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[anthroid]

He believes that the educational experience of engineers--which often doesn't include the liberal arts--prevents the development of a well-rounded critical thinking ability but a fabulous scientific skepticism about "emotional" claims.

You gotta be kidding me.  Liberal arts is the home of the well-rounded critical thinking ability?  Boy, are we in trouble. (Well-rounded critical thinking ability?  Well-rounded critical thinking ability.  Can I get noodles with that?)

Actually I suspect the problem here is that two groups are being conflated:  the engineers who have little intellectual life outside engineering, and the engineers who do, whatever their transcripts may say.  Many of the engineers I've known have been tremendous readers, and my experience is that if you want to let the hot air out of a conversation fast, bring in an engineer who has a passing, as in NYT-reader-level, acquaintance with the subject.  You will get a useful, pointed, well-made question very quickly, and attempts to bulls*** out of it will light up like Christmas. 

Tolerantly, I am quoting him.  He has a BA in psych from Williams and a BSME from a local public university.  He is the one qualified to make this distinction, not you.  He, by the way, isn't much of a traditional reader--I read many more books, for instance, than he does--but he reads a great deal on the web.  He talks with his colleagues at work, all of whom, except for him, sound like right wing nutjobs, and he has a pretty good sense of the training of both MEs and liberal arts graduates.  I'm sorry you doubt that someone with feet in both worlds thinks well of the liberal arts, but he does and he knows.  You don't.

And for those of you trying to opine about race:  stop it.  You do not know the literature and as a result your opinions are worthless.

[case_insensitive]

A narrow education may result in narrow graduates.  My field is accounting. Many accounting majors (depends on the school, of course) get very little broad-based education. Partly, that's because the requirements for accounting accreditation and for graduate to sit for professional exams (similar to PE no doubt), require a boat load of very technical accounting courses.

The problem for firms is they want folks who can think outside of the box on their audit teams. Why? So Enron and its ilk won't happen again.  So, some firms have actually gone to the trouble of hiring liberal arts graduates and then training them on the accounting (some send large groups of these hires to get masters degrees in accounting, in fact).

So... yes, in some technical fields the graduates, in general, seem to be a bit too narrowly focused.

This does not necessarily translate to socially conservative, at least in my field.

[beacon1]

And for those of you trying to opine about race:  stop it.  You do not know the literature and as a result your opinions are worthless.

I find it astonishing that an academic would make this statement. To believe that there is one infallable body of literature that leads to the same conclusion is misguided to say the least. Most of us know that it is easy to jump on either side of a social science debate and have a body of literature to support your conclusion. 

[anthroid]

And for those of you trying to opine about race:  stop it.  You do not know the literature and as a result your opinions are worthless.

I find it astonishing that an academic would make this statement. To believe that there is one infallable body of literature that leads to the same conclusion is misguided to say the least. Most of us know that it is easy to jump on either side of a social science debate and have a body of literature to support your conclusion. 

How about just a little part of the evidence, for Christ's sake?  You know nothing about the subject, beacon1, and yet you continue to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it.  Your thinking is simplistic, overly emotional, irrational, and uneducated.  Try reading some biology and sociology.  What on earth makes you think that I am referring to "one infallable body of literature"? 

Pffft.  You are not worth my time.  I am done with you.

[beacon1]

And for those of you trying to opine about race:  stop it.  You do not know the literature and as a result your opinions are worthless.

I find it astonishing that an academic would make this statement. To believe that there is one infallable body of literature that leads to the same conclusion is misguided to say the least. Most of us know that it is easy to jump on either side of a social science debate and have a body of literature to support your conclusion. 

How about just a little part of the evidence, for Christ's sake?  You know nothing about the subject, beacon1, and yet you continue to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it.  Your thinking is simplistic, overly emotional, irrational, and uneducated.  Try reading some biology and sociology.  What on earth makes you think that I am referring to "one infallable body of literature"? 

Pffft.  You are not worth my time.  I am done with you.

You have not seen me make any comments about race. You have seen me make comments about simplistic conclusions that are drawn from a body of data. These conclusions make the argument that one event causes another (e.g., poverty causes crime). This is impossible to prove without a controlled experimental design. Can you seriously dispute this?

As for as being uneducated, irrational, or emotional - I'm sure these are names that you call most that disagree with your a priori conclusions about how the world works.

[pyshnov]

beacon1:

...These conclusions make the argument that one event causes another (e.g., poverty causes crime).

