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Engineers Have a Terrorist Mindset?
An anonymous reader writes "Do engineers have a way of looking at the world not all that different from terrorists? According to an article in the EE Times, they do. The story cites 'Engineers of Jihad,' a paper (pdf download) by two Oxford University sociologists, who found that graduates in science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements. The paper also found that engineers are 'over-represented' among graduates who gravitate to violent groups. Authors Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog chalk this all up to what they call the 'engineering mindset,' which they define as 'a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions.' Is this just pop psychology masquerading as science?"
You could probably draw parallels to Engineer's Syndrome here.
* Be intelligent and educated (Or if not intelligent, obsessive enough to make it through a tough school-path)
* Have superiority complexes ("I know what's right and all differing opinions are wrong and should be corrected")
* Be good problem solvers ("If I wanted to get around this security system, here's what I'd do...")
* Know everything necessary to make good bombs
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"I'm not sure I can even think of a single example"
1. Ph.D. in science. Check.
2. Islamic fundamentalist (is it a movement?). Check.
Half of my mosque is of that type.
Supporting Shari'a, strict dressing, beards and stuff.
BOO!
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
About 1/4-1/3 of my EE graduate school was comprised of Indians/Pakistanis here in the US to study. They were great - Other than a strange obsession with Cricket, perfectly agreeable folks. However, there was another 1/4-1/3 here to study from China that were much harder to get along with. They refused to speak English except with the professors and had posters of Mao along with his poetry all over the half of the graduate-student office that they dominated. I don't want to sound xenophobic, but it was very strange.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Almost everyone in the middle east gets a higher education degree. They study and get their degrees and in their mid-20's they graduate without the ability to go to anymore school and NO JOB PROSPECTS. An inability to support their family drives them to religion and in some cases extremism where they blame all the problems in the middle east on not being religious enough (not pleasing god), or blame all the problems in the middle east on external forces. The problems in the middle east are economic. You have essentially a very small group that lives extravagantly using oil money and the rest of the population struggles to get by with no real jobs or careers that take advantage of their advanced degrees. The one exception seems to be the emirate of Dubai who actually appears to be starting a real economy.
Until there is real social and economic changes in the middle east the countries will continue to breed extremists, because people without prospects for the future will always cause trouble. Saudi is the prime example but Iran is as well, the religious leaders live extremely well, probably in the top 5% economically in the country while the poor people in the villages in the outer reaches freeze to death in a snow storm. Until there is real economic freedom and equal justice for all the area is for the most part a lost cause. Run the oil wealth out and the countries won't be able to provide the minimal support their populations need to survive and then there will be real change.
Yeah, *that* doesn't sound like a fundamentalist mindset.
Anyone who takes an idea and expands to into a universal absolute (with the exception of a few situations where this is reasonable, such as in math and physics) is a fundamentalist. That's what the Islamic terrorists are doing, is what strong libertarians do (which you appear to be, although you could be an objectivist--yet another form of fundamentalism).
That's not to equate the evilness of all forms of fundamentalism, but merely to compare the mindset, which seems quite reasonable.
As for engineers having that mindset, reading any form of geek site, it seems like there's a lot of fundamentalism among this group. GNU, the FSF, and much of Open Source shows *strong* signs of fundamentalism.
Comparing engineers with terrorists is just sensationalism, but noting the level of fundamentalism among engineers, at least on the surface, seems worth investigating.
Anyone who honestly believes there is no contradiction between science (the application of critical thinking, the challenging of assumptions, and the use of an ever-expanding body of evidence to understand the universe) and religion (the demonization of critical thinking, the elevation of dogma and preservation of ignorance, and the use of iron-age superstition and irrationality to 'understand' the universe) is either ignorant, stupid, fucntionally schizophrenic (as I said in my first post) or all of the above.
If you've actually read anything in the Quran, you'll know that eveyrthing I said about it earlier was true: it promotes a barbaric value system that any 21st Century child can see is hopelessly flawed. It is useless as a guide to creating a civil, open and free society, and it is useless as a guide to understanding the universe. That makes it pretty darn useless. The only thing it is really good at is perpetuating delusional wish-thinking about a nonexistant afterlife, and making otherwise normal people do diabolical and insane things in order to obtain an imaginary reward after death.
Science is by definition is the domain of Seen by experiment or experimentally verifiable logical conclusions of experiments.
All religions, including Islam, make explicit claims about reality. Reality is "the Seen." That's all reality is, and all it could possibly be. That's all human beings are - by definition - capable of knowing. There is no domain outside of reality. And this is the problem: religion doesn't just make senseless claims about imaginary things; it makes pernicious claims about reality that are patently false.
A-Bomb