Slashdot Mirror
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?"
First and foremost, to answer the question put forth in the summary:
To parse:
this first would have to lend credence that the thesis warrants comparison to psychology in any way, let alone "pop" psychology which tends to be a few rungs down from the imprimatur of truly researched psychology. It isn't. It's not even close.
You bet! No matter what this is trying to be in any genuine sense other than phooey, it's masquerading.
Not a chance. Anecdotally I would expect to be able to be able to think of a number of fellow engineers who match the description and thesis. I'm not sure I can even think of a single example. I can think of some peers from the past who I may describe as of a similar mindset, but those I would hardly describe as real engineers.
I'm guessing this article was supposed to be released April 1, but someone jumped the gun. That said, it's not even a very funny joke.
You could probably draw parallels to Engineer's Syndrome here.
Many of the engineers I've known in college were absolutely convinced of tehir superiority and absolute rightness in all things. Certainly not all, but a fair chunk. Same with Fundamentalism. To a certain extent its still trying to change the world instead of yourself.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Engineer's mindset: "What makes this thing tick"
Terrorist's mindset: "I know why this thing is ticking"
All I can say is, thank god I'm an atheist!
Kevin Smith on Prince
We engineers aren't the most proactive types, we tend to sit next to the flag, banging away on our defenses and designing new weapons in our heads. Oh, and watching out for those dog-gone spies.
Demented But Determined.
It's all becoming clear now. A lot of Islamic terrorists are engineers. That explains why they have no infrastructure over there... The engineers are too busy killing themselves to build a society. Boy I'm glad my engineering degree will be put to better use than suicide.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
After all, who wants a sociologist in their terror cell?
More to the point, people studying proper subjects are more likely to encounter Islamists from other countries on their courses and to be influenced by them - since nobody is going to travel all the way from Iraq/Iran/Saudi/<insert hotbed of radicalism here> to study complete bollocks like sociology or any of the other pap degrees offered, it's no wonder that there aren't too many Islamist sociology and psychology students.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
I'm from Pakistan and would be willing to guess that this is true. The issue primarily why these results would exist is the concept of fine arts etc aren't as common in most 3rd world countries. In pakistan for example the revered professions are Medicine and Engineering. The best and brightest always gravitate towards those (top 500 out of 50K candidates get into the main tech university in Karachi).
In any case, I'm willing to bet these are also the minds that go hmm there are problems with our society that need to be solved. One could probably divvy up these people into those that leave the country, those that stick behind and those that turn to religion for answers and eventually rise among the ranks of extremists etc.
Terrorism vs extremism isn't as finely delineated as Bush et. al would like to make it out to be. If one could fix the issue of social injustice and lack of opportunities / education I'm willing to bet most of these problems will go away as well.
Is that these groups often have R&D schedules adjusted by marketing majors. Hell, going through that a few times would radicalize my pet hamster.
One of the foremost terrorists in the history of the middle east was Yahaya Ayyash, an electrical engineer (educated at Beir Ziet University) who built bombs for Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. His bombs ended up killing over 100 civilians (mostly Israeli, but also Americans and other Westerners in Israel) and dozens of soldiers, ambulance workers, and other first responders.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
http://xkcd.com/319/
http://xkcd.com/253/
Anyone have a link to the one that is done in a "vertical" layout?
Living With a Nerd
It should be noted that due to US immigration restrictions, 80% of muslims migrating to the US are highly educated. Engineers. This should somehow skew the results.
Were I live, in the Netherlands, only 30% of the muslim immigrants are highly educated (the rest is practically completely uneducated...); if you'd do the same test in the Nederlands, you might find morons have a terrorist mindset;-)
0x or or snor perron?!
http://catb.org/~esr/guns/
I guess I'm an idiot for this
So what?
If the criminals and terrorists are either "uneducated hoards" or someone with some education, I'd expect someone in science to do a "better job" as a criminal than the "uneducated hoards" or someone with a fine arts degree. One of the tasks you learn in *real* science (what the pseudo-scientists here don't seem to grasp) is the ability to plan ahead. Yes, plan ahead. Therefore maybe criminals and terrorists with some science background will get further in their game than square 1.
Furthermore, maybe people that want to get "ahead" in their criminal organizations enter college to gain education in the material that they will find useful. You know, an engineer or a chemist may be a more useful profession for them than a poet.
But then what will these pseudo-scientists find next in their statistics? That some of the non-science terrorists/criminals like to play chess or other strategy games? Or that they are fanatics *before* starting their university education?
