Along with a increased chance of being a creationist and/or jihadist.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-...

http://www.theness.com/index.php/creationists-mechanical-eng...

This has a 99% probability of being absolute nonsense. Looks more like 30 years of anecdotal evidence and hearsay. Try find a credible source with actual numbers.

I'd love to know where that 99% comes from. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)

I'd say there's far more than anecdotal evidence, but not, obviously, not enough to draw necessarily firm conclusions. So I would say there's enough question to sustain further scientific inquiry. That, interestingly enough, puts us in a position at odds with one of a common traits noted among engineers, in psychological terms: 'need for closure'; which would put the 'engineering mindset' in conflict with the 'scientific mindset', due to the open-ended nature of the science. (Of course, this is only my own speculation.) Which is why we get things like this: http://cosmicfingerprints.com/ee/

Harder numbers:

http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jih...

(expanded book form) http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html

(less numbers, but foundational)

http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=212

http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=235

I pulled the 99% out of thin air, I just wanted to emphasize how small I estimate the chances of this being true. I found one analysis [1] that found that creationist or only half as likely to be engineers as the general population, admittedly only using data from a preexisting survey as proxy for the question at hand.

Maybe it is a naive view on my side but I expect that additional education will make it less likely that one believes religious claims to be true in general and this extends to becoming an engineer and being a creationist.

But even if there was indeed a correlation of the form claimed by the Salem hypothesis, I would naturally want to look for traits that make it more likely for one to become an engineer and a creationist, not for something that causes engineers to become creationists.

You did not explicitly spell it out this way and I am inclined to think you do not think this causation exists, but your response to a comment suggesting that it might be a good choice to become an engineer at least allows the interpretation that becoming an engineer causes becoming a creationist.

And I obviously consider the idea of a causal relationship between being an engineer and being a creationist even more unlikely than that of certain traits increasing the likelihood of becoming an engineer as well as a creationist.

Not that it is unlikely in the general case that learning about X makes one more likely to also believe Y, that is actually certainly pretty common, but in the concrete case I am really unable to see which things one learns when becoming an engineer are suitable to turn one into a creationist.

Finally I am not sure what you wanted the express with the Evolution 2.0 article, but at least in the linked article the reasoning is heavily flawed.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/talk.origins/Xunl5Sl...

> the challenge is to provide very precise analysis of these vague (fuzzy?) concepts

Does common philosophical discourse generally attempt this though?

No which is why it's a challenge.

Most philosophers are not very careful thinkers. There is a lot of circular thinking a lot of apriori assumptions and so one. Mostly the designers who are worth listening to IMO are those who broke down previously held illusions.