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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
They're all maniacal engineers. *rimshot*
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
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/
Goddam bankers, they're almost as bad as terrorists.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"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...
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.
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
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].
Slavery?
Bum bum bi bum..
You heroes are no better than the heroes of your enemy.
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
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.
Or maybe it's that the liberal arts majors are already getting plenty of action, while for the average engineering student, the prospect of 72 virgins is pretty compelling?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Never blow yourself up!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
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.
...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
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.
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
They just really like trains over there!
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.
Doing bad things is fine, just so long as you don't do them the worst.
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.
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