Science =/= technology. Lab training =/= science education.

[trix]

I agree that the line between science and technology needs to be made more clear.

When I entered college, I had a big interest in computers and electronics.  I was under the impression this was science, and proceeded to sign up for many science classes.  It wasn't until my Engineering Fundamentals class that my professor explained to us the difference between scientists and engineers.  As he put it, scientists push theory and knowledge further, while engineers use the knowledge that scientists discover in practical uses.  So, if I want to spend crazy time learning theory and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, I should be a scientist.  If I want to make fun electronics and program them, I should go into Engineering.

So, this year I went hardcore into Engineering classes, and I'm a lot happier with it.

[Faust]

I also don't believe that psychology is anywhere near what you could call a science. Maybe in a decade or two.

Really? Because of my college friends, the one that actually made it to the end of their Psychology Masters, nearly all of them were real good with their statistics and SPSS¹. Even though some of them still hated it

But they were really thorough about the hypothesis/experiment scientific feedback loop. In fact, in some sense, "more scientific" than the stuff I was doing with Computer Science². Especially because they had to go through great length to try and objectively measure things that are generally considered subbjective and very hard to measure. And they learned and developed methods to do that, which is also part of the science of psychology and sociology.

Maybe you are thinking of psychiatry? Which, like medical school, is much more about learning a profession than doing Real Science. IMO the only reasons why those are taught at a university instead of higher education vocational school is because of history, prestige and that you probably want your cardiologist to have as high an education as possible.

From what I have seen of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Ireland they don't do anything objectively, of course Irish psychotherapy could be ten years behind ye.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I agree that the line between science and technology needs to be made more clear.

When I entered college, I had a big interest in computers and electronics.  I was under the impression this was science, and proceeded to sign up for many science classes.  It wasn't until my Engineering Fundamentals class that my professor explained to us the difference between scientists and engineers.  As he put it, scientists push theory and knowledge further, while engineers use the knowledge that scientists discover in practical uses.  So, if I want to spend crazy time learning theory and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, I should be a scientist.  If I want to make fun electronics and program them, I should go into Engineering.

So, this year I went hardcore into Engineering classes, and I'm a lot happier with it.

Who makes it more clear? Isn't it made clear just by thinking about it?

How about this: if you don't understand the difference between science and engineering just by thinking about it, you should probably be an engineer, not a scientist.

[trix]

I agree that the line between science and technology needs to be made more clear.

When I entered college, I had a big interest in computers and electronics.  I was under the impression this was science, and proceeded to sign up for many science classes.  It wasn't until my Engineering Fundamentals class that my professor explained to us the difference between scientists and engineers.  As he put it, scientists push theory and knowledge further, while engineers use the knowledge that scientists discover in practical uses.  So, if I want to spend crazy time learning theory and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, I should be a scientist.  If I want to make fun electronics and program them, I should go into Engineering.

So, this year I went hardcore into Engineering classes, and I'm a lot happier with it.

Who makes it more clear? Isn't it made clear just by thinking about it?

How about this: if you don't understand the difference between science and engineering just by thinking about it, you should probably be an engineer, not a scientist.

Before I got to college, I didn't even know what an engineer was.  I was thinking of movies like Back to the Future and the like, where there was "normal" people and the "mad scientist" that created cool stuff.  To me, people who created technology and studied scientific things of any sort, were scientists.  I thought everything to do with science was simply different distinctions on Scientist.  As I've freely admitted many times, prior to my sudden motivation to better myself, I was stupid and ignorant to a large degree.  Still am in many ways, though now I'm working on it.

[Cain]

I also don't believe that psychology is anywhere near what you could call a science. Maybe in a decade or two.

Really? Because of my college friends, the one that actually made it to the end of their Psychology Masters, nearly all of them were real good with their statistics and SPSS¹. Even though some of them still hated it

But they were really thorough about the hypothesis/experiment scientific feedback loop. In fact, in some sense, "more scientific" than the stuff I was doing with Computer Science². Especially because they had to go through great length to try and objectively measure things that are generally considered subbjective and very hard to measure. And they learned and developed methods to do that, which is also part of the science of psychology and sociology.

Maybe you are thinking of psychiatry? Which, like medical school, is much more about learning a profession than doing Real Science. IMO the only reasons why those are taught at a university instead of higher education vocational school is because of history, prestige and that you probably want your cardiologist to have as high an education as possible.

From what I have seen of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Ireland they don't do anything objectively, of course Irish psychotherapy could be ten years behind ye.

I honestly don't see a lot of that pushed at University over here any more.  They are optional, usually under a History of Psychology course, but most of the actual training is done by "professional" groups and associations.  I know when I did psychology, it was a very scientically heavy course.  We spent our first semester learning about human physiology, the brain structure and so on, and the second on statistics and devising scientific tests.  We barely actually touched on psychology at all.