75% of people know these statistics are bogus 19 times out of 20.
I always thought that those with degrees in science, medicine and engineering were overrepresented within the realm of atheist or agnostic belief frameworks. I guess we cant go without forming a very strong opinion about the universe around us.
OK, lets back up the truck for a second and try to view this as something other than "those jerks in IT are such elitist pigs" mindset for a second. I have an organization that going to inflict terror on a given population. Am I going to recruit a wet nurses or an engineer?
I don't think engineers are terrorists, but rather terrorists are engineers. Some rudimentary knowledge of bomb making, architectural structures, and other engineering fields are usually ideal if you're going to blow up a building.
A marketing or business major would not be suitable for the young terrorist. This would lead to things such as radical groups forcing us to buy that blue jacket which we don't really like and think is overpriced anyway, but now we have to buy it or concede that they are right.
Or maybe it's that Engineers are recruited more aggressively than liberal arts majors because likely to bring useful skills and a concrete, analytical mindset to the mission.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
do terrorists have an ENGINEER mindset?
Terrorism requires the knowledge to bypass security and/or blow stuff up.
To do that, you need engineers. Otherwise all you get is a bunch of talkers, not doers, or at least doers who blow themselves up more often, and who fail to even reach their targets.
What this means is, your average engineer does not have a terrorist mindset, but terrorist groups must recruit engineers in order to Get Stuff Circumvented/Done[tm]. So they recruit engineers as often as they can, because otherwise they cannot Get Stuff Circumvented/Done[tm].
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Yasser_Arafat: After returning to the University, Arafat studied civil engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat Osama_Bin Laden: Some reports suggest bin Laden earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_laden
Great, a pissed of /.er. How long till he blows something up now?
Submitted as Brain-Chow:
I once was told in a Stats class that;
" Among Lazy, Illiterate American Auto workers,
that 40% of all sick time was taken on a Monday
or a Friday". The class ( mostly) was dumbstruck.
- Never stopping to think that 40% of every
American work week is a Monday or a Friday.
The well had been poisoned, tho, and despite
the clarity of the punchline-like analysis, many
insisted on various faults, like unions, wage status,
etc.
I feel pretty certain of two things -
1. That we've been so conditioned by Big Media to
the insidious Eevil of 'Terrorism' that it invokes
a knee-jerk response of denial in any other view.
2. Smart people make very good Engineers and very formidable
enemies. You won't hear of Inept Terrorists in the news.
Only the Smart Ones.
- Just my $0.02
I hear your pain, friend. Time to strap on some C-4 and head for the Slashdot headquarters!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
This clearly underlines why math, science and engineering must be eradicated from the US educational system.
Engineers tend to be trained to think. This is a problem for people in charge.
Ok let's see Engineers are suspect to Terrorism because they view things as right and wrong.
Assuming that this is the truth, that then puts ANYBODY WITH ANY IQ in the sciences and math as potential terrorists! So let's not stop at engineers, but head on over to physicists, and math folks.
Oh wait, maybe this is a bigger and badder idea... What if this is a way to eradicate the "intelligent."
Think hard about this. Who does any dictator knock off first? Oh yeah the intelligent and who can think for themselves.... Gee let's make engineers the scape goats and suspects here...
Come on people do we see the boggieman at every corner...
Think about why maybe many immigrants are engineers. Could it be because engineers can get visa's and jobs here? Maybe its because visa's are not given out to basketweavers!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Slight clarification about that last point. We do in fact seem to hear a lot about "Inept Terrorists" in the news, although the news never reports them as inept, rather they spin it as the brave efforts of the police narrowly avoiding massive catastrophe. Never mind the fact that the plan the morons had concocted was so bad they would at most hurt (or kill) themselves, and if they got really lucky a few bystanders. Good example was a recent case where some "terrorists" had loaded their cars up with cans of gasoline and then planned on lighting them on fire believing this would lead to massive explosions (this happened over in England btw). Anyone who knows about these types of things knows all you're going to get is a big hot fireball as the car burns down, and that's about it (might work if you had a proper fuel air mixture, but just dumping containers of gas in a car isn't going to cut it). So yeah, plenty of inept to go around.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Many of the terrorists which have been part of the popular news media the last few years have had the eventual goal of creating a very structured and ordered society. While this may seem to fit the barest idea of what an engineer might approve of, it is a far stretch from matching the what I know of engineering types.
