>>64253124
It's a really intriguing phenomenon. The faggots on Usenet used to call it the Salem hypothesis.
>The Salem hypothesis is an old chestnut from talk.origins. It was proposed by a fellow named Bruce Salem who noticed that, in arguments with creationists, if the fellow on the other side claimed to have personal scientific authority, it almost always turned out to be because he had an engineering degree. The hypothesis predicted situations astonishingly well—in the bubbling ferment of talk.origins, there were always new creationists popping up, pompously declaiming that they were scientists and they knew that evolution was false, and subsequent discussion would reveal that yes, indeed, they were the proud recipient of an engineering degree.
One potential reason is that engineers aren't usually taught to think *too* critically. They follow standards and codes and base their solutions on preexisting schemes, and when a problem arises in their designs they rarely take a holistic approach. There's also the question of background, civil engineers probably come from religious/conspiracy theory-believing backgrounds more often than researchers.
And with all due respect, you don't have to be terribly smart to get most career *titles,* smarts are really only needed to be competent and even then, they're not always necessary. I'm a med student in a third world country, so I know all about that.
