Why Do So Many Terrorists Have Engineering Degrees 736
Socguy noted that Slate is apparently a little desperate for some traffic as they are writing about"Why so many of the terrorists have engineering degrees, and they come to the conclusion that engineers and engineering students are much more likely to hold strong conservative and religious views than a general cross section of the public. Further, engineers tend to hold a particular mind-set that disdains ambiguity and compromise. Terrorist organizations have long recognized that engineering departments are fertile ground for recruitment and have concentrated their efforts there. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for 'inquisitive' students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers."
Obvious answer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could it be that engineering degrees are a dime-a-dozen in oil-rich countries where middle-eastern terrorists usually originate? How many people in these countries don't have engineering degrees?
Thomas Jefferson (Score:3, Insightful)
Inventor and engineer, also a revolutionary. Lucky for him (and us), a successful one.
Wonder what names the British called him and his compatriots? Blow the dust off your history book and find out.
Boy did I ever post this anonymously.
Lets see (Score:5, Insightful)
From my engineering degree
Chemical explosives - check
Electronic devices - check
Radio communications - check
Problem solving techniques - check
Analyzing systems for failure modes/exploitation - check
Nah .. can't see why an engineering degree would be useful to a terrorist at all
What was really fun was that the US Green card application specifically asks you if have had training in a lot of the above techniques. and I had no idea what sort of red flags sent up by me truthfully answering the questions
Not so fast ... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I might somewhat agree with the notion that engineers disdain ambiguity, I completely disagree with the statement that engineers hate compromise. Im my mind, engineering is the art of compromise, and that is what separates us from "scientists". We crave efficiency, which in turn *requires* compromises. We constantly make tradeoffs between costs, quality and schedule, with the goal of meeting requirements most optimally. Ask any engineer who has designed a product and they will tell you that they could have made it (choose 1): better, sooner, cheaper. Instead, compromises were made along the way to meet some criteria in all 3 of those measures.
Necessary skills (Score:5, Insightful)
Or (Score:4, Insightful)
Or engineers are good at planning, organizing, and building stuff. While in college they're probably most impressionable to joining causes. Every organization on the planet wants eager, smart people working for them.
Maybe the ones with drama degrees not so good? (Score:2, Insightful)
Could be just the engineering degree ones that are successful in blowing things up. Perhaps the ones who took degrees in fine art are busy in mountain retreats sculpting models of the end of world in matchsticks and bat guano, the ones who took degrees in drama are creating avant-garde absurdist plays and presenting these to goats in small rural farming communities, and the ones who took degrees in philosophy are arguing whether their enemies actually exist in complex latin tracts that nobody understands and the local printers won't publish for them because radishes are a poor currency.
Most engineers don't know how to talk to girls (Score:1, Insightful)
Most male engineers don't have fantastic communiation skills, and are thus less likely to be occupied with fun things like chatting up girls etc. Thus, when they get tired of studies it is easier to make they stray. Pretty obvious really. A marketing student will be busy going to parties etc. all year rather than studying so is a) less likely to get bored with hard work and difficult studies and b) have something fun to do when not studying.
It follows that it is much harder to recruit a marketing person.
Engineering vs science? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah. It's just that those terrorists without engineering degrees won't even make the news due to ineptitude. See this [wikipedia.org] for further studies on the topic.
Ease of travel? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps another reason engineers predominate is because it is easier to get a visa, or otherwise travel, to Western countries if one is an engineer.
Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
Must have been bottom of the class engineers who barely passed at all. All of the terrorist attacks carried out (all 5-10 of them over two decades) against the U.S. were poorly planned and poorly executed. Even the September 11 attacks could have been 10 fold more deadly had they been timed and executed better.
And don't get me started on the shoe and underwear bombers. Evidently, the "engineers" who plotted those attacks didn't think that maybe they should build a foolproof electronic detonator for their bomb rather than rely on the skillz of someone who is willing to blow himself up.
Why am I harping on this? It pisses me off that as a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots. The terrorists have WON. They've caused grievous damaged to the United States thanks to the response of the U.S. government and it's sheeple.