1. Engineers are just as interested in knowing how things work as they are in making sure they work orderly. This would lend itself to a desire for more openness in working systems. To easier be able to lift the hood and see what's going on. Most terrorists seem interested in extremely closed societies with no openness.
2. Terrorists main method of operation is to create fear and chaos in order to eventually gain control. Chaos is not an engineer's friend. While an engineer would be glad to have created order from chaos, he would not create disorder in an attempt to create a working system.
3. Engineering is generally a respected, fairly good paying career choice. What is the incentive to give up a promising future for a life of uncertainty and danger.
I just don't see it.
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
"a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution)..."
Frederick W. Taylor, advocate of "scientific management," and who literally articulated as a principle that everything could and should be done in "the one best way." In my experience, it is managers, not engineers, who tend to have the "one best way" mindset. Recently, things that used to be called "recommendations" are now called "best practices," and as nearly as I can tell nobody ever has or thinks they need any data to back up the idea that the "best practices" are actually best.
Engineers, in my experience, are the very last people to claim there is "one best way." On the contrary... the more conservative engineers are constantly articulating tradeoffs (different ways presenting different combinations of good and bad features), while the bolder ones are constantly coming up with wild new ideas. Sometimes it is difficult for a group of engineers ever to stop brainstorming, because they are so intrigued by the challenge of finding new ways to do things... and, if nothing else, because they like the competitive one-upping of thinking of ways to do something that their colleagues didn't think of.
I find this paper very disturbing. I lived through the McCarthy years... There was no definition of the word "Communist." A communist meant anyone the government didn't like. If you pointed out that some reputed "Communist" was, simply, factually, not a Communist, not only did it not matter but it made you suspect yourself. (During the McCarthy era, for example, all homosexuals were automatically "Communists.")
These days, the word "terrist" seems to have the same sort of elusive meaning. It's only a matter of time before it becomes meaningless to point out that someone is, simply and factually, not a terrist. So what, if they were friends with terrists and didn't turn them in... or if they had a "terrist mind-set..." or if they were an engineer, because, just as all homosexuals were automatically Communists, all engineers automatically have "terrist mind-sets."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am speaking as an engineer and Englishman here:
The recent failed bomb attempts in London apparently had some engineers on the design team. People with a PhD in engineering as it happens.
The fact that they failed to make a bunch of petrol and compressed propane cylinders explode, or even catch fire, is frankly quite pathetic. I think any self respecting engineer souldn't fail that badly (though I'm very glad they did fail). This certainly raises questions about the quality of the engineering department from which they got their PhDs. I have trouble believing that such incompetent engineers could really have performed any worthwhile, independent research.
If the recruits only come from third rate institutions who don't have the candidates or the ability to churn out even half-way decent engineers, then we're no worse off having engineer-terrorists than normal terrorists.
If you want an idea how bad if life would be if terrorists could get good engineers, then consider what would happen if this guy was recruited to the other side. Fortunatley the best engineers out there are far more interested in engineering stuff than they are in people. Since terrorism is about people, this does not incline them towards terrorism.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's that mandatory Circuits course that the mechanical engineers and others outside EE are required to take is what is breeding terrorists, I tell you. Requiring MEs to learn op amps is what is giving them that sour outlook on life.
I think the study missed a huge point.
Terrorists typically come from developing nations. Colleges in developing nations typically only teach engineering/science because that is what they need. People that goto college in developing nations typically have been tapped to be the leaders of their communities. It is a rare honor and they are going to study a major that has a clear and direct benefit to their communities. They are not going to study political science... because it is completely useless to them. (as opposed to somewhat useless to us) Liberal arts will not give their community food or water.
Colleges in nations outside of Europe and North America do not have the same liberal arts program. In fact, it is same to say that they have NO liberal arts program. When the dictator of your country kills everyone critical of his tyrannical rule, there are no professors left to teach critical thinking. When the only majors offered in a college are engineering or science people are going to major in those topics.
Also, engineering and science students in accredited western schools have to take humanities and social science course as part of their curriculum. You cannot make a comparison between the education received in a western college and one of a college in a developing nation.
This study reads like some poli-sci adjunct professor is lobbying for more federal funding.
To make this study creditable at all there has to be an in depth analysis of the options provided to the students, not just "violent people commonly study engineering" ergo "engineers are violent".
I live in Newton's world even though I know that his "rules" are a little flawed. I occasionally need to visit Einstein's world because I'm doing something weird. No problem. However, if Newton's world were written in scripture, then any situation requiring Einstein's stuff would be painfully ignored or explained away through magic.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
A previous poster pointed at Engineer's Syndrome, and I see some similar tendencies.
