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Engineers Nine Times More Likely Than Expected To Become Terrorists (washingtonpost.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Henry Farrel writes in the Washington Post that there's a group of people who appear to be somewhat prone to violent extremism: Engineers. They are nine times more likely to be terrorists than you would expect by chance. In a forthcoming book, Engineers of Jihad, published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog provide a new theory explaining why engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. They say it's caused by the way engineers think about the world. Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists. Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers.
Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries (PDF), and among many migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs. This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment) and why engineers were more prone to become left-wing radicals in Turkey and Iran.
Some people might argue that terrorist groups want to recruit engineers because engineers have valuable technical skills that might be helpful, such as in making bombs. This seems plausible – but it doesn't seem to be true. Terrorist organizations don't seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy and they don't actually need many people with engineering skills. "Bomb-making and the technical stuff that is done in most groups is performed by very few people (PDF), so you don't need, if you have a large group, 40 or 50 percent engineers," says Hertog. "You just need a few guys to put together the bombs. So the scale of the overrepresentation, especially in the larger groups is not easily explained."
Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries (PDF), and among many migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs. This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment) and why engineers were more prone to become left-wing radicals in Turkey and Iran.
Some people might argue that terrorist groups want to recruit engineers because engineers have valuable technical skills that might be helpful, such as in making bombs. This seems plausible – but it doesn't seem to be true. Terrorist organizations don't seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy and they don't actually need many people with engineering skills. "Bomb-making and the technical stuff that is done in most groups is performed by very few people (PDF), so you don't need, if you have a large group, 40 or 50 percent engineers," says Hertog. "You just need a few guys to put together the bombs. So the scale of the overrepresentation, especially in the larger groups is not easily explained."
I don't want the title "engineer" in it!
Many of the engineers I've worked with stayed on the verge of a nervous breakdown most of the time and were prone to extreme misanthropy. So I'm not surprised they would be attracted to a line of work where they get to blow people up.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
*face palm*
Don't fuck with engineers - we *will* get even.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It is likely many promising young jihadists are schooled to suit the perceived needs of the movement.
The claims in this summary reek of arriving at an opinion, and then fitting in the evidence as it suits your case.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
At least roughly.
...that I am totally not a terrorist, despite my nickname.
Damned infidels...
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Yes, inability to cope with uncertainty definitely drives people to religion, to be predominantly conservative, and possibly prone to violent outbursts.
This is supposed to be a news site, not an "obvious psychobabble of the week" message board.
doing 100% of the damage to us all...spirit of creation is all ++++++++ engineered for eternity,, everything made by man fails is guaranteed...
Oh good. Just what the world needs. More engineer bashing.
For the record, I'm an engineer, PE license and everything. Liberal as they come (I think Bernie is too conservative on things like gun control). And I'm an atheist. Some of the engineers I know are conservatives, but few are religious. Logic and religion don't mix well. So I'm confused about this idea that engineers are more likely to be religious than the public at large. That just doesn't make sense to me.
So I'm thinking the authors of this book... aren't engineers. Always easier to bash the other guy than look inward, innit?
So it goes up from 0.000000001% to 0.000000009% and somebody wrote a book about it?
Fortunately we're ten times more likely to become couch potatoes.
If we posit that engineers tend towards engineering because they have more aptitude for technical thinking where the answers are usually clear - either it works or it doesn't. Then it makes sense that the same sort of person would also seek similar black-and-white explanations in other parts of their lives. Religious extremism is all about there being One Right Way. That's gotta be attractive to someone looking for clear-cut answers to problems that really don't have any perfect, or even necessarily consistent, answers.
They're rational and see all kinds of things wrong with society and people in general.
They're also socially and inter-personally immature and only see solutions like explosions, guns, and sci-fi.
Engineers are wanted by all kinds of organizations... on other hand, social studies majors (that published this study) are 9 times less likely to even get a job as a suicide bombers.
>> (engineers) are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists
The Paris terrorists didn't seem that "religious" or "conservative". From AFA: "She loved partying and going to clubs. She drank alcohol and smoked and went around with lots of different guys." (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3325180/Two-fingers-world-Pictured-Europe-s-female-suicide-bomber-booze-loving-extrovert-nicknamed-Cowgirl-love-big-hats.html)
I'm actually quite surprised to see that engineers are more likely to be religious than not.
Considering the fields that we (Engineers) study and how they generally explain how everything in the universe works as far as we can tell, that's strange.
It reminds me of what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Of the elite of the elite scientists of the world, 15% of them still have a personal relationship with a god in the vein of religion. Why is that number not zero?"
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
They're likely to take the side of reason and logic.
As for being terrorists, many engineers are male and fail with women. They also get treated by shit at their jobs. At least, if the comments here are any idea.
I think more should have been done to understand this threat with terrorists and who they are. Many seem today to be well educated and focused on their beliefs. I think in general its more about religion and how the Muslim world view themselves as being left out of western success. But a lot of that is because of secular religious issues and constant violence which is a internal problem not caused by the west. Its much like Black violence is all Police action and race problems and not Black on Black crime and the lack of parental control of black youth. If you want less police problems, then reduce your crime rate. The more crime you have the more police presence and the more conflict and shootings between cops and Blacks. Same is happening with terrorists. If you want to improve your living conditions stop killing people out of some religious idealism that this will somehow get you more power and control. It won't and it just enables more suffering, more refugee's and a continued worsening of your profile in the world. Nobody cares about your plight if you killing people and doing other bad things to people. Being a martyr is about the most dumb thing you can do.
I can hear Trump already: Build a wall and keep those engineers out! Close all the engineering schools!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Engineers of middle-eastern descend are more likely become jihadist.
I don't recall reading or hearing about non middle-eastern engineers joining jihad.
I question how the expected number are derived -- from the population at large? Or from college graduates? MENA graduates proportionally far more engineers than western schools.
There is also considerable confusion in the public and amongst engineers themselves about the differences with scientists. Briefly, scientists discover new effects while engineers use the available science to make their machines (systems) work.
Scientists tend to focus very narrowly on the interesting effect. Engineers might like to focus on some interesting effect, but must not miss any important effects. That's how machines break. Engineers are scientists' harshest critics.
Engineers spend a lot of time learning math and the sciences and do not get enough liberal arts exposure at all in their educational process. Therefore, you are training a sort of human calculator, who is not well connected with the feelings and hopes of others. On top of that, the frustration of seeing what could be dome as opposed to how little is actually done must frustrate the heck out of engineers.
Is utterly ridiculous nonsense!
It's saying that being religious and politically conservative makes you more likely to be a terrorist. I'm sure this will cause no controversy whatsoever.
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Left wing terrorists come from the liberal arts side.
Seriously?! What a bunch of B.S. When are these fools going to call a spade a spade?
If you can't trust then then it's safe to say they're not that handy. I think the summary mentions this...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So we could fix a lot of problems by simply giving engineers from those areas projects that have a definite positive affect on their surrounding communities.
