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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."
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.
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
...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!
Well, we have the push to get more females into science and engineering. Let's just amend that to also include the push to deter Muslims from going into engineering, and that should help alleviate the terrorist problem a bit....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?
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.
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?
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.
Hey look buddy, I'm an Engineer. That means I solve problems.
Not problems like 'what is beauty?' Because that would fall
within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve
practical problems. For instance, how am I gonna stop some
big mean motherhubbard from tearin' me a structurally
superfluous new behind? The answer? Use a gun. And if that
don' work, use MORE gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-
mounted little ol' number designed by me... Built by me...
And you best hope...not pointed at YOU.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the engineers just tend to be the most "successful" at terrorism.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
Incidentally, the original article is here:
http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/...
As an engineer for over 30 years, it has been my experience that we see what we want to see. In my office, some engineers are religious and some are not. Some are conservative, some are not. The two groups overlap, but are not a 1:1 mapping. I would have to say that the majority are not particularly religious, but where I live, there isn't a particularly large religious community.
I would prefer to say that most engineers are determined and intelligent, and tend to succeed. If any of them were to become fundamentalist in a particular religion, I would have no doubt that they would become successful in that activity
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
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.)
Too many engineers here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
I really wish a liberal arts major would format your post into paragraphs.