Engineers -- and I'm speaking as someone who is doing an engineering job, surrounded by engineers, and from a family of engineers -- tend to favor experience more than empathy. They tend to think that if they're convinced something is right, it's for good reason, and once they're convinced, it takes some work to change their minds. More particularly, if they're convinced, they're unlikely to use someone else's experience as a guideline: they're less likely to put themselves in someone else's shoes to regard a problem from that standpoint.
My own definition of Engineer Syndrome is encapsulated in the phrase, that I actually heard from one of my dad's coworkers once, "If you would've thought about this problem as much as I have, you'd agree with me." The level of premise and and patronization enclosed in that one sentence is staggering, but when it comes right down to it, I think many people drawn to engineering feel that way at some point or another. The consequence of this is that if someone else *doesn't* agree, the person suffering from ES thinks the other person is either stupid or stubbornly wrong, and either way, is a fool whose opinion is not to be regarded.
Likewise, engineers come from a background where things are provably correct (mathematics) or experimentally verifiable (most of the rest of science and engineering) and take that sense of certainty and apply it in areas where it isn't applicable -- sociology, politics, art, places where it really does come down to opinion, where there isn't actually a right and wrong, just preference.
The fundamental difference is that engineers do tend to rely on things that are provably correct or experimentally verifiable, whereas religious extremists are predicating invisible omnipotent entities. But the point is: if you have people who have this engineering set of mechanisms and filters for dealing with the world, and who believe in invisible omnipotent entities, they're going to have similar behavior to people who are drawn to engineering.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I'm not sure it's a superiority complex, but the end result is awfully similar. Engineers are one of the few subsets of people that are in active control of changing the world around them. It's what they do for a living. They think about a problem, come up with a way to implement a solution, and then build it.
I don't think they believe they're superior-- but when an engineer decides one way or the other about an issue, he sets out to do something about it. A lot of people are content to hold a viewpoint but go on about their business, but it has always seemed to me that an engineer with a viewpoint on an issue that he won't back down from is simply doing what engineers do. He's thought about a problem, looked at his limited options, and is pursuing the solution his believes is correct.
This mindset, however, is not common. Most people, when confronted with an issue (even one they strongly feel needs to change) that is outside their ability to control, will simply go about their lives. The engineer, although similarly powerless to enact change in, say, global politics, will do the only things he can, like annoy everybody around him trying to convince them to see his viewpoint. They try to think rationally, and they believe when they've reached a conclusion that other people could be convinced rationally to see their viewpoint. Again, this is what they do day-in and day-out at work, convincing co-workers to choose a particular design path on purely rational merits. It just doesn't map to the messy grey-area that makes up normal life with irrational people.
(none of this is peer-reviewed, and was made up on the spot, and may or may not match your experiences.)
I think the more likely explanation is that this is an attempt by sociologists to get revenge for all the times they were told in college that sociology isn't a real major, sociology isn't a true or hard science, etc. Being an engineer myself, I happen to agree with that assessment, but perhaps the sociologists are getting the last laugh. :p
...... Unless of course we all really do have a terrorist mindset. In that case, publishing such an offensive article was a gross miscalculation on their part! :D <sarcastic news flash> Everywhere across the nation, engineers begin to dust off their bomb building kits, preparing to take on the evil forces of sociology</sarcasm> :D
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I'm not so sure about that. Many of us like our NIH, DoD, DoE, or univeristy grants. Many of us would be for a new orbiting space telescope, or a new Internet backbone (that isn't all filled up with random commercial crap and pr0n), or a manned trip to Mars, or a new super-collider, or a thousand other basic science projects that corporations are less likely to fund.
I'm sure there are some scientists who are libertarian enough to only work for corporations that are not receiving subsidies from the government, but I doubt it's the majority.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Take a frog, and yell JUMP!
The frog jumps.
Now, cut off one of its legs and yell JUMP!
The frog jumps, but not as far.
Now, cut off the other leg and yell JUMP!
The frog does not jump.
Conclusion: The amputee frog is deaf.
Abstract: For centuries, science has been mystified by how frogs hear without ears. Our recent work has at last resolved this long standing mystery by showing that in frogs, the ability to hear is closely correlated to the number of legs present on the frog. The hearing organ's location in the frog's legs explains the absence of any ears at their expected location. In future studies, we will determine if the frog's hearing apparatus is in fact located on the frog's feet, as is suspected from their ear-like morphology.