We need to link people like Dean Kamen and projects like http://opensourceecology.org/ with Middle Eastern and African engineers.
If they are using 100% of their time positively and are super busy, many birds are killed with one stone.
Few engineers I know are even religious. Logic and faith does not really mix. Also, how does the conservative survey carried out? By asking how many sex partners the engineers has? (Not a lot) Or how many sex partners the engineers want to have (A lot)
There is obviously a correlation between being dateless and becoming a terrorist.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So you are saying; no chance?
Maybe the engineers just tend to be the most "successful" at terrorism.
I don't come across many engineers who are conservative and religious. Most of them are atheist.
They deal with that in their summary - stating that they don't believe engineers are recruited for their utility value. My main problem is that they use this hand-wavey statement:
Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance.
Well, it would be quite useful to have a run down of what assumptions they did make in coming to this conclusion. For example, it appears that most of these terrorists are males, and we know that engineering is heavily male dominated compared to other degree classes. So unless this has been accounted for, you would expect terrorists to be nearly twice as likely to be engineers than the general population anyway (oh scary!), but that is because terrorists are more likely to be males, not more likely to be engineers.
It is pretty obvious that the terrorists identified so far are not representative of a general western population select by 'chance', so there is a lot of stuff that needs to be adjusted for before you can start claiming a particular degree is over represented among them.
Seriously, it is.
An alternate explanation:
People from countries whose predominant religion is Islam tend to be Muslim.
Many of those countries are poor compared to Western nations.
People like wealth, and wish to escape poverty.
One popular method for escaping poverty is education.
However, only certain kinds of education correlate strongly with financial independence.
Islamic Studies majors, for instance, are a dime a dozen in Islamic countries.
In the long run, a career in engineering is likely to be far more lucrative.
But educational and economic opportunities in poor Islamic countries are limited.
By contrast, there is a relative abundance of jobs and respected educational institutions in the Western world.
But you can really only get into an math, science, or engineering program there, because the liberal arts programs are strongly biased towards the local culture.
But math and science don't pay all that well.
Therefore, people of college age in those countries look abroad to choose a college, and tend to choose engineering as their field of study.
When they arrive in the West to attend college, they are immigrants, don't speak the language, and don't share the culture.
They are also usually young.
Young adults really want to socialize, especially with those of the opposite sex.
The immigrant students can't socialize effectively with the local population, because of cultural differences, prejudices, and ordinary human nature.
Also, they can't hook up with the opposite sex effectively, because there's no support structure in their host country to do that in compliance with their cultural restrictions.
Young people who can't socialize tend to get depressed and angry.
These students tend to blame the culture of their host country for their depression and anger.
They become chronically homesick, and reject their host country in every way they can.
A terrorist recruiter is trained to spot these disaffected students.
The recruiter fulfills the student's need for socializing and the comforts of a familiar culture, by introducing them to other terrorist recruits.
Having found community at last, the student stops seeking it elsewhere, and cuts off any other contacts he may have had.
The community encourages and reinforces each other's anger, and directs it towards revenge.
And that's why a lot of terrorists are engineers.
There is a strong selection bias - mostly they were reviewing the backgrounds of political prisoners and terrorist leadership, not the majority of the foot soldiers.
In addition, from the linked pdf file:
Only 33 cases out of a sample of 259 could be confirmed as having been to university. And for only 22 of them, we knew the exact subject. So they’re much more the kind of relatively socially marginal lumpen class that you would expect Islamists to be recruited from in the West. And among those few people who have a degree, and the 22 where we know which degree they have, a full 13 are actually engineers. So almost two-thirds of Western-based radical militant islamists turned out to be engineers.
How can they extrapolate that "almost two-thirds of Western-based radical militant islamists turned out to be engineers"? All they know is that 13 of the 259 they reviewed had degrees in engineering subjects.
You are all cows. Cows say Mooo. Mooo cows Moooo. Mooo say the cows. Moooo! Moooo! YOU JIHADI COWS!!!
The engineering schools are full of brown people these days...so.
While true, It does nobody any good to alienate or piss off the guy who fixes your technology.
It is like pissing off the guy who makes your food.. occasionally that makes you 9 X more likely to get "the special sauce" on your order.
A lot of not very good engineers like these absolute answers and like things to be black or white. I run into them frequently. The worst is probably the IT security field, where things are often viewed as secure or not, with nothing in between. That is an epic fail in the real world, of course.
Good engineers are not like that at all, they understand things like risk management, redundancy, real-world aspects, human factors and cost. But they are a minority, unfortunately.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
OK so a few terrorists are engineers. How many hundreds of millions dead are the results of politicians, most who are liberal arts majors?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Has anyone read the book and checked the facts? It seems to be a fairly controversial topic and I wounder why the authors didn't do a peer reviewed paper instead of a book. Perhaps because it is more speculative than factual?
I'd say it has more to do with being a male than with being an engineer.
The trait that makes a person a terrorist is more primoral than "engineer type".
Basically, terrorism is a fallback solution to changing/improving the world to fit your needs/desires.
Which is what many male humans and thus male engineers would want to do.
Tech experts are also prone to being smarter than average, narrow minded, misunderstood and socially excluded by people around them.
This in turn leads to frustration. And I'd say roughly 80% of all wars and conflicts go back to simple male sexual frustration. Also terrorism.
Take a smart, outcast male youngster, and, yes, he is indeed very much closer to becoming a leader, innovator, bum, philosopher or, yes, if the circumstances are right, a gun-rampager or terrorist than regular people.
I know that I am closer to being a warrior, leader or bum than a 'regular guy'. There is less of an inbetween for me.
Let's keep in mind, the difference between terrorism and war basically is just the amount of people you kill and the amount of comrades and long-term planning involved.
Looking at terrorism and the technical requirements for effective terrorism, these stats are no real surprise.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He submits by far the dumbest clickbait stories I've ever seen yet they get posted every time.
You know you have a glut of engineers when there are too many even for the terrorists.
... and lost her mind.
Which is a very typical path for religious converts (they tend to start out a bit unbalanced and vulnerable to begin with, get sucked into one religion or another, convert and become the worst, most zealous Godbotherers around)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Perhaps liberal social scientists who want to get rid of infidels invading their lands tend to get "a great new idea" and decide to sing a song to a the imperialists. Surely that'll work!
A conservative, by definition, values the lessons of history , the engineer seeks"solutions that actually work. The conservative engineer determines that singing a song has been ineffective, while blowing the bastards up more reliably stops their influence. So this conservative engineer takes the more effective action.
I'm kidding. Actually the terrorists they chose to study are probably the ones in the news right now - the ones who feel they are protecting their ancient traditions from the increasing influence of the western sodom, from Hollyweird movies celebrating promiscuity, homosexuality, etc. They aren't running their stats on Greenpeace terrorists. The people who seek to protect ancient traditions will tend to be conservative and work in traditional fields such as engineering. If Greenpeace extremists was your sample of terrorists, you'd find they tend to be liberal and have degrees in social sciences , environmental science, etc.
