Engineers Nine Times More Likely Than Expected To Become Terrorists (washingtonpost.com) 497
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."
Yeah, I've worked with a few of those (Score:3)
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.
When You Can't Get A Date...Blow Something Up (Score:5, Insightful)
There is obviously a correlation between being dateless and becoming a terrorist.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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Yes, I'm pretty sure that the correlation is the other way than the headline. That would-be terrorists are more likely to become engineers, in part to get the necessary skills to make the "tools of the trade".
Fair warning (Score:2)
Don't fuck with engineers - we *will* get even.
Re:Fair warning (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Or (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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?
Yes and no (Score:2)
Faulty Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Training versus recruiting (Score:2)
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.
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I would like to say for the record... (Score:5, Funny)
...that I am totally not a terrorist, despite my nickname.
Damned infidels...
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I guess I fail as an engineer --
- save my anger for Microsoft
- liberal as all get-out
- try to avoid blowing things up in the lab
- not particularly religious
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Yeah, me too. I even wish there were some other line of work I could get into, because 1) there's no women here and 2) most of my coworkers really are religious conservatives. How religion correlates with engineering, I have no idea. What attracted me to engineering was 1) working alone much of the time (open-plan work environments have completely ruined this), and 2) building cool things, making things work which implies a scientific mindset that things happen for a reason based in physics, not mysticism
yet more engineer bashing (Score:2, Interesting)
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..
Re:yet more engineer bashing (Score:5, Insightful)
Because deep down, terrorism isn't really about religion. Religion is just an excuse terrorists use.
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(I think Bernie is too conservative on things like gun control).
I'm a liberal engineer too, and I disagree about this. A strongly pro-gun-control position is a good way for a Democratic candidate to lose the general election, like what happened with Gore in 2000. Bernie's more moderate position is much more realistic in America at this time. Unless you live in the 'hood, your statistical likelihood of being killed by gun violence is ridiculously low, even if it is higher than western Europe or Australia
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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.
It makes sense to me. Many engineers I've met seem to be both conservative and religious. Why? I have no idea. My guess is they're not very scientifically-minded and want a good income and stable career (hallmarks of conservatism), so they avoided going into sci
Hypocrisy (Score:2)
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.
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No, the authors are not engineers because engineers aren't trained to perform this kind of study. One author is a sociology professor the other is a comparative politics professor.
Before you go crazy, everyone knows that few people are terrorists anyway, so few engineers are terrorists. They aren't trying to drive the engineers away with pitchforks.
Extremism is Over-Simplification (Score:2)
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 cons
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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.
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> Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind
Go read the Summa Theologica and get back to me on that. Nothing but logic and reason.
Re:Extremism is Over-Simplification (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind and gets rejected on sheer logical grounds.
Not a problem for people who can hold two opposing ideas in their mind without going nuts. As a Christian, I believe in evolution.
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Except that religion tends to make no goddamn sense to a rational mind and gets rejected on sheer logical grounds.
Not a problem for people who can hold two opposing ideas in their mind without going nuts. As a Christian, I believe in evolution.
You've just posted a famous fallacy. To wit: you consider yourself not to have gone nuts, but to many others (both atheists and various extremists in other religions) you are in fact nuts. You claim to believe in X and not-X simultaneously, and that that is not crazy. hmmm....
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The appeal of religion (Score:2)
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 sc
Engineers are wanted by all organizations... (Score:5, Funny)
Paris terrorists didn't seem "religious"... (Score:3, Interesting)
>> (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)
Then she got Got... (Score:2)
... 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)
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Re:Paris terrorists didn't seem "religious"... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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."
I noticed at a class reunion that that some of the extremes had flipped, like a fairly freaky urban party girl now living on a small farm far out on the countryside while some of the absolutely most boring and conservative people had flipped out. Those who just leaned one way or the other were mostly the same. I know I'm being an armchair quarterback here but it's probably the same with some terrorists, they've lived the party life but lacked some deeper meaning and purpose to their life and then had a true
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Like buy mandatory health insurance?
Contradictory? (Score:2)
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?"
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Engineers are not scientists, Scientific methods are handy in finding out what is wrong but the goal of most engineers is to get the thing working and go to the pub. If I could sacrifice a goat and get this FPGA working I would.
Belief in God or disbelief is hardly relevant to engineering.
oof (Score:3, Funny)
I can hear Trump already: Build a wall and keep those engineers out! Close all the engineering schools!
Lets make something clear. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 are not scientists (Score:2)
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
Re:Engineers are not scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
Education (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why don't you read the original article? It basically makes that point.
All engineering programs I have eve
If I read this right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, it's not what the original scientific article says. It's the WP article that misrepresented an article about Islamic extremism as being about violent extremism in general.
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christians don't go nuts because their book says "love your enemy"
Unless you take a look at the first half. In which case you get fun sections of Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Exodus. Or you can drink the cool aid and believe that the latter half annuls the first half and god is wishywashy when it comes to what's moral. But hey, even Matthew gets in on the action: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
No one can ever say this sort of shit because it's not true. Seriously, have you ever read the bible?