Had we done NOTHING at all in response to the attacks (except for maybe giving the FBI a billion dollar budget increase or something cheap like that) it would have cost us far less treasure and lifetimes of labor. Those freaking towers were only insured for a couple of billion, tops.
If we're going to spend a trillion dollars fighting a few evil individuals, they better be a Lex Luther...not Cletus.
Re:Lets see (Score:5, Insightful)
Chemical explosives - check
Electronic devices - check
Radio communications - check
Problem solving techniques - check
Analyzing systems for failure modes/exploitation - check
Same here, but:
...Ability to blindly swallow what religious authorities tell me? Uh oh. We're a "no-go" on that one, Houston.
It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion. Agnosticism seems to me to be the viewpoint most consistent with an Engineering outlook (until a religion provides some kind of tangible proof, which goes against what most of them say about faith.)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were to claim to have a device that could solve any problem in linear time, or that produced more energy than it consumed, or that nullified gravity, any engineer worth the title would be highly skeptical and would demand to see hard data before believing such a claim.
It doesn't make sense to me that most people with this sort of engineering mindset could blindly accept extraordinary claims (made by whichever religion.) I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong -- just that they are very difficult to believe without strong evidence.
Re:Not so fast ... (Score:1, Insightful)
We constantly make tradeoffs between costs, quality and schedule, with the goal of meeting requirements most optimally. Ask any engineer who has designed a product and they will tell you that they could have made it (choose 1): better, sooner, cheaper. Instead, compromises were made along the way to meet some criteria in all 3 of those measures.
I think that what you're describing is a good engineer. The not quite so good ones tend to be rigidly opposed to compromise. I think it's those that are the likely targets of these recruiters.
Re:Lets see (Score:1, Insightful)
...Ability to blindly swallow what religious authorities tell me? Uh oh. We're a "no-go" on that one, Houston
Err, well if you were already religious you might be more willing to put up with all the crap required to get an engineering degree. (Since you know, you're really doing it for god.)
We Live in an Illogical World (Score:3, Insightful)
Engineers crave logic. Logical people are all driven somewhat crazy by the world we live in. That will manifest itself in all sorts of strange ways. This time, it manifested itself in exploding underwear (not a very smart engineer, judging by the design). As a kind of engineer myself, I look at how limited the damage would have been, if he had blown up the plane, versus the cost of going all ape-shit over it and I naturally come to the conclusion that people need to chill the fuck out. Even if they made airport security perfect, I can think of at least a dozen non-airplane ways to kill just as many people, without the terrorist(s) even having to sacrifice his life. The way to reduce terrorism is to stop creating new ones by stop bombing their families and stop manipulating their governments.
Re:Not so fast ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I always heard "You can have it fast, good, or cheap, pick two"
Also there is compromise "Yes we can use X material instead of Y, its not as good, but, its within tolerances" and "The project is to build a bridge, the drawing you gave me is for a boat ramp, this isn't going to meet our requirments"
-Steve
Re:Lets see (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lets see (Score:1, Insightful)
I suspect religion is not as important to these people as you may think.
I think there is another typical engineer trait that is more important.
Doing it because you can. To pull it off. Being absorbed in a project and seeing through.
I mean, ask someone who has just built a perfect scale replica of a trebuchet why he did it. He'll feed you some bullshit about history and what not, but I think ultimately he doesn't really know why he did it.
Re:Engineering vs science? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe there's a mindset where it just doesn't really matter where the rules come from, and religious rules are just as good as physical or legal rules?
As an engineer, I can certainly say it does matter to us where the rules come from. To effectively tackle a problem it is necessary that we know where the constrains comes from.
Re:Eh (Score:2, Insightful)
Whole sale Vs Retail terrorism (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lets see (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ease of travel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps another reason engineers predominate is because it is easier to get a visa, or otherwise travel, to Western countries if one is an engineer.
I suspect it's sortakindof like that, but in reverse. Engineering is probably regarded as a respectable profession, so the kids get sent off with a visa to schools abroad.
Fairly common attitude across Eastern Europe, so I'd expect the Arab world would be little different. What's respectable? Studying to become a doctor, lawyer or businessmen or somebody who builds things. Maths and sciences are considered the equivalent of medicine, but performing on stage or in film, for example, is the equivalent of a being a prostitute.
