Slashdot Mirror
Why Do So Many Terrorists Have Engineering Degrees
Socguy noted that Slate is apparently a little desperate for some traffic as they are writing about"Why so many of the terrorists have engineering degrees, and they come to the conclusion that engineers and engineering students are much more likely to hold strong conservative and religious views than a general cross section of the public. Further, engineers tend to hold a particular mind-set that disdains ambiguity and compromise. Terrorist organizations have long recognized that engineering departments are fertile ground for recruitment and have concentrated their efforts there. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for 'inquisitive' students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers."
Could it be that engineering degrees are a dime-a-dozen in oil-rich countries where middle-eastern terrorists usually originate? How many people in these countries don't have engineering degrees?
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Didn't the EEtimes come to a similar conclusion last year?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/03/1943247
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=207001533
I recall it had more to do with planning skills than anything else.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Inventor and engineer, also a revolutionary. Lucky for him (and us), a successful one.
Wonder what names the British called him and his compatriots? Blow the dust off your history book and find out.
Boy did I ever post this anonymously.
I could've sworn I read nearly the same article over a year or more ago.. which was posted on /. as well.
From my engineering degree
Chemical explosives - check
Electronic devices - check
Radio communications - check
Problem solving techniques - check
Analyzing systems for failure modes/exploitation - check
Nah .. can't see why an engineering degree would be useful to a terrorist at all
What was really fun was that the US Green card application specifically asks you if have had training in a lot of the above techniques. and I had no idea what sort of red flags sent up by me truthfully answering the questions
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
While I might somewhat agree with the notion that engineers disdain ambiguity, I completely disagree with the statement that engineers hate compromise. Im my mind, engineering is the art of compromise, and that is what separates us from "scientists". We crave efficiency, which in turn *requires* compromises. We constantly make tradeoffs between costs, quality and schedule, with the goal of meeting requirements most optimally. Ask any engineer who has designed a product and they will tell you that they could have made it (choose 1): better, sooner, cheaper. Instead, compromises were made along the way to meet some criteria in all 3 of those measures.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
...and the fact that engineering students can plan for something more complicated than a keg party.
I'd guess art students aren't as good at making bombs.
Or engineers are good at planning, organizing, and building stuff. While in college they're probably most impressionable to joining causes. Every organization on the planet wants eager, smart people working for them.
Developers: We can use your help.
They think the WTC architecture is ugly.
Did those so called researchers see the obvious? The engineering students/terrorists are all Muslim!
Does literacy cause terrorism? If so, the solution is simple.
Also, this was discussed here on Slashdot twice last year:
Engineers Have a Terrorist Mindset? (Jan 2008)
Engineers Make Good Terrorists? (Apr 2008)
They wouldn't be targeting engineers because they have skills of getting things done and paying attention to details.
Engineering isn't science. Engineering is using what is known of science to create results. It is one of the few degrees that have that focus. Most of the other disciplines if recruited will spend their time researching and analyzing the problems and probably coming up with the idea it is a bad idea. But an engineer will just go ahead and make it go.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Let's face it, engineers are not known for being sucessful with the ladies. I guess the 72 virgin thing works better.
Could be just the engineering degree ones that are successful in blowing things up. Perhaps the ones who took degrees in fine art are busy in mountain retreats sculpting models of the end of world in matchsticks and bat guano, the ones who took degrees in drama are creating avant-garde absurdist plays and presenting these to goats in small rural farming communities, and the ones who took degrees in philosophy are arguing whether their enemies actually exist in complex latin tracts that nobody understands and the local printers won't publish for them because radishes are a poor currency.
Engineering students get dates and have nothing else do, so they might as well get on a plane and blow up their underwear.
Engineering students can't get dates and have nothing else do, so they might as well get on a plane and blow up their underwear.
Maybe these old clerics are putting high recruiting resources into enginering schools because those are the resources that they really need. Poor farm boys used to carry bombs into marketplaces are a dime a dozen. They need people who can make the bombs that actually do the dirty work.
And there doesn't seem to be a lack of fundamentalism in certain areas so finding them in wide and well adopted fields such as enginering shouldn't be an issue in and of itself.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
They target engineers more than other disciplines . . . and more engineers become terrorists.
I think you answered your own question.
Most male engineers don't have fantastic communiation skills, and are thus less likely to be occupied with fun things like chatting up girls etc. Thus, when they get tired of studies it is easier to make they stray. Pretty obvious really. A marketing student will be busy going to parties etc. all year rather than studying so is a) less likely to get bored with hard work and difficult studies and b) have something fun to do when not studying.
It follows that it is much harder to recruit a marketing person.
"engineers and engineering students are much more likely to hold strong conservative and religious views than a general cross section of the public" Nonsense, I've been hanging around with scientists and engineers most of my life. My observation is that few of them hold hard and fast convictions about anything they cannot measure or mathematically derive. Except possibly when it comes to debates about beer of the best editor to use. I think the reason to try and recruit terrorists from the engineering population is because they are far more likely to know how to destroy things effectively. Much like the way we build our military industry in the west.
Okay, there's an issue of being more conservative to a certain degree, but I can come up with lots more reasons that might give a bias to engineering:
Now, luckily, in my case, I'm now an elected official, so have other ways to channel my energies to better the world ... but I think many of us have had the discussion of what could be done if we nuked the planet from orbit and started all over again. Or even a tornado ... I'm sure we could fix up our downtown if we could get rid of a few of the eyesore buildings that the county built.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Do a search for "Taliban terrorists killed" and you will find hundreds of results of our boys doing a great job. I'm willing to bet 99% of these idiots who were killed had no degrees at all. It seams the real observation here is that there are more engineering terrorists who figure out a way to avoid being killed. So, the real title of this should be: How do so many terrorists with engineering degrees avoid our bullets?
Engineering is about carefully following an existing set of rules, like building codes and the laws of physics. It can require cleverness, but only in how to best achieve your goals while staying within the rules ("solve this problem, within these constraints"). Maybe there's a mindset where it just doesn't really matter where the rules come from, and religious rules are just as good as physical or legal rules? This would be in contrast to science, where the goal is to find the rules and poke at them until you understand them ("find out what the constraints are, and why").
Why do so many terrorists have a complete failure to use their training or logic? There are so many logical holes in the theater we call security, an engineer should be able to exploit them like there's no tomorrow. Yet they continue to do show incompetence on large scale attacks due to logical flaws in their planning. Meanwhile countless exploitable targets go unchallenged on a routine basis. Perhaps it is failed engineers that become terrorists?
Perhaps another reason engineers predominate is because it is easier to get a visa, or otherwise travel, to Western countries if one is an engineer.
Proverbs 21:19
Must have been bottom of the class engineers who barely passed at all. All of the terrorist attacks carried out (all 5-10 of them over two decades) against the U.S. were poorly planned and poorly executed. Even the September 11 attacks could have been 10 fold more deadly had they been timed and executed better.
And don't get me started on the shoe and underwear bombers. Evidently, the "engineers" who plotted those attacks didn't think that maybe they should build a foolproof electronic detonator for their bomb rather than rely on the skillz of someone who is willing to blow himself up.
Why am I harping on this? It pisses me off that as a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots. The terrorists have WON. They've caused grievous damaged to the United States thanks to the response of the U.S. government and it's sheeple.
Had we done NOTHING at all in response to the attacks (except for maybe giving the FBI a billion dollar budget increase or something cheap like that) it would have cost us far less treasure and lifetimes of labor. Those freaking towers were only insured for a couple of billion, tops.
If we're going to spend a trillion dollars fighting a few evil individuals, they better be a Lex Luther...not Cletus.
Maybe its because engineers are usefull.
Why would a terrorist group want an accountant, or a journalist?
Engineers can build bombs . A lawyer is just an annoying parasite .
They can do. They can think for themselves. They don't need you. Thus they are dangerous. In the 50s they would be called communists, now terrorist would be more fashionable.
So many of the Engineers I have known view "seeing both sides of the story" as some kind of weakness or soft-spined compromise. "Right is Right, Wrong is Wrong, I'm Right, and that's all there is to it. Period. Full Stop. Now If You'll Excuse Me, I've got to get back to My Important Thing."
Of course, more times than not, they ARE right. Just pains in the ass, and living in their Own Private Idaho.
It's not every engineer, of course, but a much larger percentage than, say, the writers or entertainers or sales-and-marketing suits whose company I have frequented over the past few decades. I've never made the connection before, but yes, most of the socially-dysfunctional engineers I know would make really good religious extremists.
Maybe... http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/climate-change-a-consensus-among-scientists/ "In fact, when you adjust the PetitionProject’s odd categorisation – they filed ‘chemical engineers’ as chemists and physical engineers as ‘physicists’ – the total number of engineers who signed the petition, by our reckoning, jumps to 49%"
I suppose English/Classics students argue, but they know its all futile in the larger scheme of things, as Cicero said "we're all dead, get over it losers".
Maths students argue, but only over dividing the bill.
Humanities/Politics students argue over everything, but that's all - they have no ability to do anything practical.
Engineering students, they're different. From arguing over Emacs or Vi, its no wonder they're seen as the most promising ones for a career in terrorism.
It certainly is an interesting hypothesis. However, their sample is now limited to terrorist:engineers. A test of this theory would be to check the engineers of other religious groups for similar traits. It might be the combination of these personality traits coupled with the radical teachings that inspire those individuals to act. However, the tendency might manifest itself in some other way in different religions that don't promote violent martyrdom.
...*successful* terrorists are more likely to have engineering degrees--'cause the ones who don't blow themselves up trying to make the bomb.
You train them to put things together -they know how to take them apart.
