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Absolutely loony take. How does an engineer get like this?
by voz_ 4y ago
Absolutely loony take. How does an engineer get like this?
- Aperocky 4y agoIt's some interesting psychology. I've had discussion with a guy in lab of a top university and they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that. It doesn't seem to correlate to technical ability, there are something in psychology that draws a certain type of people towards conspiracy and in which they go into a mental state where normal explanations are removed from their logic and they go seek outlandish explanations or slightly hard to explain things and turn a twist into it. I don't understand why but I think a pretty decent amount of people subscribe to this kind of thinking. Neurology researchers here, please give us answers.
- galangalalgol 4y agoNot a neurology researcher, but always seems to be people with really good pattern recognition intell. They connect dots well, blessing and curse etc.
- rjbwork 4y agoIndeed. As someone with experience of extreme manic psychosis, it is the pattern recognition/dot connection algorithm kicked into absolute overdrive. Spurious correlation abounds when afflicted with such a condition. Thankfully my experience was acute and triggered by drugs, so a few years of anti-psychotics and refraining from anything other than cannabis and alcohol in moderation have let me stop taking the anti-psychotics and at worst I experience cyclothymia, which I've decided to just live with and not medicate.
- bredren 4y agoThis sounds like ~the plot of the film Pi.
- pintxo 4y agoI'd say they may connect dots quickly, but not necessarily well.
- overrun11 4y agoWas their argument rigorous or obviously irrational? On the spectrum of plausibility from lizard people to JFK, 9/11 doesn't strike me as especially delusional. I believe we sometimes don't differentiate well enough between abnormally suspicious people that act rationally from the clearly deranged. Non-consensus views could be a sign of either but a failure mode a different set of smart people have is to write off anything non-consensus merely because it's low status.
- birdyrooster 4y agosteel beams don't melt jet fuel
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- krisoft 4y ago> they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that. 911 is definietly a conspiracy. A bunch of telecom engineers acting in unison with dispatchers and first responders. There is no other explanation how else police/emt/fire brigade shows up when you dial that number and tell them about an emergency. But what it has to do with steel beams I don’t know. \s Joking aside: I have noticed that sometimes when I preceive that everyone around me thinks X i feel an urge to think the opposite of it. I only had mild and inconsequential cases of this (opinion about shows, products, etc), but I can imagine that this type of contraryness in edge cases can convince people that everyone is wrong about some important historical event. And it seems once they convinced themselves their belief is stable enough to make them stick with it. Obviously hating Game of Thrones when everyone was raving about it feels very different from subscribing to conspiracy theories, but maybe the phenomena is similar, just one latches on to a different subject?
- Fnoord 4y ago> Joking aside Good thing you mention or I fell for it (that you meant it seriously, not that I believed in the conspiracy). Poe's law in effect. But that's the thing. People who believe in conspiracies are susceptible to them. For example, they could've lost their trust in society, or smoke a lot of pot, or have a friend or two who are into it. Very much like a cult. And I am saying that as person who was into conspiracies, who lost faith in society, who used drugs (psychedelics, mostly), and had a severe psychosis (not at all related to the previously mentioned though but stress from another factor).
- tshaddox 4y agoFunny that that's the conspiracy you reach for to make the joke. Not the one where people planned in secret to send people to the United States to learn how to fly airplanes so that they could hijack commercial airlines and commit suicide attacks.
- mcguire 4y agoHating Game of Thrones is perfectly justified. :-)
- designium 4y agoEngineers are just human as others. Engineers is not equal to be rational in other areas of life.
- woodruffw 4y agoAnd beyond this: engineers, particularly programmers, are particularly susceptible to flawed "first principles" thinking. Not every factoid in every field can be derived from a small set of first principles, particularly when that field is primarily empirical in nature.
- corrral 4y agoThey're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned. And to falling for arguments with the trappings of rationality, but deeply flawed premises or early steps slyly skipped so the castle's built on sand but looks like a perfect castle with all these crazy-tall minarets reaching for the sky (ahem, like a certain popular-online political & economic philosophy) and then treating everyone who doesn't agree that the castle's beautiful as irrational, probably-emotion-driven morons.
- mistermann 4y ago> They're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned. Like for example, their analyses of "conspiracy theorists" (when what they are actually analyzing is their own incredibly flawed semi-conscious representation of conspiracy theorists). It's quite funny that the world is this way if you think about it deeply, because it could be otherwise.
- corrral 4y agoHow many exchanges building on this before we reach a particularly helpless flavor of solipsism, you think? I'd say about three more posts.
- 4y ago
- rajup 4y agoI think this is something barfed up by a GPT-3 model trained on OANN, Fox News and 4chan.
- sangnoir 4y ago> How does an engineer get like this? There's nothing special about engineers that makes them less prone to human weaknesses. I had a (software) engineer colleague who believed in overunity energy, and was so into it they traveled to paid conferences.
- bigbillheck 4y agoAn awful lot of cranks are engineers (electrical seems to be the variety most prone to it).
- NikolaNovak 4y agoSome of the most intelligent, knowledgeable, respected-in-their-field distant family members of mine are like that. I've spent decade trying to figure it out, because selfishly it's terrifying and I don't want it happening to me. One thing that seems to be common and is my working hypothesis, is that they're so smart and so respected in their field (or, in subset of cases, arrogant), that they simply trust themselves more than anybody else. There is nobody in their family and friends who can truly "slap some sense into them"; provide perspective, course-correct, nudge into objective reality or mainstream story, whatever we call it. I've actually asked a couple of them point blank - and they admitted, nope, there's nobody that they trust more than themselves. Couple of them even said - if you don't have trust and faith in yourself, you're weak. So I'm hoping I'm somewhat inoculated against going off the deep end by having at least 3 people in my life (wife, sister, and one good friend) who can, and have, slapped some sense into me when I was going off the rails.
- Swizec 4y agoI was reading a book on cognitive biases recently and the part that really stuck for me was: The smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to the Narrative Bias/Fallacy. Super smart people are so good at constructing plausible narratives that they can convince themselves of almost anything. You have to actively look for ways to disprove your own narratives. This is hard because they sound so plausible.
- fortran77 4y agoFirst of all, he's probably not an engineer. He's a computer programmer. For some reason, Computer Programmers think they're experts in every subject.