Just ask Paris and anyone in the WTC on 9/11
Probably more correlated to not having the time to get a date really. Frankly I'm surprised there aren't a lot of tech sector postal incidents.
captcha: volcanic
It's Bicycle Repairman who fights international communism, not an engineer.
In a lot of these countries, anyone who works with technology or turns a wrench calls himself an engineer. It could be an elevator operator or a guided-missile designer, or anyone in between.
Oh and the one engineer president has among the fewest military deaths of all presidents.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
In related news, Mohammed Zuckerstan has announced that boys need not apply for isis.org's summer school's due to ... patriarchy and oppression and shit.
Stop punishing boys - Boycott sexist code.org
What are the others supposed to do, throw water balloons? Basically, this just means nine times more capable. Guess we should be glad there are less engineers in the world! :) Though, perhaps, non-engineers (i.e. less fulfilling lives, lower earnings, etc) would be more like to become terrorists than engineers, WERE THEY CAPABLE!
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Well maybe if they hadn't dragged their asses on the hdtv rollout.
Driving trains all day.
" Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious"
The statistic associating engineers with terrorism has been around for a while, but this explanation is a new one. This means that Texas ought to be a hotbed of terrorist activity.
My experience is that a sort of logical conservatism that is in stark contrast to reality is common among people who have an education that is entirely technical. I like to say that Libertarianism is for people with no liberal arts background and Communism is for people with ONLY a liberal arts background. Basically, systems that work out best (by a western measure) for society tend to be complicated and messy, because they need to allow several conflicting viewpoints to coexist. In science, and ESPECIALLY engineering, people are trained to simplify and isolate. As a result, people with only that very technical background tend to apply the same reasoning to their political views, say taking one principle and modifying their position to serve that over all others. This leads to a position that is consistent but doesn't take into account all of the facts, because very few people are capable of dealing with each element of social problems with that level of logical rigour (this is why we have an adversarial legeal system and our eladers need cabinets and advisors). The advantage of a liberal arts education is that you learn (if you want to anyway) to reduce these kinds of problems into things that can be managed. You lose a great deal of precision in doing so, but you gain accuracy. Another nice thing is that liberal degrees tend to encourage taking a wide range of courses, including sciences. STEM degrees are so specialized now that there isn't really time in the curriculum to throw in some arts courses. I recently attended an engineering open house at Western and they get effectively 1.5 credits in non-technical electives over 4 years. In contrast,I took a minimum number of philosophy courses to get my degree and was able to indulge in a whole range of different topics. I totally understand why it is this way, but the end result is that STEM students are LESS LIKELY to become well-rounded individuals. And music students. Honestly, I've never been in a department that was more insular (at least at my university). I honestly had somebody basically tell me that I must be miserable and a bit evil after describing basic Descartes. But that's neither here nor there.
Liberal Arts Guys Think Engineers are All Killbots
Hoho! How little do those liberal arts guys know -- Engineers aren't killbots themselves, they merely design and build them. For fun.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot has Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Muslim engineers are MANY times more likely. How many non-Muslim engineers have become terrorists?
Further it is hard to believe engg faculty are more conservative than business school faculty or law school faculty. I have been a TA in engg grad school. Our faculty ranged from my muslim PhD guru to dyed-in-the-wool Texas-homeland-hillbilly professor complete with knee high leather boots, 5 gallon hat and some kind of buckle-and-shoe-lace thing he wore instead of a tie, Korean war veteran.
In Asia smart kids aspire to become engineers or doctors. They do well in home country and end up in USA engg school and suddenly are confronted with international level of academic competition. Those who just managed to make it just barely over the GRE score threshold find it very hard. I have seen grad students struggle. Psychological break down common because they have borrowed heavily to come to USA and their assistantship is on the verge of being taken away due to poor GPA. It transcends country of origin. Indian and Chinese students as likely to struggle here as are Middle Eastern, Taiwanese, Indonesian grad students.
Further Engg/Med schools attract more international students, because lack of English knowledge is not as much of an impediment to Engg/Med schools compared to business or law schools.
And the terrorists need engineers as much as any organization. Except for purely retail, purely accounting, purely law companies everyone else needs engineers. So they actively recruit among the frustrated engineers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This must mean that the government should put permanent taps on engineers' computers, internet, and phone lines. Heck, cameras in their homes and cars as well. Because, you know, terrorism and the children.
Not all engineering shops have the same culture and these tend to vary by engineering specialty. Many engineers have little to do with tech. Structural, civil, environmental, chemical, even most mechanicals engineers may use software tools and electronic instruments, but many don't write code or develop electronics. If you walk into a shop full of PEs who serve the construction industry you will find a very different culture from some web shop. You will see much more muscular environment with far fewer lego wookies and far more sports banners, scripture quotes and military stickers. High tech development is not spread evenly over the planet or even across the US. The number of ratio of jobs that require a PE in say San Jose or Seattle would be much lower than say Idaho or Mississippi. Same would go for countries with little tech development. It is of course dangerous to over generalize,....
"And that's why a lot of terrorists are engineers."
Phew, thanks for clearing that up for everyone!
Beware oversimplification.
"This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment)"
The reason you won't find many Islamists-engineer-radicals in Saudi Arabia is that they would dissapear into the prison system to be subject to various forms of torture. ref
Many statements from the summary directly contradict my personal experience. The summary states:
"Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious."
Well, I'm an engineer and I work with engineers all day. I find the majority to be fairly liberal and not very religious. I always thought that it was a result of people being intelligent and familiar with the scientific method that made them less likely to swallow propaganda and dogma. Also, it is a largely foreign population and that is a factor since I meet the people who were educated enough to get jobs in different country from their own. I find that it is we Americans who are conservative and religious.
Also, the summary states:
"Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers."
I speculate that Gamgetta and Hertog are fearful and jealous of engineers. I work in chip design and there are very few clearcut answers. Furthermore, your opinion on whether or not something is a good idea has no bearing on whether or not it actually is. I find that to be a major difference between engineering and the the more "normal" fields; you have to build things that work in the real world, your ability to persuade someone will not improve the quality of whatever it is you are building. If my chips don't work, I can't argue in front of a judge that they really do work. Nor can I publish a book speculating how good they really are. No, I fscked up and I have to deal with it.
Of course, you would say, "Well history is full of people, out of the blue, turning science and mathematics on their heads and it's stuck-up ivory tower professional academics like you, that hold back the progress of science. If you only took time to read and understand the occasional maverick we would have had hoverboards and interstellar space travel by now."
My answer, is the same I give any 16 year old looking for a job, no one owes you anything - if you want them to spend their time and energy on you then *you* have to show why that won't be a waste on their part.
Engineers: I'm right until you prove me wrong.
Scientists: I'm wrong until I can prove I'm right.
(*) It's funny how you can make a two page proof proving Fermat's Last Theorem if you change the definition of a prime number.
to determine what the likelihood of the demographic of the funders of this research to drop money on politically motivated, inflammatory junk science weeks after a high profile terrorist attack. The truth is out there...
