wordsmith: ” I work with a lot of engineers and you don’t have to be that bright to get an engineering degree, especially from some no-name university. MIT, maybe, but not the ones you attended.”
An engineer is one who makes things that work. Many of the things that they make are life critical because people would die if they didn’t work. What this means is that they have to be a better scientist than the so called professional ones because they have to get it right.
All the typical scientist has to do is spin paper after paper never having to apologies for getting it wrong. Actually, getting it wrong is used as a good excuse for still more paper spinning. If they can analyze noise and come up with a p value less that 0.05 – bang! – another paper is on the way.
I will take one good engineer over a hudred scientists any day of the week. Largely becasue I will get difficult problems really solved and things that work. Out of the scientists, all I would get is a lot of paper and requests for still more money to buy still more papers.