This is the next subtext battle between (marketing/sales) and (engineering/science). When the you are train for engineering, ambiguity and compromise are not core values. It reflects in the way they see the world, so they take world views more seriously as well. Engineers struggle for truth, and stick up for what's true (hopefully - there are exceptions in the east)?
They might even think that a radical reset is a path forward. It might be, but I prefer other ways. How about we lesson the tension and not all take a big swing toward ambiguity.
That reminds me of the question I was asking the other day:
Why does American Airlines recruit so many people who know how to fly airplanes?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Lo, there in the thicket rattled the snake of logic. Said he, slithering sleeky, "Be afraid not of the close-mindedness your engineering degree affords your feeble mind on the journey of truth, for you will find it blindly". And then did the engineering student question the snake, "But I have attained logic! And it was good! I have learned to question and follow not blindly but to persevere and challenge the status quo!" So then did the snake rattleth, for pissed was he for the impudence of the engineer. "Your m-value must be negative, young fool, for surely you are sliding down the slippery slope". He added, "Take care to realize soon your inevitable conversion to irrationality!" The engineer plucked an apple from the tree of un-knowledge and smashed it all over his face and rubbed it into his chest, giggling, "Haarrrr I already have dwweeeee". And thus another engineer was turned away from the cold, uncaring logic that had festered within him.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Corporations actively recruit engineers and they are more likely to have experience living in a western society.
Theodore Kaczynski was a mathematician, Western educated, and by all accounts a model student and young academic. Was the CIA involved in turning him into a manic individual ? There is something about the obsessive nature that a person needs to succeed in science, engineering or maths that is part of the terrorist psyche.
Engineers crave logic. Logical people are all driven somewhat crazy by the world we live in. That will manifest itself in all sorts of strange ways. This time, it manifested itself in exploding underwear (not a very smart engineer, judging by the design). As a kind of engineer myself, I look at how limited the damage would have been, if he had blown up the plane, versus the cost of going all ape-shit over it and I naturally come to the conclusion that people need to chill the fuck out. Even if they made airport security perfect, I can think of at least a dozen non-airplane ways to kill just as many people, without the terrorist(s) even having to sacrifice his life. The way to reduce terrorism is to stop creating new ones by stop bombing their families and stop manipulating their governments.
Would they play engineer in TF2?
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
I think all engineers/hackers have a certain amount of idealism in them. When they see something that is badly broken they want to fix it, and many are willing to give their time/money/talent generously.
Terrorists, in an admittedly warped sense, are idealists too. I'm an Iraqi, I think the US is a massive "bug", so I'm going to try to fix it at all costs. If I'm convinced the US is a massive bug in the software system that is the world, it makes it possible for me to want to obliterate 3,000 innocent Americans.
I'm no shrink and it sounds sacrilegious, but kernel hackers and Mohammad Atta's pals may have a lot in common. Each group is trying to make the world better, at least in their own minds.
I mean if you run one of these organizations engineers are way too valuable not to take a shot and recruit.(As others have said aboe.) So I would think they actively recruit them. Plus on top of it one of the stereotypes about engineering students is that alot of them are reclusive and don't engage in society. So basically that means they don't have the societal safety net that would keep them from doing crazy shit. (I mean it always seems like the loner is the guy that ends up going nuts, not the guy with 100 friends and parties every night like the kids at Columbine.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
They're all maniacal engineers. *rimshot*
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Having spent a bit of my youth as a "Born Again" Christian (I lean towards secular Buddhism now), I noticed that there are quite a few engineers who also see themselves as fundamentalist Christians. I think that it's not so much engineering gives you good "terror skills" (although there's something to be said for that argument), but points more toward the notion of the generally conservative engineer, or at least one that doesn't take too holistic a view of the world, thus making them ripe for all sorts of fundamentalist thought be it Islamic or Christian.
Frankly I think the neo-cons and Jihadists are just "brothers from another mother" to a certain degree. Fundies are fundies no matter what they believe... it's just they think they have an inside-scoop on how things ought to be, everybody else is wrong, and the world needs to be corrected to fit their views.
I think the unofficial motto of various aerospace corporations used to be, "Everything we make either kills people or gives them cancer!" When you think about it, the military industrial complex is focused on developing destructive devices. You don't see them building farm tractors or a new line of gardening tools. So, if you are an engineer perhaps it is only a matter of choosing an employer. I have never noticed engineers being conservative nor particularly religious neither.
I'm happy that with this Nigerian terrorist that the media is emphasizing his wealthy and privileged background.
I was disappointed that the wealthy, privileged, backgrounds of Osama Bin Laden and almost all of the 19 9/11 hijackers were not emphasized more.
As with Marxism, Islamic terrorism is not about the poor rising up against oppressors.
It is about is about rich people with unresolved issues telling the poor what to think and egging them on to take actions that really don't help the poor...........exactly the complaint that these self appointed "vanguard activists" have.
Let's pull out Occam's razor and shave a bit...
If you wanted to blow up a bridge, wouldn't it help to know how bridges are built?
most of the journos already support them
Were all the biggest terrorists of past century Engineers ? Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Bush.... I dont think so . These were the REAL terrorists who dealt with whole sale terrorism. They have killed more people than any other terrorists anytime in the history. But most of these so called "Engineer terrorists" are involved in retail terrorism and the effect was marginal comparing to the former.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Not quite the same thing, but Bruce Salem spotted this some while back - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
I would agree that engineers, as a group, ( networking types too ), tend to have those traits.
So what?
Every profession and grouping of humans has a set of traits that are dominant in that group. All of those traits are dominant in that group for reasons, some good and some not so flattering.
Hey, everyone, stop staring at your penny-loafers for a minute. Why are engineers really chosen to be terrorists? Because they're socially awkward. It's not because they're so good at blowing stuff up (look at how many attempts fail for technical reasons). It's not because they're religious zealots (college graduates are more likely to be non-religious, or otherwise liberal). It's because a guy comes along and shows this brilliant mind a way to finally "belong" by joining a "family" that will care for him. It's the same reason so many brilliant minds became hackers and phreakers and so forth back in the day.
Goddam bankers, they're almost as bad as terrorists.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You sould be asking why so many terrorists have college degrees.
It is not causality.
Colleges worldwide are infested with left-wing socialist professors. No surprise that their graduates are at least open to the suggestion that these views deserve their support and adoption.
And recruitment is greatly simplified, in an ostensibly open, 'free speech' environment. Tenure insulates many professors from productive criticism. Salt in a few motiviated believers, and most any political/religious movement has ready-made converts.
Except, of course, for the more conventional movements, which are of course discredited continually. But that's part of the process. Understood.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
As a physicist, I find it interesting that both physicists and engineers have similar skill sets, but I have never heard of a terrorist physicist (unless you want to count Edward Teller).
I'm sure they tried to recruit restaurant chefs but they noticed that they spend to much time arguing about the right flavor and when they are done all you got is an explosion of flavors.
Frankly, these were poor attempts at sabotage. Unless they sabotaged their sabotaging purposely to get a free flight to the US/ wherever.
engineers do not take history classes...
The problem isn't an engineering education. The problem is a complete an total lack of humanities while undertaking said education. Well, not total lack, but a general consideration that it's a pain in the ass and not required to get your job done.
I nary saw a history class, and the only "humanities" we were offered were labeled such. (I.E. a premade minimal class just to say were had it.)
You also have the problem in that Engineering degrees are so in demand, our engineering schools have become diploma mills. Self-contained enclaves. There was no effort on the part of my school to connect what we were learning to anything else. If anything the attitude was "Engineers were special", and everything (including basic math) had a "For engineers" in the title.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
"engineers and engineering students are much more likely to hold strong conservative and religious views than a general cross section of the public" Nonsense, I've been hanging around with scientists and engineers most of my life.
The article didn't say scientists, it said engineers. Why did you throw scientists in? Apples and oranges.
My observation is that few of them hold hard and fast convictions about anything they cannot measure or mathematically derive.
My experience differs greatly. And one problem is a lot of engineers think you can measure or mathematically derive things you really can't. And I think there is a reason a lot of the more prominent creationists are engineers.
Except possibly when it comes to debates about beer of the best editor to use.
Or the federal reserve or the gold standard or welfare or income tax or flat taxes or open source or...
It's obviously hard enough to find competent terrorists from engineers. Is it any wonder Al Qaeda doesn't go looking for potential terrorists in a crowd that has trouble memorizing, "Do you want fries with that?"
No, extraordinary claims require simple proof like anything else. The burden of proof does not scale with the grandiosity of the claims. Rather, each aspect of the extraordinary claim should be subjected to falsification.
Here are some falsification tests for Christianity, for example, which directly map to specific, "extraordinary claims" made by it.
That is because those claims have been demonstrated to be impossible or at least improbable beyond a reasonable doubt at this point. Spiritual claims are primarily testimonial. I suppose you could argue that testimonial evidence is crap, but then you'd also have to argue that the entire foundation of the legal system is crap too, since "forensic science" (at least as practiced by the government) is closer to phrenology than physics as far as being science.
Funnily enough the Aum cult used to recruit engineers too and of course Heaven's Gate was packed with web developers. It's weird because you would think that engineers would be the most immune to religion, or at least moderate it. After all engineers are taught to seek out answers, to be rational and logical and not to resort to special pleading (e.g. "it was God's will") when something doesn't work properly.
Engineers will slit your throat if you use the wrong OS, browser or text editor! Don't get me started on what happens if you use the wrong engine oil!
this is almost like saying "you're becoming just like your father!"
I'm almost pained to continue pursuing my studies if my outcome is already deemed to become a close-minded, uncompromising fanatic.