Beware oversimplification.
That's a fair point. But it's Slashdot, not the Lyceum. How rigorous do I have to be?
Correlation is not causation, but it is correlated with causation.
> Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious.
That makes sense, since engineers deal with things as they are, not as they pretend they are.
That doesn't make any sense at all. Being religious is, by definition, believing in something with zero evidence whatsoever, so it's just believing in fantasies. How is that "dealing with things as they are"?
Engineering used by terrorists
Lets declare a war on Engineering and ban all engineers
I can tell you're an engineer because apparently you've never heard of a paragraph.
Although you might be a manager, since you speak in PowerPoint.
No that's because they just play Postal instead.
Engineers are more likely to become terrorists than social scientists, according to social scientists.
A very good reason to eliminate the H1B visa program for engineers!
From what I'm gathering here this study is mostly limited to Islamic terrorism. But is this true for all terrorists? Maybe something in the greater Islamic norm makes this true versus another culture where the statistics may swing the other way.
My thoughts are that engineers are very comfortable with their peers and the concept of a paradise where you spend eternity with 72 other virgins may be comforting if not appealing whereas other cultures' or religions' "final rewards" may not be as appealing to an engineering student.
It's kind of like the movie Old School but on a more eternal level.
The point of the WP article isn't that we shouldn't make generalizations about groups, like "engineers" or "refugees". That's a good point to make, but it is missing one essential point: under existing US law, US engineers and refugees aren't legally equal. That is, it is entirely legitimate to discriminate against refugees in ways that it wouldn't be legitimate for US citizens.
Nevertheless, the means by which the WP article attempts to make that point are wrong. Whether the author understands it or not, the Gambetta and Hertog article does not show that engineers are more "prone to violent extremism". The point of that article is actually that "discontented would-be elites" become radicals, and that engineers are more likely to become right-wing radicals than left-wing radicals. I.e., the "mindset" that causes engineers to become radicalized disproportionately is that engineers tend to think that their work is valuable and essential to society, and they tend to think that socialism and communism don't make much sense. Neither of those is particularly surprising, nor is it something that reflects negatively on engineering or engineers.
It is likely many promising young jihadists are schooled to suit the perceived needs of the movement.
So you think that they have a (figurative) farm system whereby they are training engineers years in advance of when they will need them? That argument fails Occam's Razor. A much simpler explanation is that individuals with technical skills are targeted for those skills.
The claims in this summary reek of arriving at an opinion, and then fitting in the evidence as it suits your case.
Sounds like you are trying to do the same.
I agree entirely. Luckily at most workplaces people are pretty good about not talking about ridiculous shit like that, but when they do take off the mask you can hear some wacky-ass shit from engineers.
It really makes me wonder how I got into this profession, since I'm not religious and don't believe in stuff without evidence. I guess I just wanted a better-paying and more stable job than you can get as a scientist.
Oh good. Just what the world needs. More engineer bashing.
Speaking as an engineer myself why should our field be above a good bashing when others aren't? We're not special. Folks here like to bash bankers, managers, marketing and other fields but can't imagine that engineers are anything other than wise saints who never do anything wrong or harmful. It's not true of course - engineers have the same human failures as anyone else.
So I'm thinking the authors of this book... aren't engineers. Always easier to bash the other guy than look inward, innit?
Given how much the engineers here bash other fields we certainly have a lot of engineers who can dish it out but cannot take it.
It's probably more like a correlation between having the kind of personality that is easier to groom for terrorism but also somewhat unattractive.
Anyway, I think it's a myth that engineers and nerds in general do badly with dating. Most I know are married or in relationships. It's just school where people are immature, and I realized that most of the people I liked back then were unsuitable partners anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Paragraphs, motherfucker. Learn how to use them!
You laugh, but you aren't really wrong, lack of dating prospects is a pretty big factor in radicalization as I understand it.
(I know, citations, but I am lazy today.)
I can tell you're an engineer because apparently you've never heard of a paragraph.
Although you might be a manager, since you speak in PowerPoint.
What do you mean? My last post was a PowerPoint. Shit, did Slashdot mangle the formatting? Yeah, looks like it. That's too bad, because it's just not the same without the pictures. They were all really relevant, and not superfluous at all. There was one that was a picture of a Mercator projection. Another showed a cross-ethnic cross-gender couple, one standing behind the other's chair and pointing at something on a computer screen. There were various geometric forms in primary colors. The pictures also served to break the tension at regular intervals through judicious use of LOLcats.
(More seriously, I wanted every step in my chain of reasoning on its own line, but I couldn't figure out how to do that on Slashdot without it adding an extra line in between. I wasn't really happy with the results either, but I still liked it better than a single wall of text. Sorry for the lack of elegance.)
The authors address everything you suggested. Engineers who are more likely to be religious and conservative are also more likely to be terrorists, than other people.
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Are programmers more likely to be terrorists?
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In fact, if you read the original article, that's the kind of argument it makes. The WP article simply distorts what the original article was all about:
Nerdy engineer here. Married and still dating [because I can].
> This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia
For sure. Among the 20 perpetrators of 2001/09/11 aerial hijackings, a total of 19 were saudis. The mastermind, Osama bin Laden, head of Al-Quaeda, was also a saudi citizen, with a construction engineering university degree earned in the USA. (His family owns a construction industry mega-corporation.)
But of course the wahabite theocracy of Saudi Arabia is a close ally and darling of USA and IL. They must only be praised and the truth about them can never be said on national TV. In fact, the entire country is about radical islam, the wahabite / salafite principles are the worst possible combinations of religious bigotry and outright medieval darkness of mind. Spanish inquisiton would be liberal feminists compared to saudi officials.
Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind and gets rejected on sheer logical grounds.
There are plenty of high quality engineers and scientists who are not particularly rational and a fair number are deeply religious. There are members of the National Academy of Science who are devout. Some of our most famous scientists such as Newton were very religious. While religion is largely irrational, obviously there is something about it that some otherwise rational and intelligent humans find irresistible. Some people have a hard time with saying "I don't know". Some people are insecure and scared and need an invisible friend to help them get through the day. Some people find comfort in someone else telling them what to do and how to think even when what they are being told makes no objective sense. Some people value the sense of community found in religious groups - tribalism is a big thing with humans. I don't think there is a single answer but clearly some find it appealing.
Personally I'm baffled by the appeal of religions. I gave up having invisible friends when I was a child and I really don't like people telling me I'm a bad person for not believing in ludicrous fairy tales. I find the tribalism and fighting that religion brings to be deeply troubling. I find proselytizing and brainwashing that religions engage in to be tantamount to rape, especially when aimed at children. I don't really care if someone wants to believe in something loony but I have a big problem when they think they need to infect others with their crazy.
Makes sense. We're all just failed scientists. It was either teaching or engineering.
Eduction is pretty much a necessity to cultivate that type of unshakable faith in a cause.