But this is the very foundation of the giant fraud of social science! In normal science to prove poverty being the cause of crime you will need to show the mechanism of how this can happen. You would have to trace how an individual being poor starts thinking about committing crime, how his psychology is changing from law-abiding to criminal, etc., etc. But in social science statistics is enough. I have seen absolutely ridiculous examples of application of statistics, drawing untenable, often politically charged conclusions. Morover, social science method of "proof" intrudes in medicine which became by 90% a horrible statistical medicine. Example - smoking tobacco "causes" cancer; here, the statistics-based fraud became universally accepted. In normal science it wouldn't be even called a research, but medicine succumbed to this politically motivated fraud. Billions of dollars went to fraud. Many thousands of crooks received degrees and positions. Somehow this must be stopped.

[redliana]

[beacon1/quote]
You have not seen me make any comments about race. You have seen me make comments about simplistic conclusions that are drawn from a body of data. These conclusions make the argument that one event causes another (e.g., poverty causes crime). This is impossible to prove without a controlled experimental design. Can you seriously dispute this?
[/quote]

Unfortunately, we cannot conduct a controlled experiment to determine the causality of poverty and crime. Social science can only extrapolate using multivariate statistics, which of course can be "manipulated" to show correlations between almost anything. However, in any scientific endeavor we must begin with the assumption that the data is not skewed by preconceived notions, nor is it misrepresented to attain a specific political agenda.  Although not scientifically rigorous, I suggest that anecdotal evidence certainly suggests that an inability to hire top notch counsel plays an important role in the outcome of criminal proceedings. This viewpoint is supported by an analysis of the sentences received by white-collar criminals compared to street-level criminals, such as those that are incarcerated for selling marijuana. Although religion certainly plays a role in the sentence outcome, in many cases the lack of money for competent counsel is the dominant factor. 

Rather than admitting the system is flawed, you can continue to dismiss the data as skewed, or you can take a deep breath, read the studies, and determine for yourself whether or not the analysis and the conclusions are incorrect. Just remember, you have preconceived notions at least as much as others.

[redliana]

You have not seen me make any comments about race. You have seen me make comments about simplistic conclusions that are drawn from a body of data. These conclusions make the argument that one event causes another (e.g., poverty causes crime). This is impossible to prove without a controlled experimental design. Can you seriously dispute this?

Unfortunately, we cannot conduct a controlled experiment to determine if a causal relationship exists between poverty and crime. Social science can only extrapolate using multivariate statistics, which of course can be "manipulated" to show correlations between almost anything. However, in any scientific endeavor we must begin with the assumption that the data is not skewed by preconceived notions, nor is it misrepresented to attain a specific political agenda.  Although not scientifically rigorous, I suggest that anecdotal evidence certainly suggests that an inability to hire top notch counsel plays an important role in the outcome of criminal proceedings. This viewpoint is supported by an analysis of the sentences received by white-collar criminals compared to street-level criminals, such as those that are incarcerated for selling marijuana. Although religion certainly plays a role in the sentence outcome, in many cases the lack of money for competent counsel is the dominant factor. 

Rather than admitting the system is flawed, you can continue to dismiss the data as skewed, or you can take a deep breath, read the studies, and determine for yourself whether or not the analysis and the conclusions are incorrect. Just remember, you have preconceived notions at least as much as others.

[beacon1]

You have not seen me make any comments about race. You have seen me make comments about simplistic conclusions that are drawn from a body of data. These conclusions make the argument that one event causes another (e.g., poverty causes crime). This is impossible to prove without a controlled experimental design. Can you seriously dispute this?

Unfortunately, we cannot conduct a controlled experiment to determine if a causal relationship exists between poverty and crime. Social science can only extrapolate using multivariate statistics, which of course can be "manipulated" to show correlations between almost anything. However, in any scientific endeavor we must begin with the assumption that the data is not skewed by preconceived notions, nor is it misrepresented to attain a specific political agenda.  Although not scientifically rigorous, I suggest that anecdotal evidence certainly suggests that an inability to hire top notch counsel plays an important role in the outcome of criminal proceedings. This viewpoint is supported by an analysis of the sentences received by white-collar criminals compared to street-level criminals, such as those that are incarcerated for selling marijuana. Although religion certainly plays a role in the sentence outcome, in many cases the lack of money for competent counsel is the dominant factor. 

Rather than admitting the system is flawed, you can continue to dismiss the data as skewed, or you can take a deep breath, read the studies, and determine for yourself whether or not the analysis and the conclusions are incorrect. Just remember, you have preconceived notions at least as much as others.

You are only considering one aspect of criminal behavior that occurs in the sentencing phase. I agree, economics does come into play in the sentencing phase. OJ was freed and many poor black men are convicted despite being innocent. How do you account for arrests? Are the police officers equally biased toward blue and white collar families? I have not made claims either way (if you will go back and read my posts). I have said that behavior can never be reduced to simplistic explanations such as poverty creates crime. These are complex issues that involve a multitude of influences. To make the sweeping comment seems to be politically motivated.