated.
I remember reading in one Henry Petroski’s books where an engineer will lay awake at night wondering, “what did I overlook?”. I’m just glad that I don’t work in an area where my mistakes can kill people.
I was about to say that all the engineers I know are tidy, except one, and then I realised that almost everyone I know is very untidy.
I’m an engineer and I work almost exclusively with engineers and I’d say the breakdown is no more different than what I’d expect in any other profession. I, personally, am pretty tidy, but I work with folks who certainly are not.
EE here.
I’m a lot like ECG. I am very disorganized; my desk is messy, I scribble on scrap paper when taking notes, and I leave parts and tools all over the lab. Drives my anally-retentive cohorts crazy. I’m also a bit of a slob, as I usually wear jeans and a simple cotton shirt to work every day. Even though I (technically) have a couple technicians working for me, I do not consider myself a “manager,” nor do I want to be one. I like being a lab rat.