Quoting: "It turns out that all this book learnin' is teaching you more than just the Pythagorean theorem -- it's also making it easier for you to believe some laughably wrong and even seriously weird stuff.
One problem is that education leads to one overall inaccurate belief: You think you're smarter than you are. Three studies have found that people who fall for investment scams are better-educated than the average person but don't seek advice because they think they're immune to making mistakes. In one study, researchers found that 94 percent of college professors think their work is superior to their peers'. These fellows fail to realize that intelligence doesn't always translate to real-world ability, and thus they tend to overestimate the quality of their work.
That's why the more education you get, the more likely you are to believe in, say, ghosts and the supernatural. One study found that 23 percent of college freshman believed in the paranormal, compared with 31 percent of seniors and 34 percent of graduate students. Which leads us to wonder ... what the fuck are schools teaching these days?" -http://www.cracked.com/article_19174_5-unexpected-downsides-high-intelligence_p2.html
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I know...we can call it 'Going Engineer'
Doesn't quite have the same 'bang for the buck' as Going Postal but it'll have to do.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Don't you worry if you don't get a date now, you'll get your reward and your 72 "virgins" in paradise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've been in the I.T. field for over 20 years now. One thing I can tell you, never, ever piss off your I.T. folks. We'd make pretty damned good terrorists ourselves.
Constant threat of being out-sourced, overseen by the same idiots who gave you shit all through high school, meant to feel worthless even though you just created products that will carry the company through the next 50 years, blah blah blah.
I mean, I'd just bury my depression in a tub of ice cream, but I guess some folks wanna kill themselves the easy way.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Is the true reason that they're turned to terrorism.
Lawyers and politicians never become terrorists, why? Because they have better things to do than to blowing up themselves! Because they don't give a shit about other people that they cannot feel the frustration at all.
There is obviously a correlation between being dateless and becoming a terrorist.
It probably isn't especially high. It isn't hard to find examples of suicide bombers that were married.
Couple planned Isil suicide bombing of Westfield or Tube, court hears
Married to monster
Saddam Rewards Suicide Bombers' Families
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Dumb, really dumb. They're getting cause and effect wrong. If you want to become a well-educated terrorist, engineering courses are far more useful than taking French literature or art appreciation.
The invisible friends part of religion is only a small portion.
I disagree that it is a small thing but I agree that it isn't the only thing.
Religion doesn't bring tribalism, it's just one of the many uniforms that tribalism wears. Without religion people would, and do, find other ways to draw lines between groups of people.
Let me put it this way. Religion makes tribalism really, really easy AND it makes it difficult to reconcile because it isn't based on anything rational. You are quite right that tribalism comes in many forms but you cannot argue that religious based tribalism is particularly pervasive. And to my mind it is particularly odious as well.
There are a number of reasons for this: (1) family expectations of males to go into STEM, (2) STEM is more prestigious in Asia than it is in America or Europe and (3) colleges fold near-STEM majors into STEM, e.g. an accountant here might be called some sort of engineer in Asia. I've notice this in all parts of Asia- China, India, Syria, etc. A prime example of this that China's last three presidents have engineering degrees. Only two of the 45 US presidents had engineering degrees (Hoover, Carter).
So my point is that if a lot of educated mideast males are engineers, it is more likely the radicals will be engineers too. I see nothing intrinsic in an engineering degree that would radicalize.
Engineers believe in math and logic (and because most of them are male also power) (more than soft values, money, justice or governments etc). Therefore they might make better cold-blooded killers. Religion and other things don't probably matter that much.
Because they believe in "logical reasoning" they can more easily act against their culture and its values.
Most of the terrorists (which is just another way of saying that one group (of semiprofessional solders) that is not large enough to form a country has started a war against your country) are male and most of the engineering students are also male is probably another factor.
Looks like it's time to pull back some of those education visas for Arabs in the engineering fields.
I think I'm going to have to plan a stealth take-down of Dice, one office/person at a time. I'll announce my involvement after each attack, and I'll promise more in the future. And I'll scare them so much they will drop this ridiculous meme. That will show them that we engineers are NOT more likely to be terrorists!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Non-social justice explanation:
1) Religions tend to come with cultural blinders which make people ignore the logical implications of their religion (and religions can have some really strange logical implications to anyone who actually tries to figure them out.)
2) Engineers can be smart enough that they stop ignoring the logical implications of their religion... but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to ignore the religion itself..
3) So if the logical consequence of the religion is that you should become a suicide bomber, a normal person would just ignore it (his cultural blinders prevent from deducing that his religion requires suicide bombing), but an engineer (who can make deductions just fine) would actually do it.
Here's another explanation that I saw personally in many examples : People who become terrorists are those who weren't educated enough in their religion by their family or by reliable scholars (This is due to the "modern" secular Arab states who separated religious and educational institutions because historically, one of the particularities of Islamic societies was mixing religious and non-religious learning inside Mosques/Madrasas). Young engineers are from those who have a very time-consuming education and so they can't dedicate much of their free time to personal religious learning and universities don't teach religion anymore. Being ignorant and curious, they are then subjected (or subject themselves) to non-reliable scholars (mainly from Saudi Arabia, where authorities are financing the spread of Salafism through medias and everywhere they can). It then becomes difficult to argue with them and change their minds about some of their more extreme views since these views are the first views they ever had about religion and it's THE correct interpretation in their minds. Some of those students then take the more violent path of Salafism (aka Jihadi Salafism aka "Terrorism").
There is obviously a correlation between being dateless and becoming a terrorist.
It has to be more than that: computer scientists and physicists are not known for their terrorism or their dating (well unless it's radiocarbon dating).
Personally I think it has more to do with the fact that engineers are trained to follow rules and so it attracts people who are happy to follow rules without necessarily questioning them or completely understanding the reasoning behind them.
On the other hand scientists will question every rule you give them and even when they believe that the rules might be right they will still spend their time poking them to see if they really do apply everywhere....which is why we can be so annoying at times especially to those trying to use toxic, religious dogma to persuade others to commit irrational and immoral acts.
Hurrah for profiling. Let's see some real numbers first.
I really wish a liberal arts major would format your post into paragraphs.
Should we suspect all men of being terrorists or wonder why they outnumber female international terrorists 99 to 1?
Statistical navel gazing.
Oppenheimer and pals
The Final Solution (chemistry *and* Hollerith cards)
Fritz Haber's WWI gas warfare (and laying the groundwork for Zyklon B)
Hell, even the guys that built a mountain-sized ramp to finally breach Masada were Roman military engineers.
Back in the 60s and 70s, the "terrorist" groups were disaffected law students and history majors.. (Bader-Meinhof, etc.) who were motivated by various and sundry political goals: nihilism (tear "the man" down, what comes better has to be better), etc. Very philosophically oriented.
Today, though, notable terrorist groups (including US white supremacy groups) attract people who feel that they did what society asked, and society didn't live up to the promise. I went to college for 4 years got an engineering degree, now I expect a good paying job. I served in the military and risked my life, and now that I'm back, why can't I get a job. I've lived on this land which was farmed by my great-grandfather, and now I can't make a living. It's a very different mindset..