Please don't lump all psychology together. There is a very large difference between the psychodynamic approach to psychology and the more modern approaches such as cognitive neuroscience. New tools in brain imaging are finally giving us the tools needed to start unraveling the human mind. We've started to progress beyond the psuedo-philosophical past because we now have data to support our arguments. Considering we all have a brain (well, I doubt it with some people sometimes...) it's probably a good thing to have a better understanding of it. Sure we don't have neat equations to describe our field, but hey, even basic engineering started somewhere. The brain is a hell of a lot more complex than a bridge so it's going to take a while.
I think what they have in common is both rigidity (eg, A+B=C is a "rule", just as "obey god" is as well) as well as a willingness to follow everything to its logical conclusion (eg, C=B-A and "obey god, god says infidels should die, therefore kill them").
I'm an engineer, and I definitely follow this. This is why I'm against religion.
In my view, the fundamentalists of every religion are the correct ones. The "moderates" are wrong, because they're picking and choosing which parts of their holy texts to believe in and follow, and are ignoring others. The problem is that every religion's holy texts are full of horrible teachings. The Christian Bible, for instance, has many places where it condones murder, genocide, rape, genital mutilation, and more. It doesn't just describe these events, it makes clear these are perpetrated by "God's chosen people", so it's OK. Some Christians try to argue that things changed when Jesus came around, but that's silly. For one, Jesus specifically said he did not come to change Moses' Law. He also said he came not to bring peace to Earth, but a sword, and to set the world on fire. Moreover, if God is omnipotent, why would he change his mind and become kinder and gentler after an event?
The way I see it, you have to accept everything in a religion, including all the silly or horrible things, or you have to reject it altogether. Since all the religions are full of horrible teachings, the logical conclusion for me is that we must simply reject these religions.
And of course, there's zero evidence to support any of these religious claims anyway. As an engineer, if I doubt something, I can set up an experiment and determine if it works or not. I can't do that with religion; it's just stories written down by ancient people, which claim to be true, but have nothing else to support them. While this is just conjecture of course, I think it's far more likely that all the ancient "gods" were actually alien astronauts than real gods, although the most likely explanation is that people just made this stuff up and it got passed down orally over centuries and twisted around.
I'm not so sure about that. Slashdotters tend to be libertarians. Scientists in general are often in favour of government funding for research projects, and my anecdotal evidence is that most engineers I met were into public healthcare and so forth. I mean, it's all efficiency optimizations, and the free market does not optimize for perfect efficiency because people are not perfectly rational and trustworthy actors (of course, command economies do not optimize either for exactly the same reasons).
Pedantic correction but that was Glasgow Airport in Scotland. Not that everyone in the countries involved would see it as pedantic...
...but yes, a good example of very inept terrorists where the reporting made it seem as if the end of the world were nigh.
I say we take-off and slashdot the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
Except that atheism is kind of an extreme position in itself. It takes a person with a big head to look at the 95% of the earth's population that believes in a supreme being and declare them all delusional.
I guess I have a pretty big head.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
is it pop psychology(?)
this first would have to lend credence that the thesis warrants comparison to psychology in any way, let alone "pop" psychology which tends to be a few rungs down from the imprimatur of truly researched psychology. It isn't. It's not even close. masquerading(?)
You bet! No matter what this is trying to be in any genuine sense other than phooey, it's masquerading.
And a personal anecdote (under the category of science no less.)
science(?)
Not a chance. Anecdotally I would expect to be able to be able to think of a number of fellow engineers who match the description and thesis. I'm not sure I can even think of a single example. I can think of some peers from the past who I may describe as of a similar mindset, but those I would hardly describe as real engineers.
While the parent is certainly entitled to have and express his opinions, the parent has made no real insightful contribution to the discussion because the parent neglected to include any evidence to support his statements. Therefore, the parent should be modded down, at least until such time that he more fully supports his assertions.
As a TA, they [the Asians] cheat too.
I was stunned how many lab reports I would get where pages (page 1 versus page 2) just wouldn't match. I mean the fonts were different, one page would end mid-sentence the next would start in the middle of a different sentence, results were from labs that had been done a year before and the assignment altered in the meantime.
I assume it is because they just really don't speak/write English. As such, written reports get passed around and they have no clue how they are mixing and matching them. They may be smart but they are unqualified to go to an English speaking school.
