Comment Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score 1) 736
I think you're on the right track. What's interesting is that in other odd areas, e.g. the occult, fringe religious movements, etc., engineers are also extraordinarily common. I think in part this concerns personalities that look for simple answers to complex problems, but the reasons are not all negative. Most of these pursuits require an above-average intelligence, but they concern matters that an engineering education does not prepare one to tackle. So, a young engineer, whose life experience has yet to expand his intellectual horizons much, can pretty easily get caught up in a world view that ignores a myriad of other considerations and data.
In most cases, it's a phase, and let's face it, undergraduates and recent graduates of all disciplines are, well, idiots, but in situations where people are exploited by those who know how to limit a person's awareness and make it look like they are making their own choices by controlling what choices are available, we can get extremely negative results.