[Triple Zero]

From what I have seen of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Ireland they don't do anything objectively, of course Irish psychotherapy could be ten years behind ye.

Aren't those more on the side of psychiatry?

I could be wrong, though.

(BTW over here psychiatry is an extra education on top of medicine, not psychology)

How about this: if you don't understand the difference between science and engineering just by thinking about it, you should probably be an engineer, not a scientist.

I dunno, that sounds a littlebit too much like "if you don't know what 'n00b' means, you probably are one", as if a lack of knowledge destines one to become an engineer.

The difference is in drive, or goals. How about if you turn it around? If you don't know the difference, you'd probably not make a very good engineer? Imagine an engineer treating his work as if he was only researching a scientific theory!

That said, you could even be both.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I agree that the line between science and technology needs to be made more clear.

When I entered college, I had a big interest in computers and electronics.  I was under the impression this was science, and proceeded to sign up for many science classes.  It wasn't until my Engineering Fundamentals class that my professor explained to us the difference between scientists and engineers.  As he put it, scientists push theory and knowledge further, while engineers use the knowledge that scientists discover in practical uses.  So, if I want to spend crazy time learning theory and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, I should be a scientist.  If I want to make fun electronics and program them, I should go into Engineering.

So, this year I went hardcore into Engineering classes, and I'm a lot happier with it.

Who makes it more clear? Isn't it made clear just by thinking about it?

How about this: if you don't understand the difference between science and engineering just by thinking about it, you should probably be an engineer, not a scientist.

Before I got to college, I didn't even know what an engineer was.  I was thinking of movies like Back to the Future and the like, where there was "normal" people and the "mad scientist" that created cool stuff.  To me, people who created technology and studied scientific things of any sort, were scientists.  I thought everything to do with science was simply different distinctions on Scientist.  As I've freely admitted many times, prior to my sudden motivation to better myself, I was stupid and ignorant to a large degree.  Still am in many ways, though now I'm working on it.

OK... but my question is, who needs to make the difference between science and engineering more clear? You said "it needs to be made more clear". By whom? This is a serious question. If the problem is that people aren't figuring out the difference until after they start college, who has the responsibility of imparting that piece of information, and how is it delivered?

Should high school curricula be changed so that at some point, your science teacher is explaining the difference between science and engineering? That's not only implementable, but I think (unless the curriculum has changed radically, which is very possible) that it's already being done... not that high school students are always the best at listening and paying attention. The problem is that there is a ton of overlap between science and engineering, so it's not really all that cut and dried.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

From what I have seen of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Ireland they don't do anything objectively, of course Irish psychotherapy could be ten years behind ye.

Aren't those more on the side of psychiatry?

I could be wrong, though.

(BTW over here psychiatry is an extra education on top of medicine, not psychology)

How about this: if you don't understand the difference between science and engineering just by thinking about it, you should probably be an engineer, not a scientist.

I dunno, that sounds a littlebit too much like "if you don't know what 'n00b' means, you probably are one", as if a lack of knowledge destines one to become an engineer.

The difference is in drive, or goals. How about if you turn it around? If you don't know the difference, you'd probably not make a very good engineer? Imagine an engineer treating his work as if he was only researching a scientific theory!

That said, you could even be both.

It was a joke based on the premise that a scientist develops new knowledge, while an engineer implements what's already known.

[Faust]

From what I have seen of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Ireland they don't do anything objectively, of course Irish psychotherapy could be ten years behind ye.

Aren't those more on the side of psychiatry?

I could be wrong, though.

(BTW over here psychiatry is an extra education on top of medicine, not psychology)

Quite possibly, I'm not familiar with the differences.

[Triple Zero]

It was a joke based on the premise that a scientist develops new knowledge, while an engineer implements what's already known.

Oh, duh, that one flew right over me

That said, from a different perspective, when I went into Computer Science, I was definitely going for the science/research direction. Imagine my disappointment when I got a course called Software Engineering It was hell! All practical and shit, we had to run a software project, and it wasn't something new, or fancy, it was just very complex and the closest you got to research was figuring out what software library we were supposed to use, and how it tied in with the old system that was already there. And the textbook exam wasn't about formulas or math or code, but it was a big fat book filled with software marketing buzzwords bullshit and moronic diagrams that weren't clever or interesting at all! I absolutely hated it

Well that was how I learned the horrible difference between engineering and science, the hard way

Some remarks though:

- even though I barely passed the course with a lot of effort¹, I did learn quite a lot from that course, in hindsight, I ended up recognizing a lot of the patterns and techniques as they were misapplied in my webdevelopment jobs. I actually read up on a couple of software engineering blogs in those days², and sort of planned to re-read that textbook (which I didnt get around to btw)

- at our university, there is actually a department that studies Software Engineering as a science. I can see that making sense because large software systems are incredibly complex to manage, but it's also more a social science, in a way. I can also see that it can't possibly work very well, because the real clever ones in this area have enough business sense to let them be recruited by well-paying firms, and the ones that are left over inevitably apply too much science in their engineering. Though I could be wrong, I never paid too much attention what exactly they were doing (and when I did, it was really boring).