As many of you now know, I was recently detained and questioned by the FBI regarding several posts on this blog. Two of the posts in question were first altered, then removed all together, by what appeared to be the Dept. of Homeland Security. I've been thinking about how to describe this experience. Last night, I talked briefly about what happened and why in an e-mail to Rich over at The New Freedom. He's got a great site over there, by the way. I've decided that that e-mail is probably about as thorough as I care to be regarding my little adventure, at least for now. Here's the copy that I sent him - I invite all of you to read it for yourselves: Hey Rich, just wanted to follow up on your comment on my blog and the post on yours. My name's Rob, by the way, hi, nice to meet you. Apparently, I actually did upset a few people with some of the information I posted. This resulted in an involuntary trip to the local FBI offices. Didn't even know they were in town - guess they're everywhere these days.
So from what I gathered in our conversation (if you can call it that - it was a bit one-sided), a couple of things set them off. They've got some tracking software sorting through everything out there, looking for certain keywords. If it picks up a keyword, you get put on a list and monitored. I got flagged the first time as a result of my post on Canada placing the US on its terror watch list. Among other things, mention of Guantanamo, Afghanistan, torture, and terrorism set the software off.
A couple of posts later, I did a parody of an interview with al-Quaeda representative Ayman al-Zawahri. This seemed to set them off, too. They wanted to know what my connections were to the group - I guess they were obligated to ask. The thing that really got them in that article was an offhand remark about the weaponization of smallpox based on some work an Australian research group did with mousepox. Here's a link to the research:
sciencedirect article
You may need a subscription to view it, I'm not sure. Anyway, I assumed that this was pretty common knowledge. Of course, I also work in biomedical chemistry, so I guess I hear some things the general public doesn't. They were really freaked out about this. Don't blame them - if you've got some time, pick up Ken Alibeck's (sp?) book on the supposedly now-defunct Russian bioterrorism program. But that's a story for another day.
The stuff about homegrown terrorism was the last straw, they said. I guess posting instructions for some lame explosives along with criticism of HR1955 pissed them off. They decided to teach me a lesson by first censoring, then removing the offending blog post. They figured that if I was posting stuff like this, it was only a matter of time before I moved on to more complex agents, based on my education and employment background. It took me about six and a half hours to convince these assholes that I'm not a terrorist. I am certain I'm on every watch list they've got now. Not looking forward to my next trip to the airport, that's for damn sure.
I guess that's about it. I appreciate your concern, and the fact that you're spreading the word - people definitely need to know about this. But standing up for your rights on paper is one thing; it's a different story when they come knocking on your door and give you the opportunity to do it in person. A word of caution: this shit is real. Do what you can to stay off of that list, man. I'm sure that it was just an odd series of coincidences that sent them my way, but better to be safe. Anyhow, I'm probably going to post briefly in the next day or two, once I have time to organize my thoughts, and then stick to the fiction from here on out. Well, let me know if you have any more questions, and keep doing what you're doing.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Engineers are well-known (by researchers, theorists, and others) as "get it done" types. They want to know as much theory as they need to make practical applications, and to make things that do something useful. As long as they're making progress, rough guidelines that take margins of error into account are as often as good as pure theory.
Terrorists are people who've decided to make people take notice of their views. They're not idealists who talk about people converting because they've come to accept what the terrorists see as truth. They want to get noticed and to get their message out to people. The media is an effective way to do that, if you can get the attention of the media. Blowing people up is a quick way to get in the news. Notice that the message spread by terrorists and the means of spreading it are often condemned by others wanting to spread a similar but more peaceful message, yet it's hard to deny who gets their message to a wider audience. It's much more common to hear "join Islam or die", "join the Communist Party or rot in jail", or "love America or leave it" than to hear "if you'll pray with us, you might see Mohammed was right", "it's better for us all if we're all communists, please take this pamphlet and consider it", or "this is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the place where it should be safe to dissent", even though there are peaceful and considerate Mulsims, Commmunists, and Americans. (I'm an American and I love my country, but I think we have not only a right but a duty to be heard when we have a grievance against our leaders -- that's what the country was founded on!)
Much of what terrorists do requires skills most people don't have. Making a reliable suicide vest takes skill. Aiming an aircraft at a skyscraper was not something left to chance, but something the hijackers trained for in actual flight schools. Terrorist paramilitary camps exist to train people in how to fight with tactics developed over generations. Those who want to be effective terrorists appreciate that an engineering degree in chemical engineering is probably a good way to learn about explosives and poisons. Those who want to write software for their cause need to know how just as those who write software for other reasons do. They need to know how buildings are supported to bring them down more effectively, just as professional and peaceful demolitions crews do. These people take engineering degrees or go to flight school or training camp because they have made the pragmatic decision that it suits their ends.