The authors of the cited book also wrote a fairly famous 50 page paper about 10 years ago.
Specifically for engineers: engineers, by training, expect there to be a set of rules and principles, and the outcome to follow according to the rules. When it doesn't they get frustrated. Fundamentalist religion provides an alternate set of rules, and a "reason" for why it didn't work before: you followed the wrong set of rules. Do not follow the rules of man, but, rather, follow the rules of God, and you will certainly be rewarded.
I guess you're young. Terrorism by right-wing groups is a fairly new thing in historical terms. Terrorism in the modern sense was more or less invented by the labor movement of 1890-1920, from which it spread to other left-leaning groups. The right-wing didn't pick it up until really the 1980s, with a couple of incidents in the 1960s.
Greenpeace co-founder / early member Paul Watson has said publicly "There's nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win."
See the Haymarket Affair (bombing crowd-control police in the middle a crowd) by unionists, the Los Angeles Times bombing (unionists), The Preparedness Day Bombing (anti-war), 1920 bombing of Wall Street, 22 anti-corporatist bombings in NYC in 1940, anti-war activists like Sam Melville and Jane Alpert bombing banks, courts, and other buildings through the 1960s, Sterling Hall bombing (anti-war activists, 1970), Weather Underground bombing of the White House and other buildings (communists/ Leninist, black power), 1983 bombing of the Senate building by anti-war activists, etc.
Since then it's been picked up more by green terrorists such as Earth Liberation Front / Animal Liberation Front, while the UN has officially added Greenpeace to its list of known terrorist organizations.
As the FBI counter-terrorism chief writes:
--
During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism, as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), has emerged as a serious terrorist threat.
--
Earth Liberation Front terrorists such as Tre Arrow, Marie Mason, and Jeff Luers favored arson, using the techniques described on the ELF/ALF web site. On the other hand, SaveThePlanetProtest.org author James J. Lee used the traditional bomb to take hostages at Discovery Networks headquarters. Daniel G. McGowan (Earth Liberation Front) used arson.
Spot on analysis I think.
It is also an explanation for the terrorist acts of Daesh. They are extremely annoyed that many displaced Muslims would rather relocate to Europe rather than their appalling regime.
http://jihadology.net/2015/11/...
They think that by commiting terrorist acts in Europe they can make people believe that all Muslims have terrorist sympathies by leveraging our corrupt media who at the very least believe that selling more page views is their only job.
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/rea...
It is straightforward for Westerners to comprehend the behaviour of Daesh and to believe that defeating their military occupation of Iraq and Syria makes sense. Extending that believe to attacking our fellow Muslim citizens and refugees is unpatriotic because it is exactly what Daesh wants to reinforce the scenario you paint.
Engineers are perhaps more susceptible to the calls of propaganda for all the reasons that you cite. As a profession we should also recognise that our education might have been light on philosophy and psychology which would armour us against propaganda and manipulation.
As a society we recognise that there is an argument that some arguably disenfranchised groups should benefit from positive discrimination - Women, people of colour, disabled people. It is arguably an even stronger imperative to be inclusive towards people of a different culture who are being attacked by an extremist terroist movement who want us to turn against them so that they are easy recruitment fodder. I suggest that it would be good systems engineering to remember this when the usual supects press the emotion button and call for repression and exclusion.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
You didn't respond directly to any of my points, although you used an ad-hominem and threw out a lot of tangentially related information. So, I'll just repeat what I said earlier.
How many people has Greenpeace killed? Non-violently interfering with business operations is something more socially disruptive than activism, but still a far cry from murdering people en masse. Lumping them into the same category as ISIS, et al isn't sensible.
You didn't explain how many people had been killed by Greenpeace. Nor did you rebut my point that the actions by these left-leaning groups are a fundamentally different kind of activity than what we see from ISIS and Al Qaeda. One is destroying property for a political cause, the other is crucifying, beheading, and burning people alive for the sake of spectacle.
To most people an "engineer" is someone who can fix a bicycle. So I doubt the statistic. But it sells books I guess.
Well when the captain asks you to do something and "Ya don't have the power" and you're "Giving it all she's got".. it can get frustrating when it happens again and again and again and again..
and then one day you realize you wear a red shirt..
your options are:
1- drink heavily and often or
2- Use the main deflector dish to fly into a building..
yea.. the conclusions of this study are BS. Terrorists would never survive in Scotland.. the butthurt among them would begat too many ass kickings for them to have any time to worry about religion or philosophy or anything other than engineering studies or alcohol.
Well, I'm an engineer and I work with engineers all day. I find the majority to be fairly liberal and not very religious.
Did you obtain a similar sample of people with other degrees to compare against?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
over generalize... not really, you make some valid points to think about.
In my experience, the lack of critical thinking is very common among engineers. Very often, while at the same time good at their jobs, they are able to espouse the most preposterous notions - New Age mumbo-jumbo, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and, yes, religion. I don't find the conclusions of the article all that surprising.
You forgot perpetual motion machines, making bad jerky you tube videos of supposed UFOs etc and junk science research trying to point to some imaginary correlation between those in the engineering profession and terrorists.
FTFY
Okay, fine.
I'm just a programmer, not a Software Engineer!
(geez)
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
That hits the nail right on the head lol
ISIS holds a huge swath of territory, which it in fact governs (brutally). ISS, as stated in its name, is a de facto state. There are terrorists, such as those in Paris, who -support- ISIS. The primary activity of ISIS is to control and a defend a territory in which they make an administer the law - they are fundamentally a (very bad) government, not a terrorist group. They are friendly with terrorist groups, of course.
So no, when people like Greenpeace co-founders, the UN, and myself point out that terrorists are associated with and supported by these green and leftists organizations, it does NOT mean they are a government or state like ISIS or North Korea. It means they, like al Qaeda, engage in violent acts against civilian targets intended to cause fear and alarm for political purposes (such as bombing various civilian buildings). That terrorist tactic of bombing civilian buildings was INVENTED by the American left. That's terrorism. Terrorism doesn't mean "occupying territory ", occupying is what militaries and states do, not terrorists.
I gave you a good representative list if you want to start adding up the death and disfigurement caused by all the eco-terrorist bombings. Based on the ones I've listed, I'd guesstimate a thousand or so, meaning they're in the top ten most lethal terrorist movements.
I was thinking similarly, but not quite the same. How many terrorist are engineers seems to be a backward question. Would a farmer be a terrorist, or have any value to a movement? Professional welder? Carpenter? So there are certain people that fit and certain people that don't from the perspective of the terrorist organization.
Further still, who is more likely to be dissatisfied with the current state of their Government/World? The farmer? The employed mason? Or the unemployed specialty engineer? Who is more likely to notice corruption, the higher educated engineer or the lower educated restaurant cook?
