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Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers?
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to their September 2008 article, IEEE Spectrum revisits the question of why a disproportionate number of terrorists have engineering degrees. According to their own summary of the interview with political scientist Steffen Hertog, 'nearly half of [individuals involved in political violence] with degrees have been engineers,' a rather ambiguous statement especially for a publication targeted at engineers. The interview makes some interesting points (lack of job opportunities for engineers despite a relatively high social status) and some suspect ones (e.g. framing Islamic culture into the western left vs. right politics). Above all, IEEE Spectrum tries really hard to associate engineers with terrorism for some reason."
Maybe a little mechanical or chemical aptitude is the reason. A bomber with an engineering degree might have the skills necessary to build a bomb and not blow themselves up in the process, whereas a non-engineer bomber might either fail to build a bomb or wind up blowing themselves to kingdom come.
Just look at Faisal Shazad, the guy from Connecticut who tried to blow up Times Square. He tried to build his bomb with a toy clock and M80 firecrackers. He had a business degree.
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There is a disconnect here. The engineers only appear to be the dominant profession of choice because they are the only ones who can actually build bombs. Actually, vast numbers of knitting enthusiasts are aspiring terrorists. Unfortunately, their background and skill set only allows them to create scratchy scarves and mittens.
Also, I have a theory that terrorists/bakers are responsible for all the Christmas fruitcakes....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I am sure you would find that an unusually high number of non-Terrorist Asians and Middle-easterners are engineers too (compared to the west). These people are often from wealthy families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (and a few other parts of Asia and the Middle east)--and university students in those areas are known mostly for their interests in hard science, business, and engineering. You don't see a lot of history or literature majors in those areas (when's the last time you saw a Saudi come to the U.S. to study journalism or art?).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
and smart people know that politicians are dangerous power-hungry individuals that, from time to time, must be exterminated (the assassination of Nero, Mussolini, Nicolae Ceauescu, etc). "The Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants - it is its natural fertilizer."
- Thomas Jefferson (an inventor/engineer but also a terrorist according to the 1700s British Parliament)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Engineers are the people who get it done and understand that technology matters. I mean, you don't win a war by bravery or the capabilities of your leaders but because the rifles load faster. Engineers also believe in objective and observable truth. And honestly, politicians are an offense.
And the WTC attack master mind Muhammed Atta was a city planner, maybe impressed by what Operation Gomorrah contributed to the city he resided in.
It's unfortunate for the world that most problems can't be solved that way. But that doesn't stop a lot of technically adept people from trying.
They started this anti-engineer jihad but we will finish it.
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I've noticed with many engineers I've known that they fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking. They want answers to be solid and 100% certain, so they have little tolerance for flexible or relativistic points of view.
It would be interesting to compare engineers with liberal arts grads on the terrorist spectrum. Engineers are not usually required to take the wide variety of non-technical courses that are supposed to give lib arts majors a grounding in history, art, social sciences, languages, etc. My hypothesis is that this might make engineers a little more rigid in their critical thinking skills and less comprehension of just how complex the world really is. If you have a better understanding of where you and your culture fit into the larger sweep of human history, are you more or less likely to engage in throwing bombs? I don't know the answer to that, but would like to see some stats or papers if anyone else does.
FreeSpeech.org
The rigors of engineering training discourage fundamental questions of why and how in favor of rote mastery of rules of thumb which are known to work. To engineers the question of why gravity works is unimportant, their concern is in dealing with the consequences of gravity (and so forth for other physical laws). The analogy to faith based belief systems, wherein you accept rules handed down by authority and are discouraged from questioning that faith. or from seeking justifications for those rules, and are forbidden to consider revisions of those rules, is quite direct.
The kind of person who thrives under one set of these conditions has met many of the criteria to thrive under the other set of conditions.
Engineering is about creating and realizing plans for getting things done, rather than just sitting there thinking, "What a shame that the world isn't the way I want it to be. If only there were a bridge over that river and a piece of software that does what I want with my spam. But there isnt. *sigh* Oh well, I'll just accept the world as it is."
