I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: ‘In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.’

In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to explain why. (When the Swiss genius Robert Maillart designed bridges in the 1930s, little was known about the properties of reinforced concrete; Maillart was to some extent flying blind. Thankfully his intuition paid off, since his work is incomparably beautiful.)

There is a huge difference between the........

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