In other words, I kind of agree with the premise that more engineers would be terrorists. I don't think that it's really surprising just by glancing at the world. I don't intend this as insulting, but the more intelligent people I know tend to be the most dissatisfied with our Government and the direction it's going. They tend to not hope on the band wagons, follow trendy music and fads, etc... The founders of the US were similarly well educated people who were fed up with their current government and figured out a way to revolt.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Scientists create new paradigms. Engineers hack existing paradigms.
Actually, if you replace "engineer" with , you end up with the same conclusion.
One good thing about engineers is they can reason on topics of violence...unless drugs are involved.
Maybe people who are planning to commit acts of terror are very likely to study engineering, so that they'll have the sort of knowledge that will be useful in destroying things that engineers design and build?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Those gul-darn liberals with their rassimfrassim Gunpowder Plot of 1605 by Catholics, the 1773 Boston Tea-Party vandalism by the Sons of Liberty, and the formation of the KKK in 1865.
Please stop trying to shove terrorism into the right-left clusterfuck.
It's like your entire world-view is skewed by your own personal political fantasyland. Do you know what we call people whose views are out of touch with reality? "Extremists".
So if a engineer builds a drone that kills a terrorist, should we rename that to a "Standardization Dispute"?
Your post has too many words.
This is Gamergate fallout. Hipsters see all nerds as suspect conservatives now. We're basically like American muslims or something.
The marginal increase in the probability of an someone being a terrorist given that you know he's an engineer may be startling in relative terms, but in absolute terms it's insignificant.
Estimates of total active membership in terror groups worldwide is under 200,000, but let's assume there's even million active terrorists just for the sake of having round numbers and not having to quibble over where to put the decimal point. There are seven billion people in the world, so the rate of terrorist participation in the general population is 14 thousandths of a percent; let's call that p(T), and call the probability that someone is a terrorist given that they're an engineer p(T|E). Let's look at the absolute marginal difference being an engineer makes, i.e.:P(T|E) - P(T)
i. p(T) = 0.0001428
i. p(T|E) = 9 * P(T) = 0.001286
iii. P(T|E) - P(T) = 0.001143
So being an engineer increases your chance of being a terrorist by at most about 1/10 of 1% under wildly pessimistic assumptions. In fact the marginal difference is really more like 1/50 of 1%. Now it's interesting that the rates of terrorism are so much larger among engineers than other people, but it has little practical significance and being an engineer myself that's what I'm most concerned with. If you were designing a surveillance program and were picking out groups that need keeping tabs on, 1/10 % is a grasping-at-straws number
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If Engineers are far more likely to be Jihadists, then make the H1B companies assume a financial liability for any and all damages etc. A levy on the industry, and considering the costs of just one act the levy should be huge.
Moo?
Am I doing it right? Cows.
Holy shit, you don't even know the differences between personal anecdote and data dude.
Terrorism is indiscriminate violence against the public to cause wideparead fear for political purposes.
Assassination of a bad ruler is not indiscriminate, not directed against the public, and not intended to cause fear. So not remotely terrorism.
Symbolically dumping tea into the harbor - again not even violent.
The democrats formation of the KKK - yes, THAT was a terrorist group. So you were saying that terrorism is NOT the legacy of the Democrats and their unionist supporters starting around the turn of the century, as I had said?
Oh, please.
Just because we could easily do it, and be undetected, doesn't mean you aren't just jealous cause we pull down the big bucks.
Live in Fear little monkeys. Hide under your bushes.
That's what the actual terrorists want.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When it comes to the applied end of exerting political power you need people who can actually harness the physical forces of nature in a scalable and systematic way, consequently a large percentage of the support staff for the navy, air-force and army, not to mention their suppliers are "engineers".
If you are a group that can't utilise large masses of troops you need to have more people who's knowledge allows them to amplify the effect of anything that they do.
If you look at the size of and make-up of modern militaries you will find that they are becoming more technical in their focus and less about boots on the ground anyway. Smaller groups then would be ahead of this curve as they have less cultural inertia to overcome when it comes to operational methodologies, they are more innovative and agile in how they express their violent inhumanity.
You try to work with product people a couple of years without wanting to blow them up...
I presume you are a blinkered right wing sycophant. Right wing terrorism goes way back, Irgun and the stern gang for instance.
I wanted every step in my chain of reasoning on its own line
actually I thought that was an excellent post. The line "A terrorist recruiter is trained to spot these disaffected students" reminded me of what I heard how cultists i.e. Moonies recruit members. They avoid confident, well connected, and sociable people.
mfwright@batnet.com
Moonies are the best recruiters of engineers. Their recruiting technique is for a bunch of good looking Korean girls to sit down next to a nerdy-looking guy eating alone. The only reason their technique is still not all that successful is most engineers hate having their lunch interrupted more than they like hot Korean girls pay attention to them on an obvious pretext.
what a weird, almost useless point of comparison - SOCIAL scientists? why not physicists or chemists? smells of women's and gender studies morons trying to paint the hard sciences in a bad light. now all they need to do is accuse mathematicians with pedophilia and big sister can continue with its march on american campuses.
Many statements from the summary directly contradict my personal experience. The summary states:
"Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious."
Well, I'm an engineer and I work with engineers all day. I find the majority to be fairly liberal and not very religious. I always thought that it was a result of people being intelligent and familiar with the scientific method that made them less likely to swallow propaganda and dogma. Also, it is a largely foreign population and that is a factor since I meet the people who were educated enough to get jobs in different country from their own. I find that it is we Americans who are conservative and religious.
Liberal minded people are more likely to pursue the sciences or arts, conservatives to pursue engineering or business. It's certainly not deterministic but there's a bias. I know a lot of people who came to software development from engineering and some from computing science, in general I find the CS people to be more liberal and less religious.
As for the foreign origins of your co-workers note that you're working with a sub-population who explicitly emigrated to the US. You'd expect them to be a lot more liberal and irreligious regardless of profession.
Also, the summary states:
"Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers."
I speculate that Gamgetta and Hertog are fearful and jealous of engineers. I work in chip design and there are very few clearcut answers. Furthermore, your opinion on whether or not something is a good idea has no bearing on whether or not it actually is. I find that to be a major difference between engineering and the the more "normal" fields; you have to build things that work in the real world, your ability to persuade someone will not improve the quality of whatever it is you are building. If my chips don't work, I can't argue in front of a judge that they really do work. Nor can I publish a book speculating how good they really are. No, I fscked up and I have to deal with it.
I speculate that you're just being defensive :)
I think it's more the case that different failure modes exist for different disciplines.
With engineering it seems to be an idea that you can nicely solve things and create a robust solution, this works well with chip design, but when applied to societies there's a tendency to want to enforce a conformity that helps everyone work. I think this appeals to terrorists who want to bring their solution. There's also a tendency to reject slightly fuzzier sciences, for instance skeptics of AGW and even evolution tend to come from the engineering ranks. Some comes from pre-existing religious beliefs but some is just their experience in not trusting systems that rely a lot on random or statistical components.