So really, yeah, I can see it. Engineers do what they need to do to build buildings, bridges, computer processors, new plastics with better impact resistance, or cars with better safety ratings. Terrorists do what they need to do if their goal is killing, maiming, and getting noticed. Both are very goal-oriented, and very pragmatic. Being effective at terror often takes some engineering skills, which reinforces some of the correlations.
All of does mean that someone who's a terrorist might be lead to study engineering. It doesn't mean that people studying engineering are any more likely to become terrorists than they otherwise would be.
I'm sure most of the Muslim people studying engineering are studying it for professional reasons, too. We have wackos in the West who were good at destruction because of their education and training (for example Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Michael Swango, Josef Mengele, Richard Angelo, Charles Cullen, Kristen Gilbert, Stephan Letter, Christine Malevre, Norbert Poehlke, Beverly Allitt) many of whom have been nurses or physicians. That doesn't mean someone who's studied electronics, pyrotechnics, or medicine in the US or Europe is going to be a serial killer or mass murderer. The same is true of the Middle East.
Actually, another reason is applicability. People don't study American business law to take back to Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Indonesia, because the laws aren't the same. Engineering is largely transfe
All the terrorists are inept, that does not stop them from being dangerous. The second generation of the Baader-Meinhof gang was litteraly recruited from a lunatic asylum. Catching inept criminals is still very difficult.
The problem with the recent scare-ware announcements in the US is that they have tended to be of wannabees and never-was types. Such folk can become dangerous, but not as dangerous as the posturing and grandstanding that the likes of Freeh, Ridge, Ashcroft, Giuliani and the rest have engaged in.
But comming back to the original question, yes having observed terrorists professionally for a number of years I would say that very few of them have what you would call a scientific mindset. They are not interested in enquiry, they have a complete ideological system that answers every question. They are certainly not interested in testing their precious little ideas.
The other point of reference is that a scientist is not much use to a terrorist group, they want practical skills like how to blow stuff up. Bin Laden is a civil engineer, so hw knows the weak spots in building design. But most terrorists have no real engineering skill either.
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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.
I am a liberal one and I disagree. I see liberalism or religiosity as orthogonal to the issue. I would say that the engineer mindset is one that is adaptable to many realms.
I think it comes down to fundamental assumptions. I disagree on a fundamental level with a lot of terrorists. However, I have to say, if I believed some of the core things they believe, I would support the actions they take.
Its a matter of putting a mind to a problem. My fundamental assumptions are that people should be allowed to determine their own destiny, there is no god, nonconsensual violence is wrong unless used as a last resort in response to the threat of violence. etc.
However, if I saw myself as a member of a minority group, whose sworn enemy was the entire current "world order". Then I can totally see myself approaching this as an engineering problem, and well... the solution of "how do you fight" looks like terrorism.
So I guess what I am saying is, I can totally see the link, not a matter so much of people perverted by science, but scientific and engineering thought patterns, derailed and corrupted by religion. Frankly, extremeism is the logical conclusion to some of the basic assumptions of religion.... and I see engineers as people who are more likely to follow something to its logical conclusion than others who are happier with vague contradictions.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> Slashdot Libertarianism is mostly hypocritical anarchism
Naw. It's mostly totally unselfconscious, unexamined selfishness combined with a sort of odd belief in 'freedom' that is so strong that it basically amounts to belief in predestination. ("Everyone has absolute choice in everything that happens to them, so therefore it's obvious that everyone deserves exactly what they are getting. Except me, because I deserve more.")
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. People who rely on logical thinking are more severely damaged by buying into baseless dogma because their first instinct is to take things to their logical conclusion. Those who don't do this are more resilient against the damaging effects of garbage in garbage out because they don't tend to make logical conclusions and base their actions upon those conclusions, but rather use the 'garbage in' to justify whatever they would have done anyway. I think much of the celebate clergy and other such religiously inspired Darwin Award winners are engineer types at core who got creamed by making the mistake of allowing garbage into their logical brains. The antidote to this is scientific scepticism. It keeps the logical mind sane. The only article of faith I've personally found it neccessary to have is that 'what happens in the future will resemble that which has happened in the past'. That bit of faith that there will be no miracles allows one to make predictions about the future from past experience. With all the dangerous and false information out there, I can't imagine a God that could qualify as good who would expect humans to accept any tenet or information as true without basis. I suppose the only critera that matters is how well off those who accept a fact tend to be, though if they be non-logical folk a logical person should beware that because of their nature they may not fare as well. Which ideas tend to work for logical folk? If you be one of them, then the answer may be useful to you. It's not suprising that some folks do well with the advice to be found in 'holy' books. There is justification for just about every possible action and also forgiveness for most any mistake to be found within. If you use your religion that way, just to make yourself feel better about what you do anyway, to justify what your instincts, desires and emotions impel you to do of themselves, then it's not suprising if you do well in life. Natural human nature has served the human race effectively for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the way it is because it works, even lying to yourself and stroking your own ego. Being logical without the defence of scientific scepticism is an unmitigated liability.