...That makes an engineer want to blow shit up! I keed, I keed.
BS
When did Thomas Jefferson ever try to murder innocent civilians or stone women because they were raped? How about try to kill a person because he drew a cartoon? Thomas Jefferson did or advocated none of these things or anything like it. It looks like you may need to crack open your history book.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
If I were looking for people to blow up stuff, I would not look for economists, biologist or romanists, but for people who know how buildings, vehicles, and machines are build and how they could be most easily damaged. And this is what engineers are learning.
I think the high rate of engineers is because the recruiters are specifically looking for them.
Uh oh, I can see it now.
Terrorists recruit engineers, therefore if you're an engineer, chances are that you are a terrorist (maybe you just don't know it yet)
I'll have to come up with something else to put on my I-94W's so that I don't get red-flag'd by DHS/TSA when I enter the USA for being a potential sleeper terrorist.
Okay, I know nobody RTFAs. But the original paper is here, and it makes the following points:
1) It has nothing to do with technical abilities. Terrorists don't attempt to recruit people by technical ability, they just take whoever they can get.
2) It has nothing to do with ease of immigration as a skilled migrant. The paper cites studies on American religious terrorists (the nominally Christian far-right) and concludes that the unusual tendency of engineers towards right-wing radicalism seems universal.
3) The paper argues that the 'styles of thinking' that predispose people towards engineering, also predispose them towards right-wing radicalism. Engineers are more reliably right-wing than even economists! (who are the second-most reliably right-wing academic group). Likewise, a liberal arts education is correlated with left-wing radicalism (e.g., communist bombing campaigns in postwar Western Europe). But there have been relatively few left-wing bombing terrorist acts after the end of the Soviet Union, while right-wing radicalism is on the rise. Hence mad engineers rather than mad Marx-spewing liberal arts graduates.
When I was in college I was amazed at how politically naive and how conservative Engineering students were.
Many of them were better at things like puzzles or math than I was, but man, I could sell them the Brooklyn bridge.
To be fair, a lot of it has to do with who writes or who will write your paycheck.
That is true for everyone in every profession.
I did meet engineering students who were liberal and or non-superficial thinkers. Interestingly they all got out of the profession eventually.
A degree in engineering has one of the highest degrees of mobility in the world. Engineers are frequently dispatch across the globe for special projects from mining, bridge building, design, and implementation.
Much like churches and schools, predators go where there is prey. Churches and schools provide the perfect "fish in a barrel" environment, access to prey, authority, and oportunity. The same hold true for the preditor that preys on fear. They need to have an occupation that provides them the tools necessary. Not only would engineers have the skills to develop weapons and "Mac Guyver" solutions but ideally, the job environment endows the ability to travel without drawing attention. Engineers can travel all over for projects and confrences vs. say an automechanic. It would be suspicious for an average automechanic to have to travel to Prague for a conference but an engineer travelling abroad for their career sounds plausable.
I would suspect that fields that require or at the very least imply travel are prime targets for recruitment.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I somewhat agree. The liberal software engineer is a dying breed. Witness Slashdot, where libertarians are constantly extolling the "magic of the market" as a solution to all problems and government as the problem by definition. We have our own orthodoxies, clearly, and they aren't much different from the Fundamentalist Christians or the Jihadist Muslims.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Every serious military fan boy (or whatever) knows that combat engineers are, overall, the most economically effective soldiers.
Take everything you'd want in a grunt, but invest a little more education so they can use more technology, and that is basically a combat engineer. A super-grunt, the grunt of the future ... today.
Per dollar invested by society, per person, per pound, per whatever, combat engineers are simply the most effective soldiers on the planet. There are other groups with "more battlefield power", tac nuke artillery, attack copter pilot, etc, but they invariably require a million to trillion dollar rear echelon and military industrial complex back home, and lack the sustained long term fighting power of a combat engineering group. Anything that can crush ten combat engineering units, has an overall societal cost maybe 1e6 higher than a CE unit, so assuming enough smart enlistees, your overall military power is the highest when you maximize your combat engineers.
The only reason more combat engineers aren't used, is the quantity of enlistees with the required superior brain power is limited.
In the 70s/80s there was kind of a "revenge of the jocks" doctrinal move toward special forces, etc, but that has pretty much failed, fizzled out, and the combat engineers reign supreme on the battlefield once again...
Non-military folks can pretend to be surprised that a military force would try to recruit engineers for pageviews or whatever, but for those in the business, its no surprise at all.
(And, yes, I was in the Army in the early 90s, and no, I was in Ordnance not combat engineering, and as a supplier we were well aware that the combat engineers have by far the most effective armaments)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't know if I agree with this assessment.
Most real Engineers deal daily with evaluating many possible solutions and picking the "best" one. Often weighing different and conflicting criteria in doing so. (Cost, performance, lifetime, social acceptability etc, etc, etc.)
And anyone who works in the sort of field where there's a right answer and all others are incorrect runs into problems when their starting assumptions are wrong. GIGO.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The obvious point: Terrorists need people with money and people with the skills to make bombs.
Not much room for English or Journalism majors at the Al Quedia training camp.
The communication skills from those disciplines are useful, but the Islamic terrorists already have the SUV/Saudi Arabian funded clerics taking care of brain washing and recruitment.
Hey, can you think of any recruiter in any field and any country who isn't out to snag the best and the brightest?
Wouldn't it be recruiting malpractice so not do so?
I am a software engineer by trade. Note, I do not call myself a programmer, as that has an entirely different tone to it.
I can see where recruiting young engineers would be best. When I was 20, I was a sharp network engineer (again engineer) working on integrating a section of the Exxon and Mobil servers when they merged. At that time I was also studying several translations of the christian bible trying to find meaning in life.
I can see how someone with an analytical mind, logical training, and a sort of philosophical interest could be of use to nearly any cause.
Quite a few years later I am married, have a good life, and gave up the network bit for my hobby (coding). I am back in college, aiming for a degree that matters to me and now am much less prone to theological stints. Wisdom comes with age.
If you catch the young engineer while he's figuring out the world, yeah, he may just sign on for [random cause].
The article even hits on it.
Who is more likely to commit an act of terrorism:
1) A doctor who works 60 hours a week and golfs with his buddies
2) An unemployed engineer who is socially inept and having difficulties earning a living wage
The article points out that in Saudi Arabia, where the rapidly growing economy has resulted in very low unemployment for engineers, there is no over abundance of engineering degrees in terrorist organizations. But in other countries where grow has been slow or stymied and engineering education has been heavily promoted, unemployment, specifically in the engineering sectors, has been especially high.
The best way to fight against extremist recruiting is to maintain low unemployment and to keep people socially engaged. So long as people are comfortable with their existence and have hope for the future, any extremist group will have a hard time coming up with fresh recruits.
That is why, IMO, the most critical aspect of world wide security is not nukes or armies, not even police or surveillance laws. The most important factor to peace, stability, and security is the Middle Class.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I threw scientists in there, perhaps hastily, because in my mind they are not "apples and oranges" to engineers. Quite the reverse, I see them as different degrees of the same thing (un-intentional pun). Both have to be logical, methodical, mathematical. You will find both doing experiments on things to find out what really goes on. Perhaps the engineer is not about to do original research or come up with new mathematical models but they overlap a lot. Being from the UK I have no experience of creationists. Never met one as far as I know, engineer or otherwise. Likewise I haven't met many engineers who waste a lot of their breath harping on about economics or politics. Could it be, given what you say and guessing that you are from the States, that the culture of engineers is different there? Like so many other cultural differences. And could it be that the culture of Islamic or whoever engineers is different again? Could be dangerous to generalize in that way.
I would not disagree if someone called me an engineer. I have no desire to blow things up. However, having read about a bomb plot, most engineers would wonder how they might have tackled the problem, and whether they might have done it. This is not the same as having the will to do the dirty deed, but it is a start. If there is enough of a trend for engineers to be targeted for indoctrination, then that might be enough in itself. However, let us supposed there is something real there. Suppose you have fundamentalist leanings, and the talent to follow a scientific discipline. What are you likely to study at University?
A mathematician might work out how to get past the searches, and how to get a bomb onto a plane. However, having determined that it is possible, I don't really see them actually doing it: the proof that it is possible might be satisfying in itself.
Good physics often requires serious thinking outside the box. Doesn't really sit with maniacal orthodoxy. Same, I guess for most pure and applied sciences.
People who do medicine often have the fanatical mindset, but it is fanatically pro-life rather than the other way.
People who drop out of science in the UK may go into IP or law, or something completely different. In these cases, they have decided not to use their main talents. This suggests they have some balance between what they are called to do, and what they want to do with their life.
So, if you are still here, then you are a part of the population that may or may not have a pro-bombing mindset. This does not mean you are a bomber, but merely part of a group that may have an above-average portion with a pro-bombing mindset because these people do not feel attracted to the other disciplines. If you are an engineer, you will want to do something with your talents. This may be to build something. However, you do not have the same 'pro-structure' belief you find in medicine. Architects are often keen to clear sites of buildings that they disagree with. The various architects who worked on the new Wembley Stadium could agree on nothing other than the famous Wembley Towers had to be demolished. A large building project may claim tens of lives, and yet people must continue to design, knowing that their project will probably kill.
Not proved. But I can think it might work.
Engineering is a means for people who feel insecure to gain power. Personality flaws are not a real obstacle to getting a degree. I used to tutor premeds in physics and would find some pretty obsessive people, people who did not care at all about the subject, found no joy in learning it, but who covered it to get to their medical goal. But the funny thing was that I met engineering students who had just the same attitude. But physics is much more foundational to engineering that to medicine. What these students seemed most interested in were the sports cars that came along with their coop programs. I'm pretty sure that premeds who did not like medicine itself would not make it through their program while engineering students who did not like engineering would.
