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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."
The claims in this summary reek of arriving at an opinion, and then fitting in the evidence as it suits your case.
You are aware of what a summary is, right?
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.
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)
Except that particular story has turned out to be false - the images "proving" this were actually of a totally different moroccan woman. Her pictures were sold to media by a former friend, which turned on her and did this for revenge. That woman now lives in fear, for obvious reasons. Some of the media who published the pictures took them offline, but didn't fix their reports.