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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."
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
Engineers of middle-eastern descend are more likely become jihadist.
I don't recall reading or hearing about non middle-eastern engineers joining jihad.
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.
Conservatism isn't about what you do, it's about what you want to force everyone else to do.
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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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.
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.
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.
Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind and gets rejected on sheer logical grounds. An overly religious "engineer" is like a doctor who smokes or a fat personal training, not to be trusted as there is a serious flaw in their thinking.
Scientists love surprises. Engineers hate surprises.
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.
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.
Like buy mandatory health insurance?
Because deep down, terrorism isn't really about religion. Religion is just an excuse terrorists use.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Go read the Summa Theologica and get back to me on that. Nothing but logic and reason.
Read most of it in college. It's got holes in the logic and reasoning which should be instantly obvious to anyone with an adequate 20th century education. Doubly so for anyone trained as an Engineer.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.