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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."
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.
Another issue is that engineering students are more likely to have enough skills to really pull off a terrorist act.
Many terrorist acts today involves a certain level of technology - everything from flying an aircraft to connecting two wires.
So there is no wonder that the terrorist organizations are targeting engineering students as a first choice. Just imagine how well another type of student would be able to rig an explosive or cause problems.
And there is also something behind the idea that many other societies are pushing hard in the engineering sector. It's only in the western world today that engineers are seen as some kind of low level creep that creates atomic bombs, weapons and biohazards - and that the best and highest rated people are instead working as actors, participate in reality shows like "Big Brother" or focus on essentially non-productive stuff like sociology.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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
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.
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.
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
That's true, but I also think that
If you're poor, your overriding goal in life is to survive. You don't have a very "empowered" mindset. Other articles have noted that the terrorists are all from middle class backgrounds. If you're middle-class, you have enough mental breathing room to ask "What do I want to be when I grow up?" and "How can I make the world a better place?" You feel that you have some power or leverage in life and society. You can make choices that can have real impact. In other words, you feel "empowered".
So why do terrorists have engineering degrees? Probably because they are middle-class.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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
Rand had no royalties at the end of her life. The copyrights had run on her books and plays. She lived on her Social Security check and married a man named O'Connor and the two lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's upper west side in the late 1960s-early 1970s. I would see her at the deli on Broadway between 98th and 99th street from time to time.
She was a favorite guest of a conservative club located in the basement of a brownstone at 92nd St. between Broadway and West End Avenue. The area was full of political clubs in those days, I belonged to the Hudson Independent Democrats, a FDR democratic club. When James Buckley was elected NY Senator on the Conservative Party Ticket, it was because the Republican and Democratic candidates split the vote.
I did see quite a few engineering students at NYU (just before NYU dumped its engineering department) in the early 1970s reading Atlas Shrugged - but, they were square in the middle of The Village and such nonsense was acceptable in that free-for-all part of the city.