Re:If I read this right (Score:4, Insightful)
This suggests a fix (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Selection bias (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the engineers just tend to be the most "successful" at terrorism.
What???? (Score:2)
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Re:What???? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Liberal Arts Guys Think Engineers are All Killbots (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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."
You stereotype Liberal Arts people and Muslims (Score:2)
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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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:
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I really wish a liberal arts major would format your post into paragraphs.
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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.
Re:Liberal Arts Guys Think Engineers are All Killb (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
Brutal abuse of statistics (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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There are numerous other problems with the analysis. For example, the "nine-fold" claim comes from dividing the percentage of engineering graduates in the sample by the percentage of engineers in the general population of those countries. But since university degrees are greatly overrepresented among their sample, that greatly overstates the ratio. The first statistic that should strike people is not that engineers are overrepresented among terrorists, but that education is overrepresented among terrorists.
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Describes mediocre and bad engineers well (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The worst is probably the IT security field, where things are often viewed as secure or not,
That question is easy, the answer is "not." All that remains is "how hard to access?"
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Indeed. And "who wants to attack this and what capabilities do they have?".
Terrorism is a fallback solution. (Score:2)
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
depends on how you identify engineer (Score:2)
Yeah (Score:2)
Blame Dallas? (Score:2)
" 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.
Muslim engineers are MANY times more likely (Score:2)
Correlation != causation (Score:3)
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.
Surveillance!! (Score:2)
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.
Location, Location, Location, specialty, specialty (Score:2)
False premise and screwy logic .. (Score:3)
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 [youtube.com]
Wow, it seems like someone doesn't like engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The people that always wrote long winded... (Score:2)
ban engineers (Score:2)
Engineering used by terrorists
Lets declare a war on Engineering and ban all engineers
better explanation (Score:2)
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, th
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Incidentally, the original article is here:
http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/... [ox.ac.uk]
What about programmers? (Score:2)
Are programmers more likely to be terrorists?
In Asia, more male college degrees are engineers (Score:3)
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.
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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....
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LOL..geez, can no one sense or take a joke?
Re:Time to change my job description.... (Score:5, Funny)
Too many engineers here.
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Re: Yes (Score:2)
Yes, but trolling the readership is always good for selling ad impressions. I see lots of engineers here biting hard on the hook - maybe we have a less-clever caste.
or -effective- against the infidel imperialists (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Mod parent up!
Re:or -effective- against the infidel imperialists (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I wouldn't be so quick to just say you're kidding.
I was Muslim (currently secular), and I am engineer. I guess I'm the target demographic.
I think people have covered the abuse of these statistics in other posts. Things like technical skill, Western grads might be more involved in engineering...
So I'll just add my anecdotal bit that might actually add some validity. I have a hard time with cognitive dissonance or whatever you wish to call it. But something is either true and I act accordingly. Or something is not true, and I drop it. Or I just don't know enough about it.
In my days as Muslim, I really did believe in Islamic law. I really did think suicide bombing and terrorism was a way to get the end result. It wasn't pretty, but if that's the goal, that's what we have to do. Now I didn't do anything, but the thoughts were in my head.
We sometimes look down at people with cognitive dissonance, but in a way, it's a good feature for society as whole. Other people just don't seem to have the same trouble with it as I do. To them Islam might just be a way of life. They will say they believe and then ignore most of the text and most of the rules.
I think the engineering mind might be very focused on goals and if they can be convinced of the goal, the rest kind of follows.
Re:or -effective- against the infidel imperialists (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell is this modded insightful?
A conservative, by definition, values the lessons of history
You wouldn't know it by today's conservatives. They are calling for Muslim registration (sounds eerily of WWII concentration camps for Japanese-Americans), abandoning war refugees (the populace didn't want to accept Jewish refugees from Germany), continued American presence in the Middle East (which has arguably created much of this situation). What lessons are they heeding, exactly?
The conservative engineer determines that singing a song has been ineffective, while blowing the bastards up more reliably stops their influence.
Really? Terrorism has been effective in what ways, exactly? It produces tangible results in terms of dead people and international headlines, but what is really accomplished?
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.
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.
Not sure if this is sarcasm and I just missed it. They do say that parody of conservatism is often indistinguishable from the real thing.
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> 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"?
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Oh and the one engineer president has among the fewest military deaths of all presidents.
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"Churchill's famous quote applies 100%: 'Engineers should be on tap, not on top'."
Churchill didn't live to see century in which a government of lawyers is being eclipsed by a government of engineers. That's why Shanghai has the first commercial maglev, not New York.
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WWI and WWII had nothing to do with Muslims, Arabs or Islam. Most people involved in those wars were so-called Christians.
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Left wing terrorists come from the liberal arts side.
Yes, BUT: left-wing terrorists, the ones who burn labs and rip up agricultural test plots, are not religious.
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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.