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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."
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.
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.
You forgot:
Awkward around girls - check
This is a good point. The promise of 72 Virgins is probably much more enticing to geek engineers.
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.
Chemical explosives - check
Electronic devices - check
Radio communications - check
Problem solving techniques - check
Analyzing systems for failure modes/exploitation - check
Same here, but:
...Ability to blindly swallow what religious authorities tell me? Uh oh. We're a "no-go" on that one, Houston.
It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion. Agnosticism seems to me to be the viewpoint most consistent with an Engineering outlook (until a religion provides some kind of tangible proof, which goes against what most of them say about faith.)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were to claim to have a device that could solve any problem in linear time, or that produced more energy than it consumed, or that nullified gravity, any engineer worth the title would be highly skeptical and would demand to see hard data before believing such a claim.
It doesn't make sense to me that most people with this sort of engineering mindset could blindly accept extraordinary claims (made by whichever religion.) I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong -- just that they are very difficult to believe without strong evidence.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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?
Hmm... some googling:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got his engineering degree in North Carolina.
Mohammed Atta got an engineering degree in Cairo (and studied English and German there), but his PhD in Hamburg, Germany.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied mechanical engineering in London, UK. It's unclear whether he graduated.
Speaking of degrees being a dime a dozen: 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. In other words, unless wikipedia is wrong, two thirds of the population has attended college. According to the Unesco website, the situation is similar in Western Europe. According to that same website, "23% attended college in the Arab States, 11% in South and West Asia and, despite rapid growth, only 6% in Africa"
Google is refusing to specify these statistics to engineering degrees, but the numbers above suggest that degrees are actually a dime a dozen in "the west", and not in the oil rich countries where middle eastern terrorists usually originate.
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.
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.
The problem is that if you had two such engineers, they're compete to see who could get his 72 virgins stacked to make the strongest bridge.
I don't think the terrorist recruiters are specifically seeking out Engineering students.
Based on my experience working in a University (and attending a couple) it seems to me that students who get sent abroad from Islamic countries study Engineering because it's a particularly useful degree back home. Many of these countries are underdeveloped and bringing back good engineering skills is a way to work towards correcting that. You just don't see as many students from the developing world here in the US getting degrees in art, English, or the social sciences.
Now, I if I were an Islamic terrorist recruiter, I'd most interested in finding people who had lived in the target country and could move around comfortably there. But they'd also need to be people who were grounded in Islam and hopefully susceptible to a more fundamentalist point of view. Young people tend to be more "flexible" in their theology than older people. So, who do I look for? Students from my own country who have been or are currently studying abroad and most of them are going to be Engineers. Plus these students have the added benefit of having already gone through the visa process and will probably much easier to get back into the target country.
I really don't think the recruiters and leaders are looking specifically for highly trained engineers so they can be expended on the front-line. If Engineers are actually valued for their technical skills, planning capability, etc, I'd use them for designing IEDs and planning operations. Considering the failures and apparent incompetence so far, maybe they are using the "bottom of the barrel" for the actual operations, since they have the qualifications to reach the target country but are not so capable in an Engineering capacity.
and yet my experience in university tells me that the religious social conservatives are concentrated in the engineering college...
why?
because engineering is a world of black and white thinking, and it doesn't challenge their religious dogma like the other departments with their more rounded gen ed requirements do. Let alone the departments in Arts and Sciences like Geology, Biology, Paleontology, etc that the findings of openly challenge their dogma.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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 hate to say the following for two reasons. 1) it is a stereotype of my own design, and 2) I am an engineer.
Engineers are ALWAYS right. ALWAYS. Even when (especially when?) something is clearly opinion based.
Ask a non-eng what their favorite color is, you get a simple answer.
Ask an eng the same, you get an answer PLUS reasons why it is superior to other colors.
As I said, I am an engineer. It was only after I noticed behavior like this in other engs that I noticed it in myself as well.
I don't like having that trait (flaw?) and have had to make a conscious effort to be less judgmental. (Yet remaining critical.)
So, yeah, as RobotRunAmok pointed out - engs tend to think/say "Right is right - AND I'M RIGHT" even when it isn't a correct/incorrect discussion, sometimes when they are clearly incorrect (they defend what they've said, clearly wrong.)
Also, and again this is something that I've caught myself doing, is that these personality types can and do play the Devil's Advocate rather well - up to a point. There is a difference between seeing the other side of a discussion and being contrarian for the sake of "being right."
The above may not be worded all that well, but I need my morning coffee. Besides, it hardly matters if you disagree with me, since I KNOW that I am correct.
Funny!
Lots of people (especially engineering types and other nerds) go through an Ayn Rand stage in early adulthood. Most of them get over it, though.
Easily the most ridiculous author in post war literature. "Selfishness is the only virtue" - the philosophy of a 6 year old.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain