Why is it so hard for scientists and engineers to admit to being wrong?

Why is it so hard for scientists and engineers to admit to being wrong? Topic: Engineering case study
May 22, 2019 / By Gemma
Question: When they don't understand something or have not really studied something, they can't admit to being clearly ignorant or wrong. I've listened to engineers talk about something for hours without truly having expertise. Actually, it's a serious issue. Remember the space shuttle Challenger disaster and all the forums and televised meetings that were held about that. Still, it was hard for engineers and scientists to truly admit to screwing something up, something about an "O-ring." I've sat at dinner tables listening to engineers (some in my family) go 'round and 'round, yet the conversation follows a certain trajectory (one of being stuck) unless one or the other is truly knowledgeable about the subject!
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Best Answers: Why is it so hard for scientists and engineers to admit to being wrong?

Dee Dee | 5 days ago
Its because many science-related professionals are arrogant. Of course this is not always the case, but it is certainly prevalent in a lot of engineers and scientists. It might have to do with them holding a vast amount of knowledge in their brains so they find it hard to cope with not knowing one particular thing. In my personal experience, I was exposed to the majority of my professors looking down upon other majors. Maybe thats rather common in most engineering courses. Who knows. Like I try to do, just ignore the arrogant type. They feel its important to look down upon other people for some reason. They are most likely weak inside so this is there solution to deal with it. Edit: Its a serious issue to your own experiences. There is arrogance in all fields, not just engineering and science-related fields. The Challenger disaster was a big time disaster that was solved by Richard Feynman. He is considered on of the smartest men to ever live and is in no means arrogant. He was one of the best teachers to ever exist in the physics community and took much pride into helping people understand things that came very easy to him. Here is a link that talks about how he solved the O-ring disaster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAi_9quz... Its just the type of personality people have that makes them never want to admit they are wrong, it has no baring on what field of work they are in (although I have noticed the arrogance in engineering field as I stated earlier).
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Dee Originally Answered: Did Scientists admit that they are wrong on Evolution?
That article was written by an ideological idiot. And evolution is supported on more than just one fossil. It is supported by a vast array of evidence from a wide variety of fields. The theory of evolution has been tested ever since Darwin came up with it, and it has always passed with flying colors. One test is performed every time a paleontologist digs in geologic strata--the results of which could falsify evolution if it is false and verify the creation model if it is true. The results, in fact, verify evolution and falsify the creation model. Evolutionary theory would be falsified if fossils of any of the 5,000 present-day species of mammals, including human, or the 10,000 present-day species of birds were found in the fossil strata where they should not be found (for example, in the same strata with dinosaur fossils). No such finds have been made. But, according to the creationist flood "model" those species should be found in those strata. Here are some other examples in which the theory of evolution has been tested and passed with flying colors. http://www.mathprog.org/Old-Optima-Issue... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc... http://www.utm.edu/departments/cens/biol... http://www.physorg.com/news192882557.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512131513.htm http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v297/n5863/abs/297197a0.html The fossil record presents an evolutionary sequence through the strata, and there are numerous examples of transitional forms. http://truth-saves.com/Transitional_Fossils.php http://truth-saves.com/Human_Evolution.php http://truth-saves.com/Our_Ancestors.php http://www.holysmoke.org/tran-icr.htm http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=229081369&blogId=371847244 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaurs http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1081677.stm http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/thedinobirdconnection/a/dinobirds.htm http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/thedinobirdconnection/a/dinobirds_2.htm http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/c.bkgrnd.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/hominids.html http://www.evolutionfaq.com/videos/transitional-fossils http://chem.tufts.edu/science/evolution/HorseEvolution.htm http://www.theistic-evolution.com/transitional.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossils And these in particular: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/hominids.html Then there is this. About fifty years ago, when it was first noted that apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have 23, the creationists subsequently pounced upon that as evidence against the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with the apes. The evolutionary scientists, however, using evolutionary theory and an understanding of genetic modification, proposed that two of the chromosomes must have joined together in the line that led to man from the common ancestor, thus reducing the chromosome number. That prediction has been verified with the results of the recent human and chimp genome projects. It was found that human chromosome 2 is the result of the joining of two chromosomes that have homologues in the chimp. The decoding of the genomes revealed that human chromosome 2 has a stretch of non-functioning telomere coding in the exact place it should be if the two chromosomes had joined in the human line from the common ancestor with the apes, and there is also non-functioning coding for a centromere in the exact location where the extra centromere would be as it occurs in one of the homologous chimp chromosomes, as well as a functioning centromere in the same location as in the other homologous chimp chromosome. Long before the genome projects verified it, this article contained an example of the proposition that two of the ancestral chromosomes joined together to form human chromosome 2. (The link is to an abstract of the article. The full article is available for a fee. Sorry) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/215/4539/1525 The following site (which is an NIH human genome site), however, does have this statement: "Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes - one less pair than chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and other great apes. For more than two decades, researchers have thought human chromosome 2 was produced as the result of the fusion of two mid-sized ape chromosomes and a Seattle group located the fusion site in 2002." http://www.genome.gov/13514624 These sites explain the finding of the genome projects. http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chromosome_2 http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html No creationist pseudo-scientist could make a before-the-fact prediction like that. All they can do is to make up pseudo-explanations after the fact of the finding.

Brittney Brittney
First of all, Scientists and Engineers are two very different groups. Scientists are concerned with theories, and do tend to 'fall in love with' them but they are looking for THE TRUTH. They will often argue, 'just for fun'. Engineers are interested in the 'why', but are primarily concerned with 'what works'. They know that many of their empirical formulas don't conform to latest theory. (They still mostly use Newtonian mechanics rather than the relativistic model, because the differences are too small to be significant.) Thay also often argue, 'just for fun'. As to 'forensics', (admitting what went wrong), there is always a financial concern involved. In the commercial world ,it's liability. In the case of the Shuttle failures, there were 'working' Engineers who warned of the problems, and the '*** covering' was mostly among supervisory types who ignored the warnings. You don't hear from those 'working' Engineers because airing that kind of an "I Told'ya so' will render one unempolyable in the future.
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Alishia Alishia
Just responding to your remark on the Challenger tragedy: Remember, the engineers were right. They were overruled by managers' desire to get the ship off the ground on that day. (The O-ring wasn't defective. The entire field joint, including the O-ring, was designed with some play in it to facilitate the assembly of the booster at the Cape. Too much play for cold weather launch conditions, as it turned out.)
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Unni Unni
""Species that have been as quickly as concept to have grew to become into others have been discovered to overlap in time with those alleged descendants. in actuality, the fossil checklist does no longer convincingly checklist a single transition from one species to a distinctive." – S. M. Stanley, the recent Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the muse of Species (ny: person-friendly Books, 1981), p. ninety 5." my own renowned as what he's describing is precisely what you may anticipate.
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Unni Originally Answered: Are engineers with phD's considered scientists?
You don't have to have any degree to be a scientist... Consider Gregory S. Paul... He has a high school diploma and is doing freelance research...

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