An engineer with a political goal can vote for a representative, but that's more like hiring a political engineer than being one. Directly trying to personally cause a policy change is appealing, but most of the avenues for doing that, have high social barriers. Terrorism actually does too, but a stupid or naive engineer (i.e. a person who thinks terrorism is actually effective at persuading people to see things the terrorist's way) will see it as a way to personally get the job done, without having to rely on other people who will just drop the ball. "While you're all pointlessly talking, I can go shoot someone."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Perhaps we shouldn't be asking why engineers become [individuals involved in political violence] on their own accord. Rather, the engineers may be targets of recruitment by [organizations involved in political violence] because they possess desirable skills.
Part of the allure may be that carrying out such an attack is a challenging problem to solve. Engineers are all about solving problems, figuring out puzzles, coming up with elegant solutions.
Terrycloth Lobster
I have noticed a disproportionate number of intellectuals are depressed. Probably because they are smart enough to know no matter what you do you are screwed. This in turn leads to acting out against the dumb/happy people. The dumb/happy people are generally unphased because they didn't even realized you just dissed them making the intellectual even more furious. Which in turn leads them to target the dumbest group of all...that's right...government officials which gets twisted to be a political statement instead of the "kill all dumb people" it was truly intended as.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
What's ambiguous about that?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
why are engineers often terrorists? perhaps they see a flaw in the system that requires elimination.
Most people think in terms of emotions, the equality of individuals, rights, etc.
Engineers think about society as if it were a machine that needs fixing (and given our overpopulation, pollution, ugly modern lifestyles, boring architecture, slavish jobs, etc. they may have a point). They are thinking of the long term consequences of our actions.
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking terrifies 99% of the population who never want to be told what to do, or that what they're doing (buying SUVs, having 11 illiterate grubby children) is wrong. They want to think about their karmic pleasures, like who they're having sex with, what they're buying, who thinks they are pretty on myspace, etc.
If your ideas are demonized by 99% of a population, your only recourse is to be a terrorist or extreme ideologue.
* Ted Kaczynski (advanced mathematics)
* William Pierce (physics degree from Rice U)
* David Myatt (IT guru)
* Joseph Goebbels (PhD in philosophy)
And doubtless many more.
Futurist Traditionalism
The points already made about engineers being specifically recruited for their skills, being the ones most likely to be successful (or nearly so), and engineering being a very dominant field of study among educated middle-easterners are all well-taken, as are the jokes about antisocial engineers who can't get laid, but I wonder if there's not another element.
Engineers are, by aptitude and by training, problem solvers. We tend to look at the world as a series of problems to be solved, and to be fairly realistic about the materials and capabilities available to us. We also have a tendency to focus on approaches that involved hardware and technology rather than social processes. I think those factors may lead an intelligent young engineer who is extremely unhappy with perceived injustice and sufficiently fanatical about it to be willing to resort to violence to consider terrorism.
If, for example, you really felt you wanted to get the USA out of the middle east, you would immediately realize that economic forces are working against you. The US really wants middle-eastern oil. That makes political protests unlikely to succeed at anything, particularly protests of the scale and in the places you can manage. Conventional military options are clearly infeasible, even if you could manage to apply the full power of your nation's military, and even fully mobilize your country on a war footing, the US military is just too advanced, too powerful. You have to find something you can do to make the US want to leave. You can't make the oil go away, but maybe you can make it too costly to obtain.
In that situation, asymmetric warfare, AKA terrorism, is the logical choice. It requires little resources, is made vastly more effective with technical skill and detailed planning, and allows you to strike an actual blow against your perceived "oppressors". Of course, it's only one small blow, and won't by itself accomplish anything. Still, it's all you can do, and it's something substantial.
I can see that. Lack of actual experience with violence and the messy, complicated ways things go wrong may actually help as well.