My experience with people who claim to be nuclear engineers here on slashdot is that they are obsessive to the point of being completely blind to reality. More than once I've said that I hoped the commenter had nothing to do with the running of a nuclear power plant because they were plainly security risks. That is on slashdot. Who know who those people really were. But there is at least an association between threats of violence and claims to be engineers. Insecure personalities could explain that association.
I've also worked with mechanical and electrical engineers who are really great people. Engineering is not a ticket to personality disorder, it just seems to attract and pass through some of that sort.
Never blow yourself up!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Seriously....
Artsmen can spend their time thinking about a problem, come to a declaration and think they've changed the world.
Engineers belive in concrete (in terms of solid and real) actions. Cause and effect. Besides, we tend to think things through in a logical manner, regarding the order that tasks have to happen in order to achieve a desired goal.
Lets just say that the successful terrorists tend to be engineers, cause we tend to be able to plan things through fully, and have the technical expertise to analyse problems and derive solutions / countermeasures.
The most successful "terrorist" revolt in history was instigated by the middle and professional classes in the 13 colonies of the US. These are the classes that suffer the most under repressive regimes but they also have more resources (money, education) available to them to successfully react. So I would expect to see the professional classes (engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers) over-represented in an established revolutionary organization (as opposed to one-off wackos). The question that comes out of this, though, is why is the anger directed at the US, rather than at the local government that is doing the repressing? Are the local governments being seen as sock-puppets for the US as the US drains the middle east of oil?
This seems more plausible now that I've RTFA and seen that they address the recruiting issue in the article.
We are the 198 proof..
When we're done studying, we don't have to bother with girls in order to relax. We can just curl up with a good book and a bottle or two of good beer. Smart engineers know that girls are like cats: you don't have to go after them, eventually one will simply insinuate herself into your life. If you're lucky, you won't want to get rid of her by the time you realize what she's done.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I've met quite a few religious engineers. Engineering school doesn't teach evolution or anything that directly conflicts with the bible. You can't test for the existence of god, so any argument for or against religion is pointless. Some may see Pascal's wager as logical, others won't.
Hindu Engineer terrorists?
Buddhist Engineer terrorists?
Atheist Engineer terrorists?
etc.
You slashdotters are genius at falling for the moral equivalency B.S. and being duped into arguing about red herrings.
I especially enjoy the deep (armchair) psych 101 babbling on about logical thought being too rigid blah blah blah.
Yet none of you draw any conclusions about a religion that has a duty to blow themselves up; to go in front of their god with no scars from killing infidels is shameful.
Brah-vo!
People with a degree and taste of freedom available in the Western countries find themselves locked out of every possibility to develop themselves in countries in the Middle-East like Saudi-Arabia, Egypt, etc. etc. if they are not part of the ruling few. If they blame only their own government they flee to the West. If they believe there is a conspiracy between the local rulers at home and the infidels that rule the West they go support violent groups like Al-Qaida that fight the West and their own governments. People without a degree tend to live happy within the constraints of dictatorships. The only long term strategy that can make an end to the wars between countries in the Middle East among themselves and against Western countries is a shift of power from those who have access to the natural resources to those that participate in the workforce. The problem however is that the Industrial Revolution does not take place in those parts of the world where there are abundant natural resources. That has to do with policies set by those who control the access to the resources who do not want changes in the economic order.
I guess times are tough to find a job! How does one stand out from the crowd. We'll in this case he wore
his resume and got alot of attention and free publicity! Now all he has to do is wait for the job offers
to come in over the next 100 years (lifetime) and accept only the highest one of them all. Time is on his
side... After a few years he'll be recruited by the US gov as a consultant on how to detect and identify
these problems in the future and be a high paid civil servant! (See what happened to the high profile
hackers and how they attained wealth).
Obviously, they do it for the chicks.....
I studied Arabic in the Army's immersion program and I can tell you that most Arab males claim to be engineers (even if they aren't). It's one of the highest achievements in their culture. Ana Muhandis (I'm an engineer) is a common phrase and one of the first you learn.
I'm an engineer. (Civil PE, with a BS in Mechanical Engineering). I think the primary reason that terrorists recruit from engineers is because so many of the security measures (in airports for example) are transparent to us. Many of the TSA's measures are for the purpose of making the general public feel safe. Not that that's a bad thing, because there is no such thing perfectly safe in reality. The only way air travel can be perfectly safe is for it not to exist.
As an engineer of an "underdeveloped" country and someone who's got scholarships abroad, I can tell that only engineers can get scholarships easy and don't have to sell their houses to study abroad.
Engineers can work at research labs with their stay full paid without having the highest degrees, not even a bachelor is needed for an engineer to work. Instead, if you want to get a work as a researcher in any other profession you need several years of experience and a lot of your own money because you start without any payment.
Really it's like any other high paying job- I think if you get the Engineering degree you can participate in the 401k plan.
I remember what Engineering school was like. It wouldn't surprise me if there is more to this than just practical skills.
First of all, Skule was harrowing and lonely. Nobody else on campus hit the books harder than eng students and that already is a reason that, shall we say, our social skills aren't always top notch. On top of that there is the condition of apartness that comes from specializing in something that nobody else gets and that gets magnified by the disrespectful attitude towards the arts you find at eng school. We all know what that was like.
And there's more. At my school the eng faculties operated on an attrition basis, failing almost half the class each year. I understand that was financially motivated, the big year 1 and 2 classes bring in tuition that supports 3 and 4's. That creates a lot of people feeling the way you do when you blow out of college, a little bit lost.
And finally there is the engineering curriculum. It's not all that well rounded. It's always been my opinion that Engineering should be a 5 year degree with some social and poli sci, or have a pre-eng phase like medicine so people could get channeled away from it in an orderly fashion instead of getting dumped out on the street when they fail. Pre-eng would be a better general-purpose education for people that don't make it all the way through.
I just think the normal approach to eng education is almost guaranteed to create outsiders.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
could it be that they are highly trained professionals by the united states military?
the 9/11 hijackers were trained in us military bases in san diego.
The word al qadiea is a name created by the US's CIA refferring to their own contacts.
the is ample evidence pointing to controlled demolition in the 9/11 attacks. ample evidence of a false flag type of attack in the 7/7 bombings.
perhaps we all have the duty to look beneith the surface of the official news story
Engineer is juse a cultural push onj the type of degrees people want there children to have.
As has been widely documented, people with a Bachelours degree tent to believe in 'woo' more then people without one. People who move onto a masters degree tend to loose there belief in 'woo'.
And religous terrorist is nothing more then someone believing in Woo...and bombs.
When you culture pushes getting a degree as an Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineering, or be an effective outcast, people come up with ways to get through school even if they don't have the chops for it. Out of the three which one do you think is the easiest to cheat your way through?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Of course engineers make better terrorists. Generally, engineers are better at just about everything. I know this is an offense to liberal arts and under-grad business majors. While there is a definite sub-population of engineers with social deficiencies, most REAL LIFE engineers don't fit the stereotype. 25% of all MBA graduates have engineering backgrounds, and engineers dominate many MBA programs. You will find engineering graduates pursuing careers as lawyers, surgeons, investment bankers, Fortune 500 executives, heads of state, FBI agents, rock stars (yes, I said "rock stars"), and so on. The executives running the company where I work all started as engineers. Our sales and marketing team consists mostly of engineers as well, and they are definitely not the shy nerdy type. I even have friends from college who dropped out of our engineering program and excelled to the top of their class with business degrees. We're just better at what we do! I never met anyone who washed out from a liberal arts program and had to major in engineering as their second choice.
Engineering, at its root, is the practice of taking abstract reasoning into physical form. Nobody might have ever seen a certain kind of widget before, but if you know the right equations and do the math right you can make that widget and know what it will do. This leads to a tendency to take beliefs seriously and to apply them consistently that can be dangerous when mixed with the wrong kinds of beliefs.
People are good at wearing beliefs like clothing to impress others and not really acting on them. Christians might believe "Its good to give all your money to the poor" without actually believing that they should give all their money to the poor. We're taught one thing explicitly, but by watching how other people act we learn to do something else implicitly. Its non-trivial to learn to be an engineer and take explicit ideas seriously in your professional life while not doing so in your religious life, but we as a culture have generally learned how this is possible and Christian engineering students grow up with lots of good role models showing them how to compartmentalize their beliefs. Sometimes it doesn't work, though, and the student becomes Bible literalists.
Muslims studying engineering in other countries, however, don't have the advantage of role models in how to continue believing-but-not-believing and so its far easier than it would be in the West for someone to come along and persuade them that they have to take their religion seriously.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
With some of the mind bending math that engineers must study it is no wonder at all that they often get very, very weird. As a society we have not yet faced the fact that education is actually a cause of a certain type of brain damage. It is easily observable in college sophomores who display all manner of weird social behavior. Areas of the brain that have important functions are not in proper use simple because the brain is being ravaged by excessive concentration and focus.
If you get around people in the trades much you soon find that they think that all college graduates and students are weirdos who don't know their asses from their elbows.
At the outer limit we see idiot savants who lack basic survival skills and yet display tremendous genius. Albert Einstein lived on the verge of being like that.