For Liberals the failure tends to be towards excessive non-conformity. If someone is exhibiting self-destructive behaviour they tend to be overly accommodating or even idolize it. If someone becomes critical of non-conformity they'll attempt to punish that person so people feel free to be non-conformists (ie SJWs). They also tend to be sceptical of Western medicine due to the power structure and conformity it implies. I consider myself a Liberal and I'll readily admit that Jenny McCarthy has killed more people through her ignorance than most terrorists could dream of.
I stole this Sig
I'm sorry, but just being religious makes no difference, if you wanted to kill people, yea you would join ISIS. I always say terrorist as liberals, they want what you have, and will kill you for it.... which is what liberals are.
This is just a "study" that tells people what they want to promote. Just like climate change, they want to promote it, then do studies to prove it, if a study dose not prove it, they will edit it so the result is what they want it to be.
On the job? People that doesn't have enough free time to date probably don't play a lot of games either.
A lot of engineers would get fired if they were disloyal enough to even think about dates.
They do say that parody of conservatism is often indistinguishable from the real thing.
There are some wickedly funny conservatives; just listen to any Mark Steyn monologue. But did you see Trump attempt to poke fun at himself on Saturday Night Live? It was a complete fail, because the joke Trump was almost indistinguishable from the real Trump.
so does it help to be a Professional Engineer?
Do terrorists need certification?
When You Can't Get A Date...Blow Something Up
Well, if they stuck to inflatable dolls, we'd all be better off.
This is why the west hates STEM.
The topic being discussed is the origins of modern terrorism, invented by American labor in 1890s - 1920s. I'm not sure why you're bringing up World War II.
Terrorism is indiscriminate violence against civilians for the purpose of causing fear in the general population. Why are you bringing up groups targeted the local Prime Minister of an occupying nation during war time, and a related group that (after repeated warnings) destroyed the confidential government records that the invading force had seized?
These events were not indiscriminate violence against the general public, they were targeted at the chief officer of an invading army and one of their offices, and neither was designed to cause fear in the general public. In fact, warnings were sent telling the general public to evacuate the area before the records office was destroyed.
Further, this is a half-century after American leftists had established their pattern of bombing civilian targets. Plus Irgun and Stern Gang were during war time, against a military enemy.
Not even close to meeting half the definition of terrorism, and LONG after the American left invented terrorism and established it as one of their key strategies.
What a bunch of malarkey. An obvious crap science statistic bovine anal discharge in a field of tall, tall moron.
This kind of junk science is why we can't have nice things and play with them. For every great idea that needs funding there are hundreds of this kind of vacuous living aborted fetus that steals grant money from those scientist who REALLY need it.
That is all. Damn it!
The last two paragraphs of the article pretty much states that this is just paranoid correlation.
There is obviously a correlation between being dateless and becoming a terrorist.
And if they use explosives, then you could say they got a blowjob.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Also a correlation between heavy-handed policy like the CFAA, and the SWAT-team approach towards copyright and "cyber-security". This is similar to saying that depression correlates negatively with happiness, when anyone under stress - not in any way limited to "terrorists" - responds not surprisingly with frustration. Gangs arise from poverty for similar reasons.
Since engineers and scientists naturally enjoy solving problems and sharing their knowledge, they fall into this trap easily.
Great theory but unfortunately there is a little problem that the data show that engineers are far more susceptible to this trap than scientists so your explanation completely fails to explain the data. Hence there must be a difference which you hugely long comment completely ignores.
Again I would argue that this is due to the big picture thinking of scientists. Give an engineer a problem of how to perform a "DoS attack on the enemy during a religious holiday" and that's what they will want to solve. Give the same problem to a scientist and they are more likely to ask what the goals of such an attack are and whether there are alternative and better i.e. more peaceful ways to achieve them. So the scientist may end up sympathizing but will look for their own solutions and not necessarily follow the narrow track laid out for them. Of course an engineer might do this too but their training does not emphasize this approach as strongly.
The watershed moment is when that nerd finishes his engineering or computer science degree and get a 50k-100k job. Engineering is one of the few jobs that consistently have high entry salaries. Other areas that may have huge salaries, generally have really low paying or ultra high steess entry conditions, such as law, medicine or business administration.
As a result you have a slightly weird guy with mediocre fashion sense, not very high self esteem and a high paying job. They suddenly get catapulted to the top of the dating pool without actually realizing it. The reason why you see many nerds being married, is because any woman with a sense knows to put a ring on his finger before he realizes that he actually is at the top of the dating pool.
Back to the terrorist thing; conservative and religious; that seems odd. This does not hold up with my anecdotal experience. Most engineers are quite rational and that generally preclude believing in imaginary people in the sky. Also the conservative moniker does not really hold up; most doe not hold any profound political views; but they sure can get riled up about naming conventions or editor choice. What they generally are, is antisocial to some degree. Hating people in general and certain anointing groups in particular can lead a certain inclination to violence.
I don't know what types of engineers you have in mind, but I was thinking civil, agricultural, mechanical engineers when I read the story. Those would tend to be conservative and NOT especially antisocial. I took a lot of classes with these people. And I believe at least one of 9/11 attackers was a civil engineer.
The watershed moment is when that nerd finishes his engineering or computer science degree and get a 50k-100k job. Engineering is one of the few jobs that consistently have high entry salaries. Other areas that may have huge salaries, generally have really low paying or ultra high steess entry conditions, such as law, medicine or business administration.
As a result you have a slightly weird guy with mediocre fashion sense, not very high self esteem and a high paying job. They suddenly get catapulted to the top of the dating pool without actually realizing it. The reason why you see many nerds being married, is because any woman with a sense knows to put a ring on his finger before he realizes that he actually is at the top of the dating pool.
Yeah, I too live in a fantasy 1950s world.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
They're only married because of their salary. Getting married to a gold digger isn't something you should be proud of.
A terrorist is a freedom fighter who is not on your side;
http://wh.gov/iyhMK
Casteism
How does that work when they're all supposed to be neckbeards and geeks?
Mind you, engineers are 10x more likely to be deniers of AGW too, and pretty much for the same reasons. Conservative, religious, worried that if we "go green", they won't get the big money job they know they deserve and will be getting any day now (tm),
OK, I'm either going to have to: (1) read this post and TFA carefully to figure out why engineers tend to both be conservative and to become left-wing terrorists, or why it's nonsense (2) say it's nonsense and move on with my day.
Option (2) is definitely faster, and option (1) may get me to the same conclusion.
Option (2) it is. (But maybe I'll check back later in case someone tries option (1) and then posts something short and insightful that I could have found out on my own.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
A friend of mine who works for a non-profit that trains employees in the middle east shared an interesting factoid with me.
A college education in the many middle eastern universities regardless of discipline consists of 50% religious classes. A
consequence is that an "Engineer" from an Islamic University is not qualified to be an engineer until they take a lot of
company paid training. I think my degree was 75% math, science, cs, and engineering courses. Are these guys really
engineers?
Who's this Bill Mahar fellow? Distant Palestinian cousin of Bill Maher?