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Maybe is because Engineers have a more technical & logical mind and once they set their sights on a goal are more likely to finish it ?
I don't think any Politicians/Lawyers would be able to do the same. They will just stage a theatrical act out of which they can escape untouched or just switch sides.
It's getting deep around here. The reason "terrorists" are engineers stems from the fact that they are educated. The requirements of advanced education is the ability to perform critical thinking, understand integrated mechanisms (whether physical or psychological), be able to move through iterations in a logical manner.
Even though these "terrorists" may plan attacks, so do educated governments. The true terrorist will manipulate the un-educated masses to advance their causes while "they", the educated, remain behind the scenes to do more damage. How many Islamic women are there, truly educated within the borders of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia?
Religion and governments do not want an educated populace. The un-washed masses of ignorance are more controllable.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. Edward Everett
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. Robert Frost
Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people. John Adams
The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people. Claiborne Pell (1918 - )
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained. James A. Garfield (1831 - 1881)
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Having been in engineering majors before, I can testify that engineers receive little or no training in ethics. Antisocial attitudes are rife; they are trained to look down on other people, and think it's "funny" to install a virus on someone's computer or blow something up with a pipe bomb. I was a software engineer for 10 years, but I got fed up with these attitudes, so I moved into the health professions. I feel much happier here; it's all about caring for other people.
>I remember reading once that men were much less likely to engage in terrorism if they had a wife (or was it a girlfriend -- I'm too lazy to hunt down the reference).
You've been modded as "funny", but I think you should have been modded as "insightful".
Engineers are still, by and large, the nerds. There is probably more than a grain of truth to the observation that people who don't fit in very well socially find comfort in academic endeavors, as opposed to social or athletic endeavors.
If I was going to go find people to blow stuff up for me, social misfits would be a nice place to start. The fact that they are smart enough to design bombs is a bonus.
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Looking back at the events of 2008, how many financial terrorists who created the situation had business degrees? I bet pretty much all of them.
The overall damage done to society by terrorist in business suits exceeds any other terror damage by far.
Both have a worldview consisting of strict mathematical certainty, with no room for shades of gray.
Both place little value in opinions or interests that do not align with theirs.
Both are more likely to blame their problems on external factors rather than internal flaws.
Both grossly oversimplify interpersonal relationships.
Both have an innate sense of superiority.
Take a look at the way the OP blames the magazine publisher and at some of the highly rated comments here for examples.
There are a few reasons I suspect and not all of them are about how awesome and useful they are as most of the posts above would have you believe. If technical skill was all that was required, why are there not more chemists?
From personal experiences only, I would say it is the fundamental difference in mindset required to practice a science over engineering. Self doubt and questioning are par for the course in the physical sciences, indeed it would be extremely difficult to do the job without the question "Are you sure?" running through your head every 15 min. Engineers on the other hand tend to deal in absolutes, laws carved in stone, it works or it doesn't, black and white. This does appeal to those with a predisposition to ignore shades of gray and are exactly the same traits as those of a fundamentalist of any persuasion, making them the ideal recruiting target.
This can be summed up by saying engineers tend to have a "I'm right. I'm right. I'M FUCKING RIGHT!" attitude to their work and life in general and woe betide anybody who tells them otherwise.
Disclaimer.... I openly accept that there is variability in any population, I made sweeping generalizations etc. This was done to stop the post turning into a monty python sketch listing all the exemptions. But the very fact I'm writing this disclaimer is a dead give-away that I am not an engineer.
That's like saying someone who claims to have medical training but doesn't know how to properly set a fractured bone is more likely to be a dentist then a doctor.
Or that someone with a B.S. degree who believes electrons move at the speed of light through wires is more likely to be a biology major than an EE or physicist.
There's bound to be very few biologists who believe in creationism because they've spent a good portion of their life attending classes that taught them otherwise. On the other hand, very few engineering programs require the engineer to take college-level biology.
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