Follow the linked article and you get to the Atta article on his ideas on urban development in Aleppo. What's interesting is that he saw Islamic and Christian culture in fundamental and irreconciliable conflict...and he may have been right. We live in a largely secular society and it's hard for us to fathom its religious underpinning but the basis for much of our Western culture and society are rooted in the simple Christian gospel messages of Jesus which recognize that all people should be loved, regardless of their race, sex, money, age, vulnerability, or power. So ...if Jesus was truly the divine Son of God, then the inevitable
result of the conflict is failure for the ideology of terror as a means
to perpetuate values which are counter to the Gospels of Jesus. Much of our
technology was developed to accomplish Christian-based objectives (labor-saving, health, nutrition, transportation, communication) and that
would become especially obvious to a student of that technology (such as
an engineer.)
The snipes at the liberal arts in this thread perfectly illustrate why engineers make excellent unthinking soldiers. If you're trained to think that all questions of value, philosophy, politics and ethics are merely the irrational quibbles of unintelligent people, then you'll never learn the subjects, or how to evaluate them critically. And if you believe that thinking about or engaging with politics is a waste of time, you will tend to uncritically accept that whatever prejudices you were raised on are "common sense," "the plain truth," or "God's revealed wisdom."
Why so many of the terrorists have engineering degrees
Why do so taxi drivers have a medical degree in their own country? Not all pieces of paper are created equal.
I've been curious about what kind of education you get in a "Prestigious" University that doesn't emphasize knowing your tools and testing your procedures. Why didn't the bomb go off?
Engineering education is very dogmatic. Unlike proper scientists, Engineers are trained to accept a certain subset of physics/chemistry/biology, and use that to build stuff. This is not exactly a bad thing -- this is the most efficient way to train people to build stuff. But Engineers seem to forget sometimes that their understanding of the world isn't "the way it is", but merely "my understanding and perception of the world".
Programmers are like this too, often to an even greater extent. I think this mainly stems from the "that last guy was an idiot because he didn't code this in the same way I would have" mentality. Programmers probably aren't as good of candidates for terrorism, though, since they're less knowledgable in the explosion/bioweapons area.
The surviving terrorists probably are engineers.
As much as Abdula the Terrorist cell leader wants to have an argument with some philosophy major prior to an OP, it could be that an engineer is just plain more useful to the cause with advanced science training.
Also, I am not sure what college everyone went to, however it has been my experience that many people from many parts of the world, if they make it to University will take one of the hardcore sciences. That is to say to eventually become a Doctor or say an Engineer of some sort (or their parents will be pissed!). I am guessing that those on the doctor path may have a predisposition to be against blowing people up, but that could just be me.
Software Engineers are not real engineers.
Network Engineers are also not real engineers.
Businesses will add "Engineer" to any title to make cable pulling and simple coding sound impressive.
Real Engineers have a piece of paper, and hefty liability insurance to back up any claims.Oh, there is also the little matter of taking the Engineers OATH [at least here in the great white North]...
Yes, those motherf**** use their degrees and knowledge to kill,harm and destroy the infidels instead of helping their "brothers" to relieve poverty, build and make a better life for them in their shithole countries. they give a damn for the degrees, it is just a weapon to fight the "infidels". Their goal is to turn back time and live like 1000 years ago in the darkness of the middleage. Those engineers are happy in Afghanistan/waziristan living in tents in the middle of the desert
- This can't be... - Be what? Be real?
If you like to watch buildings burn, being a fireman is a good fit.
If you like watching towers fall, building them first is a good fit.
How many of you were kids who built towers only to knock them down?
Having read through their explanation of the sample of 404 "known terrorists" they derived their figures from, I have to say that they are clearly jumping to conclusions. . .
Here's the thing; If you are an engineering type, then chances are you are comfortable with information technology to a higher degree than others. --I've known a lot of different kinds of students and not all of them are computer savvy. Further, if you are an oil worker or a baker or an unemployed man whose house has been run over by a tractor and you have notions of social justice through violence, how much awareness of you are the secret services going to have versus an engineer with an internet connection? --You know, a guy whose Google search footprint and subsequent psychological profile screams, "Malcontent!" --Surveillance is easy when you don't have to leave the Homeland office to build your suspect list.
And a sample of 404 people, (nearly all taken from internet sources, I might add), for such a squishy study is, while interesting, hardly damning proof of anything. --I mean, just the definition, 'terrorist' is a bullshit one these days. Every time a military bomb wipes out a village, it is usually reported that most of the people killed were conveniently, "Terrorists". I had no idea the world had so many engineers! And frankly, based on everything I've read, (and I've read a truckload on this), I happen to believe that a lot of high-profile 'terrorism' is performed for false-flag purposes by mind-control patsies of one sort or another. Heck, the kid who set his pants on fire just a few days ago aboard an international flight, when you dig into that highly suspicious story, appears to have been in zombie-mode and to have had several handlers who put him on the flight, by-passing security.
I would be VERY cautious about taking a study like this one at face value. I mean, yes, engineers do tend to carry certain social characteristics, and as I've always said, they are one of the most powerful groups on the planet because they make everything work. They define reality. And as such, the military industrial complex has a vested interest in making damned sure all the Pavlovian programming has well and truly taken hold in that group, with regular inoculations, so that they are easily controlled. Top priority slaves, as it were, making slavery as a way of life possible.
Geeks have been punished and programmed and used by society their whole lives exactly because of their social traits. But that doesn't make them prone to becoming systematic killers. Who got blamed during that Columbine massacre? The misfits. But upon closer inspection, it turns out those trench coat kids were not your or my kind of misfit. They didn't hang out in the computer lab and their bombs didn't work. --When it comes to labeling a social group, I'd be more worried about those Tea Party people with their guns and down-home religion, conservative rage and neighborhood mili
There are reasons to uphold the traditions of religion even if you don't believe the religion itself.
"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal."
from What I saw in America
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
based on the observations of religious and/or extremist groups in turkey, i can assure you the most fertile places they prefer are wherever there are few women. for whatever reason, women quite dampen extremism wherever they are. even in religious schools that allow females and males to study together, you cant find that many extremists. but, in schools or departments which have a very low percentage of females, i have came upon more extremists during my education life. actually, some of my family acquaintances also fell into such brainwashing, even though they were from thoroughly secular and modernist families.
as a result, religious and extremist circles try to separate females and males as much as possible, wherever they can pass their will.
Read radical news here
Most countries sponsor people to get engineering degrees aboard.
New Economic Perspectives
You don't see many English majors making predator drones because they don't know how.
As an ME, my first thought about the pants bomber was how wrong it was done. Who wants to blow up an arriving airplane? Get one all full of fuel for a long trip that will make a much bigger bang. If the operative (obviously NOT an engineer) managed to get a bomb onboard undetected he should deliver it to an accomplice departing from the same concourse who has already passed screening. He can then blow up a departing flight. And don't try to blow your dick off, press the device firmly over decking that covers fuel or control lines.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
Engineers have physical problems to solve. They have a toolkit of methods to solve them with. (Religion is similar in that it provides a complete framework to think in.)
An engineer, when faced with a political problem may think that if people are shocked into realizing the errors in their ways, that a logical outcome will be the result.
For example it is logical to think thus: You bomb my people; therefore I shall bomb your people and you'll realize how evil it is to my bomb people. Problem -> solution -> resolution.
Well, those schooled in say, a social science know that this logic doesn't follow due to people being adept in avoiding any idea that does not buttress their belief system.
Ignoring the religious side of things, which I would think would simply be a product of culture, I think it's just the mental process that a true engineer has.
I often find myself instantly thinking of 10 ways to circumvent whatever stupid thing the news says the TSA is going to do next.
It's not that I'm a terrorist, obviously, or that I want to circumvent these measures. It's just how my mind works.
The consensus of Slashdot's editor opinions on religious subject matter has been made painstakingly clear for as long as I can remember. Combine that with the increased popularity of liberal viewpoints in the last 6ish years, the summary makes an excellent breeding ground for flamebait: The summary implies anyone with conservative religious views is likely to be weak minded enough to accept the murderous agenda of religious extremism.
What is interesting is none of these views are perpetrated in the linked article. So to pick apart the summary:
1. Religions condone killing for evangelical purposes: A broken, squeaky wheel called the 'overall majority' of Islamic clerics denounce terrorist activities.
2. All religious persona are conservative: There is something called the 'religious right': Katherine Sebelious is Catholic.
3. All terrorists are religiously motivated: Yes, but also (and more importantly) problem-motivated. Engineers solve problems: Getting bombs through airport security is an engineering challenge.
I could go on... I'll let more commentors contribute if they wish.
I think the most important point is #3, which was completely missed in the summary. Yes, the religious extremism has to be sown, but that can be accompblished via brainwashing. You cannot however, brainwash someone to be an engineer.
In the United States, almost 30% of the population has at a Bachelors degree or higher, and again that many have attended university but only have an associates degree or nothing...
Nowhere in the links provided is "almost 30%" a number. From the above wikipedia source, "The 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau found that 19.5 percent of the population had attended college but had no degree, 7.4 percent held an associate's degree, 17.1 percent held a bachelor's degree, and 9.9 percent held a graduate or professional degree." Even if you decide to sum bachelor's degrees and graduate or professional degrees (since it's entirely feasible that the Census Bureau considers the latter to be a subset of the former), you still come away with 27%. If the country had 300 million people as of 2006, you just overestimated by 9 million residents. And 23% (Arab states) versus 27% (US?) is a mere 4% difference.
I'm not entirely sure what the poster's point was in comparing somewhat inflated/rounded-up numbers of US college graduates with other global regions, and how that makes them dime-a-dozen or whatever, but the actual percentages sourced appear to be closer than they were editorialized to be, in any event.
Hmmm, now I know what happened! And my GF brought cats so I can understand the metaphor.
...Ability to blindly swallow what religious authorities tell me? Uh oh. We're a "no-go" on that one, Houston.
