Okay, time out on the topic. If you feel the urge to slap me (and I know you do), do it in a Private Message, because I don’t want to kill this rather enjoyable thread.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to take issue with that comment. It's in direct response to another comment (also in jest) made earlier. After all, I have to keep my image as a ‘public defender’ of lawyers everywhere on this forum, because in general, FIRST is taught to hate them in a
dazzling display of biased ignorance. That being said, I actually did my research before I made that little parting remark. I would have been content to not disclose any sources, but since you asked…
Know Your Child’s IQ, by Glen Wilson and Diana Grylls lists occupations that they maintain are typified by various IQ levels. It is unclear where they got this information or whether it is based on empirical data at all however to your credit, engineers are placed in the same IQ category as lawyers; that is the ~130 mark.
But.
CNN did a story on this very recently and mentioned attorneys scored higher than all other professional disciplines, including "doctors" (as in MDs), and engineers. Professional disciplines are by far the cream of the crop in this regard. However, it should also be noted that years of schooling and IQ are proportional. In order to become an engineer, one can take half the schooling the average lawyer or doctor has to endure. I am guessing (though I have no proof of this) that engineers have higher IQs than MDs on average for the simple fact that the IQ system places a high emphasis on mathematical prowess, but the years of schooling proportionality is evidenced in the table
here (engineers are notably not mentioned in that table) for those interested.
Unfortunately, I could only find one set of IQ ratings of both attorneys and professional engineers
here, but the
lowest mean IQ I could find with Google for “attorneys” or “lawyers” was 127, whereas according to
this, the mean IQ of engineers (who have not gone back for another three or four years of school--remember again the years of school propotionality I discussed earlier) is 111. This is the also the lowest average IQ for engineers I could find. I did not find any source that put engineers’ average IQ above that of lawyers, but if you find one, point me in its direction by all means. The point is that an analysis of numerical data puts the average lawyer
at least three points ahead of the average engineer.
Flame away everyone, but in a PM. Quickly back on topic, while I would really prefer to stay out of this part of the discussion, I'd just like to note that Al's example of four crab steering devices could be logically interpreted as one device or module; one could argue that the mobility of this hypothetical Wildstang consists of four tangible objects, and thus the fact that they are not physically attached is a side issue. Run with that if you like.