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A recent post by Jesse Galef at Unreasonable Faith about why skeptics seem predisposed towards sarcastic forms of humour got me thinking.  The question was whether there was a causal link between deriving humour from being able to spot the things that are exaggerated or out of place and being able to spot the things that are similarly incorrect in a proposition (see The Hurley Model of humour as an evolutionary incentive).  Jesse describes this as “debugging”, and so naturally I thought of a potential link to my own profession.

I should state straight-up that I’m assuming, off the back of purely anecdotal data, that there is a higher percentage of atheists, skeptics and freethinkers in the computer science fraternity than the general population (correcting for affluence, education levels and whatnot).  If anyone has hard data on atheism or skepticism demographics by profession (outside of academic science and philosophy, which have excellent stats) I’d love to see it, but for now let’s plow ahead with my assumption and ask what the potential factors are here.  Please also bear in mind these are generalisations and tendencies – there are most definitely exceptions to these.

We spend our lives debugging

Debugging is the act of stepping through a flow – be it code, an argument or a real-life situation – to look for discrepancies; things that aren’t as expected, whether it’s the state or the logic.  The parallels to philosophy are obvious – an argument is essentially a piece of simple (by CS standards) logic, which is either valid or invalid, that draws a conclusion from a premise or premises, such as: (premise) All men are mortal; (premise) Socrates is a man; (conclusion) therefor Socrates is mortal.  We’re built to spot logical inconsistencies, because in our world, they’re bugs that must be squashed.

As a corollary, I strongly suspect we’re much more susceptible to certain fallacies – incorrect premises, straw men (see below)  – than strict logical errors, such as affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent.  I also agree with Zed Shaw that programmers often overvalue logic and undervalue evidence.

We are generally meritocratic

Software engineers, in general, don’t value authority for authority’s sake.  We’re logical, and we value problem solving above niceties – that’s what we love to do, and we recognise it in others, as well as appreciating those who make our lives easier (The Truth About Managing Geeks is a good read that touches on some of this).  The upshot is we’re less likely to take the word of some authority figure at face value (aka the fallacy of argument from authority) – we’ll evaluate what we’re told, decide whether it’s worthwhile and ignore it if it’s not (and, more than likely, subvert it if it’s forced upon us – there’s more than a little anarchist in many a techie I know, including myself!).

The flipside of this is arrogance.  We can be dismissive of those who don’t share our technical knowledge, and assume that because we’re knowledgeable in our own profession those skills automatically transfer to other domains – or worse, that those domains are inherently inferior to our own and not worthy of consideration.  This is by no means limited to computer scientists, as the age-old philosophy vs science debate will attest, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

We are opinionated and confrontational

Any programmer who’s interacted with the community at all is going to be familiar with the Holy Wars.  Topics as seemingly innocuous as whether to use Java over C++, or how to format code most readably, create massive arguments, histrionics and flame wars.  The problem I have with these is that too often both sides have good points, are completely unable to see the points of the other side, and descend into completely over-the-top ad hoc rationalisations and name calling.  Sad, but true – and the reason I suspect we’re more susceptible to straw men than other fallacies.

I think in general we’re accustomed to speaking out in no uncertain terms when we have a strong opinion on something, which garners attention that quite possibly contributes to the impression of skepticism I have (or maybe it’s just confirmation bias on my part, who knows).  If so, on the whole it’s a good thing, although lacking receptiveness to others’ points is something to avoid.

We are often anti-convention

The picture of the geeky outcast living in a basement shunning all contact save fellow geeks is overly harsh, but there lies a kernel of truth at the heart of this stereotype – I certainly wasn’t in with the popular crowd at school, and I know I’m not alone in that.  Western culture can be very anti-intellectual at times, and compscis come in for some of the worst of it.  The result is often a latent mistrust of what is popular or mainstream.  When married to the ability and desire to validate claims made to us on their own merits, this insulates us from argumentum ad populum; the all-too-often seen result, though, is simply supporting a position because others don’t (for instance, the Dissent From Darwin petition – which I refuse to link to – features a strangely high number of computer scientists, although that may in part be down to the Salem Hypothesis).

Any thoughts?  This is something of a mind dump, so is likely laden with too much projection and confirmation bias – hence why I’d love to see some hard stats on the subject, or at least some other opinions.