Engineers not religious? They are more religious than anyone, it's just that the religion is engineering and they take a ton of convincing that engineers they consider to be "above" them are wrong even when the evidence is clear. Absolute obedience to authority comes naturally to an engineer because they spend so much time early on gathering facts from authority figures that over time they lose the ability to question what they are being told, they just accept it naturally.
I know because I'm one too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
At least not any that would get passed along to anyone who could do anything, if they maintain that list like the no fly one.
The "Insightful" parent's stats are not reflected in the link that he provided. Here's quoting directly from Wiki:
"The 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau found that 19.5 percent of the population had attended college but had no degree, 7.4 percent held an associate's degree, 17.1 percent held a bachelor's degree, and 9.9 percent held a graduate or professional degree."
Just another day in Paradise
Apparently few engineers are actually using their engineering skills in an engineering capacity, which would argue for something else going on. As the article notes, engineers are apparently more religious than their brethren in other majors.
that actually stems from a common misunderstanding, that highly technical degrees require highly intelligent people, and these people being of such grand intelligence are above the influence of theistic absurdities like 72 virgins after blowing yourself to bits in the name of a supernatural being.
theism is the suspension of reason. my coworker has a masters in computer science, and takes his children to the creation science museum twice a year for pictures with the dinosaurs. can an engineering doctorate holding terrorist not be convinced to enact and achieve outlandish acts of brutality regardless of what logic and reason tell him? of course.
icecream truck driver or nuclear physicist, the end result is simple: if you can get someone to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Evidently, the "engineers" who plotted those attacks didn't think that maybe they should build a foolproof electronic detonator for their bomb
And just how do you walk through a metal detector with a "foolproof electronic detonator". Remember the constraints are that you have to fit all components on your person to walk through a metal detector AND pass a pat-down. You can't have anything in the carryon because that's too easily discovered.
The issue was not coming up with a "better" detonator, the issue was that he did not practice the technique for the approach they took.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Meanwhile, most organized religions are just plain stupid, since they believe logically inconsistent nonsense (example, the notion that the purely physical process of cell-fertilization can cause a nonphysical entity like a soul to begin to exist, or even more stupidly, force God to create a soul for it).
If you are going to attack other people's belief's as "logically inconsistent" it might be nice to check that your own beliefs don't fall clearly into that category.
In General, Krueger found, "terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families." Despite a few exceptions
I don't believe it has anything to do with technology rather I buy what the book was pointing out that terrorism takes political motivation and College students tend to have plenty of strong and forming political opinions that the poor and uneducated just don't care about.
Accountants are the ones that "disdain ambiguity"
An Engineer thrives in ambiguity as it allows him/her more freedom to design a solution to the problem.
A truth that's told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent. -- William Blake
People from foreign countries (mid/eastern, asian) comes to US for studies and 90% of them either choose engineering degree or doctor.
1. They can easily compete in the job with local people. It it is art/acting etc, they need to have knowledge about the local culture and language. Also their skin color may cause trouble getting the job.
2. More valued back home
Why do so many terrorists have a complete failure to use their training or logic?
I would argue there was no failure to use logic in the most recent attack.
After all, the guy did not know his father had warned anyone, so he wasn't really concerned about getting on a plane - he had a valid U.S. Visa. There was no question he would get on, and thus no need to use any tricks to conceal identity. In fact this is why I don't really see Bruce's workaround for the need to present ID as much of a security flaw, because in practice few people even know they are on a list and so many people easily get on even if they are on such a list...
As for the bomb itself, well the device itself was actually pretty well thought out (he could have even had a pat-down without them finding anything), it's just that he apparently got something wrong in execution. You have to think he practiced beforehand, but the problem is as always, stuff in the field works differently and also how to you really practice doing something by hand that is meant to blow you up as quickly as possible? They probably practiced with some kind of remote activation technique that he messed up doing by hand.
People think todays security sucks and it does suck from the standpoint of the traveller but it has imposed enough constraints on being sure you get an item through security that even an engineer has a hard time getting a working device through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's because Arabs (males) in general like engineering, and most "terrorists" are Arab, so you'll have a higher likelihood of a "terrorist" with an engineering degree, not because "terrorists" go around campus engineering depts. looking for recruits.
One reason why many, not all, engineers are conservative:
1. Regardless of what they do, people believe they are doing the right thing
2. Engineers are people
3. Engineers want to believe they are doing the right thing
4. Engineers need jobs/money.
5. Most, not all, engineering jobs are associated with the military ( in the US )
6. Republicans do more business with companies that build military hardware
7. Republican policy/tendencies create more engineering jobs and money for engineers.
8. => People who like engineering tend to be republican.
In other words, people's views shift with who writes their paychecks.
If you're getting laid, you're much less likely to hate your fellow human beings and desire to blow them (and sometimes yourself) up.
What?
these guys are frustrated because they don't get laid. i am willing to bet that many of these guys wouldn't care so much about religion or "western transgressions" if they had sex with a cute girl every day.
In many countries outside the USA, you must take a placement exam. So if you get 90% or higher, you go into medicine, you get 80% or higher, you go into engineering, you get 70%, you go to law and anything below that, you go into religious studies. I don't think it really has anything to do with what can they do with an engineering degree but rather its what was scored on their placement exam.
my 2cents.
I can't beleave this discussion gone on this long without a reference to The Matrix.
(I'm sure the true engineers among us will see what I'm getting at.)
Imagine having to belive something on faith and work in a career based on facts and logic. Maybe that produces unbearable tension in some people, leading to total breakdown and insate activities.
Engineering on is own is tension filled, building sturdy bridges that are cheap, fast programs that don't use a lot of storage, and all the other contradictory requirments that must be meshed, questioned, implemented, or ignored. I suspect the pressure may be just too much for some people when you add cultural pressure to "just believe".
This sounds similar to the Salem hypothesis, which states that ". . .there is a correlation between subscribing to creationism and working in an engineering discipline."
Oh great, now being a geek will get us on the airport list to have a free prostate exam.
Table-ized A.I.
"Terrorist organizations have long recognized that engineering departments are fertile ground for recruitment and have concentrated their efforts there." Liberal types love to speculate about how scary conservative religious people are. But the population of this site is both heavily skewed towards engineers and very liberal. The reason you see engineers as terrorists is because the terrorist organizations realize the value of engineering and recruit as many as they can.
This is not a self-referential sig.
If I'm me, then I'm not some guy who's memories and personality I don't have. If I'm some dead guy in a new body, I'm not me. The concept of reincarnation either requires an idea of 'self' that contradicts everything commonly meant by self, or it is a meaningless semantic exercise used to justify success by evil and the suffering of good.
If you need to redefine self to make it work, then why not be honest and say, (for instance) "Well, lady, your baby died because some old dead guy was evil, his soul needed punishing, and, well, your baby was him. And the guy that killed your baby, well, some guy in the future who has no memory of being a murderer is going to suffer for that!" Yeah, that's comforting.
I suppose for people who need to assign meaning to things, any meaning will do, no matter how meaningless it actually is.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The more sophisticated our skills, the more sophisticated our artistic expressions. When engineers commit acts of terrorism, it isn't an expression of their identity as engineers, but rather an expression of their identity as sophisticated and diabolical artists, so perhaps we should ask what drives artists to terror, since nearly every terrorist is an artist, bent upon self-expression at any cost. Most of the artists whose names we know are artists who are skilled in their chosen medium. Engineering, organizational planning, and the psychology of political economy are the media of terrorism. We have only heard of those who have the skills necessary to achieve their desired, but deplorable, expressive effect... so naturally, we often hear of engineers.
I didn't know there was a place to go and research the "resumes" of Terrorists. Most Terrorists I see on CNN are either children with nothing left to lose, or someone throwing the Koran in other peoples face. There are the short stories of folks that make bombs, but these stories are in the Obituaries. I have yet to see any reference in the "Jobs", "Business", or "Homes" section of the L.A.Times advertising folks to get involved with someone's jihad. Now that I think about it, maybe if a Terrorist were to put their jihad request on CraigsList.com and then got spammed for male enhancement drugs; that would be funny.
...mind-control patsies of one sort or another...zombie mode...
What do you mean by this?
They want their 15 minutes of fame. It's a PR trick to find out where to go for most visibility.
The obvious needs to be said : no they don't. Most terrorists are nameless, faceless idiots. Rich kids mostly (this last terrorist had mountains money). They are invariable "idealists". Religious idealists, mostly people who've come to repent and look for guidance from a certain book (in "that" religion repentance can only be obtained by what would probably be best described as military service).
And then they're the people who are simply forced into doing it. Women who are convicted to death for .. (what exactly ? laughing at a boy ? Or is that only a severe lashing type of offence in this middle age idiots religion ?). Men who are desperate to look after their family and get guarantees for their families in trade for cowardly killing Jews or "westerners".
Of course, the non-forced terrorists want a very simple thing. You see "that" religion is not a religion in the sense that people here know it. It is a political ideology, a law, a way of life FIRST and some measure of faith comes in at a distant second. Just because one huge religion focuses on faith being "trust in God" stuff doesn't mean they all do. Other religions, like Judaism or Hinduism, or indeed "that" religion do not push such a concept. Most religions started out as pure laws, cruel and barbaric laws (who might even have been "progressive" at some point in the distant past. Like allowing women to trade, was "modern" when compared to the "natural religion" of the arabs, and to some small pseudo-hindu communities. It was not at all progressive when compared with Christians, Zoroastrians or Jews though)
But one should always keep in mind exactly what the context was of "that" religion. It must be clear to even the most blinded muslim that it has something to do with Christianity/Judaism, and that it came after both of these religions. At that time Christianity was slowly becoming a majority religion in the region. It was doing so peacefully (relatively peacefully as compared with the "average" level of peace, which was certainly not a level that we'd identify as peaceful, but there was no concerted campaign of forced conversions, in fact, Christians were mostly the victim of forced conversions. Nevertheless, the faith grew).
