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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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