Scott - answering your questions in reverse order:
(1) Yes, engineering.
(2) No - there are many disciplines we can draw on in order to evaluate whether an hypothesis or idea is valid. The more multidisciplinary the approach, the better. Sometimes an idea can only be approached by drawing on the concepts from all the major disciplines.
(3) I constructed my post on the basis that academics can, and should, formulate their theses having already considered at the very least a quantitative analysis of their ideas. We have reached a point in academia where the facts, and reasoning, are ignored in favour of the opioid grip of ideology.
I'm not arguing the degree to which various faculties should be funded by government, at all. It's the departments themselves which have become indoctrinaire and need to be "bulldozed", such is the ease with which any thinking person can drive a hole through their arguments. But no would-be dissenter speaks up for fear of losing their tenure.
For example, why do we need someone like a Jordan Peterson to apply the multidisciplinary approach in dismantling the belief in the existence of a 'gender pay gap'? It's almost as though the various disciplines on campuses around the world aren't even talking to one another. He draws upon psychology, sociology, normal distributions and outliers, statistics, history, biology, politics, Pareto principle, inversion, law....calmly dismantling a darling, but terribly outdated idea of the feminists.
(4) There are obviously whole fields of study where logic, reasoning and ethics are required to approach the question at hand, and where let's say numerical or quantitative analysis of any depth doesn't even enter into the process. Can we describe 'love' by a set of equations? The concept of a Higher Mind behind the universe perhaps? Why I far prefer to discuss things, Scott, with people of the opposite political bent?
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