The plausible "source" of the larger part of the quran (the story part) is distinctly Christian in origin, but severely twisted, due to a severe and prolonged military defeat that will be explained below. This has do to oral passing on of the bible, which in those times was a necessity. Since it was prohibitively expensive for a missionary to carry a whole bible, they carried a few excerpts, a few songs, a few poems, a few important stories ... and a part of the quran is just that. Up to somewhere around 700 that's exactly what "islam" was : the result of a particularly successfull christian mission, performed by a man who would fall very ill (infected with "the evil eye", and probably never recovered) and retreated to the a mountain hideaway, in an attempt to keep the pain in his head at bay with solitude and silence. This Syrian orthodox missionary earned the title "praised one" or even, although blasphemous "praised by God" (that's a correct, but blasphemous translation, the subject of any passive verb can be interpreted either as the impersonal, or as God. Texts from that age do not say "God resurected Christ" for example, they say "Christ was resurrected". This form is no longer in use in western languages)
Another party decided to get involved, though. The (by then very Christian) eastern Roman Empire. Lots of tribes did not like the ERR at all, and so a number of tribes allied themselves and wanted to go to war with ... well with the center of the Christian world at the time, what they thought to be the capital of the Roman Empire. They had this tiny little problem : their people had already been mostly convert
All we need to do is find a way to get the terrorists to visit Slashdot, and then they won't have to wait for the afterlife to interact with many virgins.
I rememebr reading a bunch of papers - SciAm and Psych Today. Sorry no exact citation - 'tis New Years Eve dammit - that basically said that detail oriented people, which engineers definitely are, deplete their Serotonin and Dopamine reserves more quickly, and that they also lack some signalling pathways between different parts of the brain that delinks their logical reasoning ability and emotional abilities. Usually emotion and logic play nice, so a normal person can curb hateful thoughts and their rationalization. But detail oriented people lacking these important neurochemical and neuroanatomical features, are more likely to be depressed, emotionally numb and thereby prone to fundamentalism.
Social status plays a large part in who is a terrorist, and a leader with technical skills and leadership qualities can command a cell. Leaders can even have suspect technical skills if they have good technicians, and the leadership charisma and power to sway the masses. History is filled with revolutionaries from elite families. Many of them disdain the family wealth! Yummy dreamy virgins versus those boring clan bakes with a rigid hierarchical structure is a no-brainer! A terrorist without leadership skills is the dead goose sprouting a firecracker in his shorts and riding tourist class, or the pimple-puss in the trenchcoat sporting a rifle and a hard-on for bullies!
I'm an engineer as well. I've always questioned authority and the status quo, and the more I learn about science and engineering, the more I question them. Maybe there's a generational gap or personality differences at work here, but very few of the engineers I know take anything for granted. We question everything, ESPECIALLY conventional wisdom.
Granted, it can be difficult to change our minds once they're made up, but that's because our opinions are based on facts and can only be changed with more facts.
The very essence of science and engineering is to question things. Progress can never be made if we always stick the old way of thinking/doing things. I've always felt that engineers and scientists that DON'T question things don't deserve their degrees and/or titles. (This is not meant to be directed at you and I hope you don't take it personally...)
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
I like how some of you talk about engineers. One thing though today when you go home ... no that 30 mile trip ... think about how your life would have been without an engineer. You would go home to a candle LOL!
I hate when you people generalize and besides this the US is based on Europe's minds that fled their countries because they didn't wanted to make genocide! And during the second world war the Americans stole all the technology from the germans and they still can't @#$%ing build a good car!
Your specific logic is just as bad as I described generically. You have no basis for assuming that a just-fertilized cell must immediately in some fashion be associated with a soul. You have no basis for assuming that numbers of souls are increasing. You have no basis for assuming that most biological organisms are (or need be) associated with souls. The evidence is that most biological organisms are mere robotic stimulus/response machines, too limited in capabilities to attract the interest of a soul. It is not human bodies that have free will; it is their souls. That's because the definition of "free will" requires Causality to be violate-able, and this does not appear to be a valid aspect of the purely physical universe. Therefore if free will exists in humans, it exists as a non-physical aspect of humans. (Note, overall, the preceding means that a sufficiently advanced inorganic robot might attract a soul, and thereby become as much a person as the average human or equivalently-intelligent alien. Xenophobes, you have been warned!) So, a loose soul need not be especially more interested in a just-fertilized human ovum than in an average bacterium. It might claim "dibs!" to other loose souls, due to knowledge of potential growth, but it has no reason to actually move into a human body before birth takes place --especially since birth might not take place; there are a lot of possible failure modes for that organism to escape. Not to mention it is only after birth (and perhaps not until months after birth), that a typical human body is developed enough to be useful for independent behavior. On the other hand, every human body is different in such details as the wiring of the neural cortex; it likely takes time for a just-incarnated soul to find and learn how to handle the "controls", so the sooner-incarnated, the better. Shortly-after-birth is a logical compromise. Finally, it is an open question, about just how many souls exist. The Universe is a big place. Multitudes of worlds could be inhabited by souls; logically (especially since nonphysical things don't have to worry about Einstein's Speed Limit), word would get around if some world was about to have a short waiting list for souls due to a population explosion like here on Earth --which, by the way, is known to be unsustainable in the long run, so the upcoming Malthusian Catastrophe will release about 99% of those souls, for finding available bodies elsewhere. Simple, logical.
Your sample has two traits: you know them, and they are engineers. How do you know which trait to attribute your observations to? Maybe the real correlation is not with their education, but their willingness to share some of their views with you.
They just really like trains over there!
An early emphasis in my studies at UBC was the engineer’s responsibility to society. An engineer deals with the infrastructure, roads and every kind of machinery that makes our society prosperous and safe. After graduation the various professional engineering associations of Canada reemphasize our responsibility to society. A iron ring is worn as a constant reminder. When someone uses their engineering knowledge deliberately for harm and malice the profession and the society who trusts in it are betrayed. I believe ethics and responsibility to society must be made the core of every engineering curriculum because of the potential for harm or good.
You have no basis for assuming that a just-fertilized cell must immediately in some fashion be associated with a soul.
Read my post carefully. I did not propose any alternatives I was just pointing out that your beliefs (assuming that you are the same AC) are no more (or less) logically inconsistent than any other religion's. I was not proposing an alternative I was just pointing out that you are the proverbial kettle calling the pot black.
I hold two degrees in physics, but worked as an engineer and around engineers for thirty plus years. The following are generalities: 1) Engineers think they have all the answers, and are very impatient with those who do not, especially governments. If the government isn't doing it right, they have a better answer. No mind that governments are run by people. 2) Engineers know how to design and execute a terrorist plot, including bomb making. They can also think through how to do the most damage in an unexpected and effective way.
Why are so many Christian fundamentalists who claim to be scientists actually engineers? I don't think this is wholly coincidence.
Those with socioeconomic backgrounds that allowed them to be educated to that level (engineering degrees), also have the intellectual means to understand the "rhetoric of revolution". The logical arguments (right or wrong) of freedom, rights, oppression, etc.
A "typical" illiterate, though religiously-devout follower of (insert_toxic_fundamentalist_cult_here) can have a xenophobic mindset. I think that's probably a very natural, human element. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the different. But ignorant.
To embrace a complex philosophy that includes a 1000-year history of perceived oppression and mutual war of extermination, and a sophisticated conspiracy-theory involving some un-obvious interpretations of extra-scriptural prophecies, satan, the UN, imperialistic European "pagans" (Christians and what I've heard referred to as "Sephardic" Jews - Jews of European descent - whom they claim have no birthright to Palestine, and are therefore just European invaders under the pretense of a false claim to "divine-right") . . . I think you don't just take a starving orphan off the street and indoctrinate them to that.
All they've ever known is poverty and misery. They just don't have the perspective and breadth of experience to grasp an idea of a "global jihad" - or that "revolution" means something other than swapping oppressive dictators.
If someone's known at least a little bit of middle-class lifestyle, maybe studied at a university in a wealthier country, and then gets exposed to the massive suffering that they've allowed themselves to be blind to - and opens up to the empathy, it's a powerful driver to reinforce that rhetoric.
There was also the theory that bin Laden got the idea to specifically recruit from more educated middle-upper-class people, because he wants to use the decadent west's own products against them. As a sort of a political statement. A cocky move. But that would only apply to Al Qaeda terrorists.
I don't know if the competence argument washes, because although the Khobar Towers and 911 operations - technically, were spectacularly successful, (if you look at it purely from an analytical planning-and-execution standpoint) the "shoe-bomber" and the "jockstrap bomber" were both embarrassing failures. In fact - these spectacularly executed attacks used to be the hallmark and reputation of Al Qaeda. If nothing else, their "brand" has obviously been diluted by very low-quality product now. Likely, they've lost some irreplaceable expertise. I'd posit, also, that their operational secrecy forbids any kind of process improvement. So all the obvious arguments for recruiting "engineers" don't seem to have borne fruit.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And all black people are criminals, Hispanics are Lazy, Jews are greedy and Arabs are terrorists. Do you generalize much? Your attitude that all of one group are similar is no different than racism. And what's your basis for this pearl of wisdom? That Bin Ladin and Christmas NW bomber are both engineers? How about the 4 doctors that tried to blow up Heathrow? How about Bin Ladin's second in command is a doctor? In fact much of the leadership of Al Queda has medical degrees. Should we also single out doctors as potential terrorists as well?
