I agreed with the first two sentences, but you lost me on the last one. I may be misreading you, but if I’m not...
There seems to be a meme among certain groups of smart people (mainly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists) that engineers are ignorant. This is irritating to me, as a mechanical engineer who doesn’t seem myself as deficient compared against any of the mentioned groups. In fact, it seems to me that my education is broader and more complete than the mentioned groups.
I agree that society does not encourage learning things thoroughly, but engineering is not usually an example of that. There absolutely are a large number of engineers who don’t particularly care to understand things thoroughly, but I don’t think this is so different for people in other fields (especially CS).
You’re right that I shouldn’t discriminate against engineers ;-). I was more intending to make a distinction between, let’s say, professionally applicable Bachelors-level expertise and research-applicable postgraduate expertise. A BSc/BE can be used to train a civil engineer who builds bridges, but it won’t bring someone up to the level needed to do materials physics research.
I agreed with the first two sentences, but you lost me on the last one. I may be misreading you, but if I’m not...
There seems to be a meme among certain groups of smart people (mainly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists) that engineers are ignorant. This is irritating to me, as a mechanical engineer who doesn’t seem myself as deficient compared against any of the mentioned groups. In fact, it seems to me that my education is broader and more complete than the mentioned groups.
I agree that society does not encourage learning things thoroughly, but engineering is not usually an example of that. There absolutely are a large number of engineers who don’t particularly care to understand things thoroughly, but I don’t think this is so different for people in other fields (especially CS).
You’re right that I shouldn’t discriminate against engineers ;-). I was more intending to make a distinction between, let’s say, professionally applicable Bachelors-level expertise and research-applicable postgraduate expertise. A BSc/BE can be used to train a civil engineer who builds bridges, but it won’t bring someone up to the level needed to do materials physics research.
I appreciate that clarification. There are a small number of people (some affiliated with LW) who consider calling someone an engineer an insult.