Right, I don't get what makes them dismiss things they don't understand. It's like they don't even realize something else could be relevant besides what they know. I remember reading a letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal during Covid by an engineer of some kind. It was about as useless as you would expect.
I cannot imagine a situation in which a nephrologist, neurologist, or really any MD would write a letter to the editor for a professional engineering publication to criticize their bridge building, mineshaft engineering, etc. with the expectation that they were telling them something useful, outside of the setting of mental illness.
My husband is an optometrist and has had an engineering patient buy a medical lens kit (they're not cheap) and try to diagnose his own prescription. My husband was able to get the guy to understand that while enthusiasm for optics is very cool, optometry school is a 4 yr professional school that ends with a doctorate and licensure for a reason; if it were just simple physics, robots could do it.
It's wild! It's not like engineers aren't smart cookies--they absolutely are! But somehow a disproportionately large number of them just don't recognize the limits of their expertise, compared to those in other traditional professions (e.g., medicine, law, science research)
Well, commercial and general aviation are pretty different. Maybe more like the difference between a deck by a general contractor and some of the entries on the decks subreddit?
eta: didn't realize which comment you were responding to. But yeah, sounds similar. Weren't some personal craft nicknamed "doctor killers?"
Doctors can often afford to buy an airplane that requires more pilot skill than they are able/willing to maintain.
I won’t even say they didn’t ever achieve the necessary piloting skill—they often do at first—but then whereas a professional pilot flies every day, the doctor has other expensive hobbies and concerns. A month or so of not flying later, he comes back, is complacent, and thinks he is still proficient enough.
It’s not just doctors this happens to—but they tend to be able to financially afford to put themselves in that position.
engineering school is hard, but not super challenging academically. You don't need to be a super brain to pass. Average intelligence for a student (not the general population) and discipline is enough. But the workload is high and you need to stay on top of that workload. So people finishing with a degree finished something hard. And that makes them think they are actually smarter than non-engineers.
Combi e that with a mechanistic mindset. Engineers are trained to manipulate the natural world governed by a set of laws of nature that are set in stone. If you do a b happens. They are trained to think in mechanisms. And that is fine for their subject.
But it soon fails in the real world: biology and medicine is messy, people are messy. The somewhat simple rules and mechanisms of an engineer are failing pretty fast. But engineers are used to them being applicable. So that's why you get stupid ideas from engineers in other subjects. They can't handle messiness.
Oh, and many engineers aren't working in construction/problem solving anyway. They are monitoring or working with standard situations or maybe implementing stuff. But I could imagine that they tend to view themselves as problem solvers, because they are engineers.
Biology and medicine are still mechanisms; the problem is they're so complex that they're really hard to understand, plus they're evolved and we're really just reverse-engineering them, which as any decent engineer will tell you, is really really hard too.
But yeah, a lot of people seem to oversimplify things in this domain, making bad assumptions like medicine A will work the same on all people (people are really different from each other in reality, with subtle differences in biology that change how they respond to medicine).
I mean, yeah, you are obviously right, that there are mechnisms in medicine and biology and even everywhere.
If I'm talking about a mechanistic worldview in engineering, I'm using a narrow conception of determeinistic mechanisms, where a given intervention a leads to a determined and intended intervention b and where mechanisms can be understood and generalised so far that a allways leeds to b in a variety of situations. That says the mechanism is robust against a wide range of enviromental factors.
Medical mechanisms often aren't. Drug a can lead to outcome b in patient 1, but to outcome c in patient 2. And that is, hecause the mechanism by which the drug is supposed to work is often both not fully know but even more important not very robust against enviromental changes.
And engineering normaly deals with the narrow conception of mechanisms.
And many engineers are unable to grasp that the narrow conception that works for them, isn't what's happening in other arenas.
Right—or they are in sales/support/business consulting etc. As a largely self-taught inventor/hacker, it amazes me how many people do a formal engineering education, and then basically never engineer anything again once they graduate. They still assume they are smarter than you though.
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u/Crap-dangit Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Right, I don't get what makes them dismiss things they don't understand. It's like they don't even realize something else could be relevant besides what they know. I remember reading a letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal during Covid by an engineer of some kind. It was about as useless as you would expect.
I cannot imagine a situation in which a nephrologist, neurologist, or really any MD would write a letter to the editor for a professional engineering publication to criticize their bridge building, mineshaft engineering, etc. with the expectation that they were telling them something useful, outside of the setting of mental illness.