I can't believe this made the front page, its blatant hate speech.
With apologies to future Hiro (or is it future Hiro of a now dead timeline?)
"other".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
While most day-to-day engineering is, as you say, a compromise between multiple priorities, I've been told by an IBM Research "Master Inventor" that really excellent engineering figures out a way to meet all the priorities without major compromise through some new insight (but such conceptual breakthroughs are rare).
Of course, a deeper issue is, what are our priorities, values, and assumptions, and how are we choosing them? :-)
I hope we go into future technological singularities with humane values at the front of our priorities, because otherwise, building things like military robots to enforce economic dogmas (usually linked to not letting people eat unless they work) is totally ironic.
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Why not just build robots to do the work instead? The major challenge of the 21st century is overcoming the irony of the tools of abundance being used to create artificial scarcity (because the people directing the engineers are still preoccupied with perceived scarcity). A parody I wrote related to that:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd?hl=en
I think many engineers spend too much time indoors with too little sunlight. They should be taking vitamin D to help ward of disease and mental illness:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
now is the time to start recruiting women to engineering schools en masse.
If "hold[ing] strong conservative and religious views" is their measure, then the Founding Fathers are terrorists.
I'm so freaking sick of the 72 virgins thing that I want to scream. It's not true. They don't believe that. It's against everything in Islam and the Qur'an.
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/debunking-the-suicide-for-72-virgins-myth/
The joys of accepting the bear minimum life hands you
I did read your post carefully, and parsed each one of your stupid statements (some of which were equivalent to loaded questions) appropriately. For example, you wrote: "as a reincarnationist you believe that "this purely physical process" causes a pre-existing soul to be placed into the body" --that is FALSE. The physical process of fertilization does not have to cause a pre-existing soul to be placed into the body, nor do I believe any such stupidity as that aspect of the purely physical realm superceding the free will of any pre-existing soul. You assumed it, and I said so when I wrote: "You have no basis for assuming that a just-fertilized cell must immediately in some fashion be associated with a soul." What a just-fertilized ovum is, nor more and no less, is the equivalent of a "Potentially Available For Occupancy" sign. Unless there are Rules in the realm-of-souls, affecting decisions regarding that cell/sign, then souls that notice it are free to ignore it, or (assuming first-come-first-served) free to line up to claim it (having free will, some could be expected to change their minds). Have you ever considered the possibility that some (not all) still-births are the result of NO soul deciding to claim that body? And so, similarly, I dealt with the rest of the nonsense you spouted in your earlier message. All the illogic you perceived, regarding my philosophy, derived straightly from your own ridiculous assumptions about it. Care to try again? I'm quite confident you cannot pose an actual dilemma about it.
An artist or a lawyer normally do not have the necessary skills to switch a lightbulb so how could they probably build a bomb. Furthermore lawyers are better in targeting and destroying companies or the legal system. Artists are good in making fun of western symbols and values e.g. ($ EUR YEN). Also engineering students are more likely to be treated badly by others. Hey they are geeks so they respond "good" when they are the target of jokes. They are more likely introvert. The same persons tend to shoot of peoples heads in high schools for the same reasons.
So if someone thinks he is mistreated by all other people he most likely does not have any sympathy left for those jerks. Therefore the best way to prevent terror recruitment is to integrate geeks and even dorks back in society. Also as societies: We should not treat other societies as inferior, which is also a source of terrorism.
This happened in part because George W. Bush and the Republicans were able to do well in the 2002 mid term elections by pushing a terrorist threat really hard. They did well of course.
In the 2004 presidential elections, there were people that realized this was a big waste of money. Half the people that voted for Kerry wanted Bush out of office. Turnout rate was the highest in 20? years. Unfortunately, Bush heavily pursued the Evangelicals and got many gay marriage issues on the same ballot. The Evangelicals voted for Bush at a 75 percent rate, and there are quite a few of them.
Quite frankly, the evangelicals should pay.
My personal experience with other engineers, which while merely an anecdote and far from solid evidence, is that politically they can vary. I've seen engineers all over the political spectrum. Please remember that a one-axis or two axis political spectrum is a gross oversimplification. There are a few issues on which the vast majority of engineers agree, but other than that it is rather chaotic.
However, as for religious views, I've not personally seen many regious extremists or fanatics among the engineers I've known. Many are either moderately religious or atheistic. Perhaps the sample of engineers I have tends to be highly biased in that regard, as many would consider themselves scientists too, even though engineers for practical reasons tend to take shortcuts and not adhere as rigorously to the scientific method as scientists do. The engineers I know just reach different conclusions when analyzing an experiment from an engineering perspective and from a scientific perspective.
Understood. I may not qualify as a certified engineer, after all my parents are married. I couldn't even be a practicing engineer, as they are married to each other.
That aside, there is such a thing as CMMI maturity level for an organization of software engineers. Look into it. You'll see that being a software engineer by trade, and not just random corporate title, is a bit more than printing up some business cards.
Because they are nerds and can't get a date, so they go for the virgins as their only hope of getting laid.
http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/02/18/enginneers-vs-sociologists/
Terrorist = Unamerican
The significance of the time delay between conception and occupancy by a soul relates to the properties of the body and the properties of the soul. Note that if a soul can exist without a body after death, then it can exist without a body any other time, too. Why should it have to be associated with a body before birth? Not to mention, for most of a pregnancy a body, if occupied by a soul, is technically equivalent to a "sensory deprivation environment". The nervous system doesn't connect to the brain until the third trimester. So, what is a soul going to do in that body, if it joins at conception? God is neither a torturer nor an idiot, to create an innocent soul and immediately lock it into a body isolated from sense organs for six months. Nor is God another sort of fool, to create a soul for a body that isn't going to come to term (an omniscient God will even know about probable abortions, and a loving God isn't going to create a soul just so a pregnant woman who gets an abortion can thereby be condemned). Back to reincarnation, which means God doesn't especially need to be involved at all at any particular conception; all the souls in the Universe could have been created a few billion years ago, and have been free to roam and play since. Do note that God, if omniscient, would know how many souls the Universe could accommodate in terms of bodies, all-at-once. Most of the time there wouldn't be that many bodies available; there would be waiting lists, probably quite long if the maximum number of souls had been created at the start. The assumption that souls never reincarnate depends on additional assumptions regarding what sorts of interesting things there are in the nonphysical realm, and especially the assumption that those things could accommodate an ever-increasing number of souls, in a manner such that none of them would ever have any desire to reincarnate. Well, between the cliche "there is no accounting for taste", and the basic claim that souls have free will, it would be irrational for God to think every soul would never ever want to experience another physical life. Therefore, even if God had at one time been creating souls as bodies were being born, this need not be true today. Just pick any fraction you want, of souls that want to reincarnate, and when the total number of souls becomes large enough as a result of God making more and more of them, eventually a point will be reached where that fraction-of-all-souls means every available body in the whole Universe has a soul wanting/waiting to reincarnate into it. I do not know that that extreme is currently the case, but I'm quite certain that any religion exhibits ridiculous stupidity when/if it claims reincarnation is bunk.
They were probably terrorists first and figured, or were told, to get an engineering degree to help their cause, bastards.
Engineers aren't busy watching "Dancing with the Stars" or popping out kid after kid, so they see what's really happening in the world to the point they have feel they have nothing left to loose.
After a few months of dealing with clients and management, I think most engineers feel like blowing something up... ;)
In US I must drive cab...
The fact that they were "engineers" is not surprising. Look throughout history at the people who may have gotten engineering degrees, if such things had existed then:
* Thomas Jefferson (who was something like a surveyor's assistant, and a botanist of sorts)
* Michelangelo (who was a tinkerer and inventor, making new things)
* Edison (of the lightbulb)
* Ford (of the automobile, was known as a self-taught watch repairman as a youth, and once even held the title 'engineer')
Problem is, in today's society, an "engineer" is a really wide definition. If you're getting a useful 4-year technical degree, it's an engineering degree or a technology degree. Getting a "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering" degree would be the most likely means to gainful employment, regardless of where you live.
And in reality, many men are well suited for the role of "engineer". They're tinkerers, problem solvers, and fixers. If a man is generally competent, he's more likely to make a decent engineer - and by association, is more likely to go into that field. ...
As for the implications of the article, I am keenly aware of the disturbing social implications resulting from widespread dispersal of this "study". I can easily see security theater like the TSA moving to profile against, say, "religious technical people", making sure to adjust their procedure to not "unjustly discriminate against Islamic engineers with one-way tickets and no luggage.
The only thing this study really tells me is that men who are of a regimented mindset and/or an engineering background are more likely to become successful terrorists when coming from an Islamic culture. To read anything more into that is foolish, but we should at least heed that correlation.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hiding sharpies in a plane requires mad Engineering skillz....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If I look at the mindset of an engineer, we see that they are very oriented to analysis and problem solving and have not studied any of the humanity subjects. For the most part they lack people skills, and therefore, cannot relate to happiness, sadness or tolerance for errors. Therefore, when faced with what they are convinced is less then perfection, (human design), they are more ready to give their life to correct the situation. I also believe that these "brainwashed" individuals are not successful in life or marriage. I don't see a man with 4 kids committing suicide unless their is dispair in the individuals life.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Engineering = time consuming + Lack of women = pent up sexual frustration. Religion = relief of such frustration. Before you know it, your blowing up a plane.
Rapper's have their bling-bling made out of platinum. My necklace is made of rhodium.
... on the customer support desk would make anyone want to blow something up.
Have gnu, will travel.