¹ am just not very good at learning from large wordy textbooks--hence my failings at history, even when it's super interesting.
² for people in the industry: I can really recommend joelonsoftware.com, he's not always right so don't take his word for gospel, but he does share quite a few interesting insights on estimating development time, whether to rewrite your code from scratch or not (the answer is "not") and his essay on Unicode is not called The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) for nothing. Seriously, any coder that ever expects to work with text at any point in his program (so that's every coder) should read that.

[trix]

I agree that the line between science and technology needs to be made more clear.

When I entered college, I had a big interest in computers and electronics.  I was under the impression this was science, and proceeded to sign up for many science classes.  It wasn't until my Engineering Fundamentals class that my professor explained to us the difference between scientists and engineers.  As he put it, scientists push theory and knowledge further, while engineers use the knowledge that scientists discover in practical uses.  So, if I want to spend crazy time learning theory and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, I should be a scientist.  If I want to make fun electronics and program them, I should go into Engineering.

So, this year I went hardcore into Engineering classes, and I'm a lot happier with it.

Who makes it more clear? Isn't it made clear just by thinking about it?

How about this: if you don't understand the difference between science and engineering just by thinking about it, you should probably be an engineer, not a scientist.

Before I got to college, I didn't even know what an engineer was.  I was thinking of movies like Back to the Future and the like, where there was "normal" people and the "mad scientist" that created cool stuff.  To me, people who created technology and studied scientific things of any sort, were scientists.  I thought everything to do with science was simply different distinctions on Scientist.  As I've freely admitted many times, prior to my sudden motivation to better myself, I was stupid and ignorant to a large degree.  Still am in many ways, though now I'm working on it.

OK... but my question is, who needs to make the difference between science and engineering more clear? You said "it needs to be made more clear". By whom? This is a serious question. If the problem is that people aren't figuring out the difference until after they start college, who has the responsibility of imparting that piece of information, and how is it delivered?

Should high school curricula be changed so that at some point, your science teacher is explaining the difference between science and engineering? That's not only implementable, but I think (unless the curriculum has changed radically, which is very possible) that it's already being done... not that high school students are always the best at listening and paying attention. The problem is that there is a ton of overlap between science and engineering, so it's not really all that cut and dried.

Good question.  I don't know the answer.  High school would be start, but as you said, many don't pay much attention in high school.  I was one of those.  And as you say, it's not all that cut and dried.   Academic Advisers in college would be another spot where the difference, when it applies to the student, could be articulated.  Though, I can't speak for all colleges, but the one I'm going to has some extremely clueless advisers that often give extremely bad advice.  In fact, one of the most common pieces of advice I hear older students giving newer ones, is to do your own research, thoroughly, rather than depending solely on an academic adviser.

I just wish I'd gone to one of those high schools that have engineering competitions and robotics clubs and the like.  I feel so far behind when I see high schoolers competing in robotics competitions and such, talking about circuit boards and servos that work best, when thus far into college I haven't been taught a single thing about electronics thus far, and that is my intended major.  I wish I could find some friends that do this shit for fun.  My current group of friends have interests basically limited to smoking good pot and playing Call of Duty.  I don't even have a friend that reads books for fun.  It's kind of amazing I grew up with these people and turned out so different.  Well, in some respects, anyway.

[Kai]

To make it clear, I don't have anything against engineers or engineering. I appreciate the applied machinations of technologists and the way they improve my life.

They however are not advancing knowledge, instead producing innovation upon existing knowledge. As Nigel said, if you need to be told the difference between a scientist and an engineer you probably should be an engineer and not a scientist. There's a whole different mentality that goes with science.

Another way to put it: An engineer knows just enough theory so they can work their equipment and inventions. A scientist knows just enough equipment so they can work their theory and experiments. These are different realms of expertise.

[Faust]

Another way to put it: An engineer knows just enough theory so they can work their equipment and inventions. A scientist knows just enough equipment so they can work their theory and experiments. These are different realms of expertise.

With the exception of course of the entirety of the Manhattan project.

[Kai]

Another way to put it: An engineer knows just enough theory so they can work their equipment and inventions. A scientist knows just enough equipment so they can work their theory and experiments. These are different realms of expertise.

With the exception of course of the entirety of the Manhattan project.

That was a science/engineering collaboration of a scale not seen since.

[Triple Zero]

Another way to put it: An engineer knows just enough theory so they can work their equipment and inventions. A scientist knows just enough equipment so they can work their theory and experiments. These are different realms of expertise.

With the exception of course of the entirety of the Manhattan project.

That was a science/engineering collaboration of a scale not seen since.

... Large Hadron Collider?

(and some other particle smashers were also pretty big, but none as big as the LHC)