KevinC
4622
Man, he is getting murdered in that twitter thread. I think we all understand the GOP are aligned with Russia at this point, but being that blunt is still a little surprising. A little.
Trump is gonna tweet asking if “Beryl” sounds like an American name.
Clay
4624
Little does he know that Beryl Markham’s autobiography, West With The Night, is an amazing book and that Markham was more of a badass than he ever was or will be.
antlers
4625
Trying to win influence on the part of your Russian benefactor is not exactly the same thing as acting as a secret agent of the Russian state. I will admit that the distinction becomes muddied because in Russia the distinction between the oligarchs and state actors is blurred.
What is with the really super smart engineers being Trumpers? Massie has BS and MS engineering degrees from MIT, founded company and had an exit. The two most vocal Trumpers on my Facebook feed, one is Vietnamese boat person also with a EE degree from MIT, and the other is Naval Academy grad and nuclear engineer submariner. The Vietnamese guy is racist against blacks, but submariner isn’t. He not only married a Chinese women, but he just hired a young black female lawyer, and his small company has one white guy and white female, but the other 5 employees are minority.
I’m really baffled how smart and generally nice people can support Trump.
RichVR
4627
I believe one reply had it right. Smart in their major, but nowhere else.
Edit: The same way that PhDs can believe in god.
antlers
4628
Probably similar to why so many of the 9/11 attackers were engineering students. You get impatient with answers that can’t be expressed mathematically, so you look to radically simplify insoluble social problems.
KevinC
4629
I wish I knew. The incredibly smart data analytics guy I work with insists that the Trump tax cuts have really boosted revenues and cut into the deficit and that the data doesn’t show that global warming is a thing. He also still says that as bad as Trump is, he is still glad he voted for him instead of Clinton because of Clinton Foundation corruption.
At some point, I think certain people just completely set aside rationality for ideology.
Does someone like that think the news headlines about the deficit are fake news? Or could he be convinced if shown that the deficit is larger this year than it has been in the last 7? Some of those analytic guys will actually respond to data.
KevinC
4631
Not fake news exactly, he just falls back on the usual talking points. The tax cuts actually have been great for the deficit! It’s just that spending is out of hand, see, and that’s why the deficit numbers look bad. The tax cut part is helping though!
Same with global warming. “The earth has gone through many cycles of climate change in the past before humans even existed!”, while ignoring that such trends didn’t happen in a century or two but rather than tens or hundreds of the thousands of years. I think people like that fall back on ideological catechisms so they don’t have to really taking a look at the information available. It’s the only explanation I can come up with, along with it being very difficult for people to admit to themselves that they’ve been wrong – or worse – have been duped.
ShivaX
4632
Start lecturing him incorrectly in his area of expertise. When he says something, cite some random fuck from the internet or Reddit.
Because that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Even so, I’m old enough to remember when congressmen openly consorting with lobbyists for foreign plutocrats was, while not technically illegal in itself, frowned upon.
Dammit, once upon a time, opening consorting with congressmen was a privilege reserved for American plutocrats!
(One of the unexamined aspects of all these scandals in the degree to which the non-American ultra-rich seem to have displaced the American ultra-rich in their ability to pull the strings of American power - e.g. Tillerson being expected to meekly make nice with Russian oil barons as opposed to telling them what to do.)
Enidigm
4634
I’d guess Specialization vs Broadmindedness. Many engineers are wiz but incredibly specialized and deep into their own technical world. Their mathematical mastery, memory recall and ability to problem solve technical matters gives them the confidence and assurance that what conclusions they come up with are true. But unlike technical conferences they have no alternative information to the propaganda they get from conservative news. While some engineers are true savants and are artistic, musical and well read, maybe more (in my experience) are math wizards with little interest in economics, politics or liberal arts. At least, little interest until such things threaten to affect them.
I’ve noticed too that engineering is the “safest” technical profession for religiously minded persons, since mastering flow regimes or water chemistry little challenges deeply held religious preconceptions in the way even going into biology or medicine might. For some it seems like there is a huge amount of compartmentalization mentally between these deep technical mathematics and social or religious issues which they lean conservative on.
jpinard
4635
And some just think they’re a better class of people above everyone else, ie. entitled.
Plus considering that at one point the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t even have oxygen in it, and at other times more than 90% of all species have gone extinct, I don’t take a ton of comfort in the idea that there have been lots of climatic changes over the eons.
Where is the equal time for climate change is a Chinese plot, libtards?
It was the exact opposite for me. Learning about the fundamentals of physics/chemistry (and the universe) as part of my engineering education helped squash the last remnants of my catholic beliefs.
Seems like if you take all of engineering (very broad as there are many disciplines), most lean Democrate (per this site http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/)
What is with the really super smart engineers being Trumpers?
One simple way of understanding human beings is that we are ego-maximization machines. In this view, what is important about an idea is not so much whether it is right or wrong, but whether it helps or hurts our ego. If the idea would hurt our ego, then it is clearly a bad and wrong idea and we just need to find the right rationalization to show it as such. From this viewpoint, intelligence is really just a tool for helping us craft better and more elaborate rationalizations. An IQ 80 CHUD would respond to your criticisms of Trump with “MAGA 2020!1!”, while your IQ 120 friend will start trying to fiddle with tax statistics. But in both cases they are just trying to hold to the central constraint, that they are good and right and that their actions and thoughts are good and right, and the facts just need to be moved into the correct configuration to prove that.
There’s actually a fairly well-developed theory that posits that we are surprise-minimization machines. So when we get new information that’s a little surprising but within the borders of what we considered likely, we shift our estimates of what’s likely a little to incorporate that information so that we are less-surprised the next time around. When we get new information that’s outside the borders of what we thought was likely, we revise the information so that it fits within the borders (perhaps by editing out pieces that don’t fit or by reducing our trust in the source) before incorporating it into our world view.