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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.
Anyone who thinks that critical thinking happens in the absence of unprovable postulates has never done any critical thinking. Everything from "I exist" to "Time flows" to "Cause and effect exists" to "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" is just as much an unprovable (and impossible to disprove) assumption as "The universe has a first cause" or "We persist after death" or "All of this has meaning."
Furthermore, you have an extremely one-sided view of the history of religion. A dogmatically one-sided view. You ignore the influence of religion on Renaissance to Industrial Age science -- how it led people to ask, "How did God wrought the universe." You ignore the influence of even Islam on preserving the maths and sciences of the ancient Greeks after the fall of Rome. Instead, religion is nothing more than superstition, irrationality, and the elevation of positions born from ignorance in your eyes. Ignore Newton. Ignore Mendel. Ignore Ibn al-Haytham. It's all just suicide bombers and Inquisitions, isn't it?
But that's okay. You're a "critical thinker." You're wisdom is inherently superior to the ignorant skeptics of your positions. Why, you're so righteous and wise in your beliefs that you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran, a book with which is almost certainly more familiar than you. But don't let logic get in the way of the bitter, bile-filed diatribe that is born from your enlightened "critical thinking." After all, the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
One does not have to "believe" fully in one idea or another. Sometimes equality of outcome is important, sometimes equality of opportunity is important, sometimes *inequality* is important.
Sometimes it's the means which matter most, sometimes is the motive. Sometimes it's the ends. Or any combination thereof.
To take your examples, guns *do* kill people (the literally-minded might chime in that it's the bullet, but pedantry aside, the point stands). People kill people. Both statements are true. Some people with a gun are *more* likely to kill someone. Some people with a gun are *less* likely to kill someone. To take any side of the argument as an absolute (i.e., fundamentalism) is foolish, because it contradicts reality (the key flaw in fundamentalism and extremism).
Your other example, of the opposition to nuclear power further illuminates this point. There's no single reason behind most things. To elevate one reason above all others is, almost always, counter-productive, because it's counter-reality.
I don't know exactly what those examples really have to do with what I wrote before, since I stated that equating engineers with terrorists is silly. On the other hand, the apparent tendency towards fundamentalism (not *Islamic* fundamentalism, nor terrorist fundamentalism, just some (often relatively benign) form of fundamentalism, even if it's just emacs vs. vi) among engineer-types is worth looking into. There may be nothing there, but even a cursory familiarity with slashdot gives the impression that there's *something* to the notion.
Personally, I think it has to do with engineers being very literal-minded (hence all the grammar nazi's and people whose pet peeves are something as silly as when people say, "I could care less"), and also above-average in intelligence (or at least in thoughtfulness), which sort of works off each other leading to strong opinions about the way things should be. For the engineer, the ideals tend to be technical (i.e., which is the best way to write a program, what's the proper way to phrase a sentence, what exactly is the way to measure the Kessel Run, etc.). For the jihadists, the ideals are theological. It seems like fundamentalism is something innate to humans which certain external and internal forces can amplify. It also seems fairly clear that fundamentalism never seems to lead to good ends (except in the very rare cases where a concept truly does appear universally valid, such as with math and physics), so it's worthwhile to study it in situations where it arises, both in its most evil forms, and in its more benign.
Those of us who are not in the USA really do not know what that means despite many efforts to explain it and the "anarchists that want the government to protect them from their slaves" cracks that I hope are way off the mark.
While I agree with your general statement about human nature, I think that FSF-style fundamentalism is quite distinct from sports fans or brand loyalists. FSF-style fundamentalism starts from a specific logical premise and seeks to mold the world to match those premises. It pretends to be logical. Sports fans and brand loyalists do not tend to come to their conclusions as the end of a series of logical steps.
BTW, I don't mean to pick on the FSF specifically (I'm quite sympathetic to their ideals), they are just a great example of the form of fundamentalism I'm referring to.