You're talking about bankers, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Goddam bankers, they're almost as bad as terrorists.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the terrorist recruiters are specifically seeking out Engineering students.
Based on my experience working in a University (and attending a couple) it seems to me that students who get sent abroad from Islamic countries study Engineering because it's a particularly useful degree back home. Many of these countries are underdeveloped and bringing back good engineering skills is a way to work towards correcting that. You just don't see as many students from the developing world here in the US getting degrees in art, English, or the social sciences.
Now, I if I were an Islamic terrorist recruiter, I'd most interested in finding people who had lived in the target country and could move around comfortably there. But they'd also need to be people who were grounded in Islam and hopefully susceptible to a more fundamentalist point of view. Young people tend to be more "flexible" in their theology than older people. So, who do I look for? Students from my own country who have been or are currently studying abroad and most of them are going to be Engineers. Plus these students have the added benefit of having already gone through the visa process and will probably much easier to get back into the target country.
I really don't think the recruiters and leaders are looking specifically for highly trained engineers so they can be expended on the front-line. If Engineers are actually valued for their technical skills, planning capability, etc, I'd use them for designing IEDs and planning operations. Considering the failures and apparent incompetence so far, maybe they are using the "bottom of the barrel" for the actual operations, since they have the qualifications to reach the target country but are not so capable in an Engineering capacity.
Re:Lets see (Score:5, Insightful)
and yet my experience in university tells me that the religious social conservatives are concentrated in the engineering college...
why?
because engineering is a world of black and white thinking, and it doesn't challenge their religious dogma like the other departments with their more rounded gen ed requirements do. Let alone the departments in Arts and Sciences like Geology, Biology, Paleontology, etc that the findings of openly challenge their dogma.
Re:Engineers are more effective at destroying thin (Score:4, Insightful)
The article didn't say scientists, it said engineers. Why did you throw scientists in? Apples and oranges.
My observation is that few of them hold hard and fast convictions about anything they cannot measure or mathematically derive.
My experience differs greatly. And one problem is a lot of engineers think you can measure or mathematically derive things you really can't. And I think there is a reason a lot of the more prominent creationists are engineers.
Except possibly when it comes to debates about beer of the best editor to use.
Or the federal reserve or the gold standard or welfare or income tax or flat taxes or open source or...
Re:Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
100% incorrect. Look at the "broken window fallacy". All that trillion dollars (I am talking about Iraq, Afganistan, Homeland Security, and other waste...more than a trillion, actually) is pissed down the drain. See, the same money could have been used to create new wealth instead of being expended. Iraq and Afganistan expend men, ammunition, vehicles, and so forth. Those same people could have been working in the U.S. and have created a trillion dollars worth of wealth, such as a trillion worth of consumer goods or nuclear reactors or wind and solar panels and so forth. And we'd still HAVE that wealth.
Instead, to illustrate : we are bringing shrink wrapped helicopters over to Iraq and Afganistan that are fresh from the factory. Those helicopters will never be brought home. We are building special armored vehicles that consume too much gas and are too slow to ever be used again. And so forth. Every round of ammunition fired, you can't get back. Every soldier who loses his life or limb you can't get back. And so on.
Re:Thomas Jefferson (Score:0, Insightful)
So, what you're saying is that history is viewed through the eyes of the winners (of war)?
Gee, Captain Obvious, thanks for that little pearl of wisdom.
I just love it when pseudo-intellectuals point out an obvious and trivial fact as though it's some form of original thought; something nobody could ever have possibly considered before.
Re:Lets see (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Eh (Score:4, Insightful)
s a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots
Taken out of context, that could apply to the bankers on Wall Street.
Quick responses to common /. responses (Score:5, Insightful)
1) It has nothing to do with technical abilities. Terrorists don't attempt to recruit people by technical ability, they just take whoever they can get.
2) It has nothing to do with ease of immigration as a skilled migrant. The paper cites studies on American religious terrorists (the nominally Christian far-right) and concludes that the unusual tendency of engineers towards right-wing radicalism seems universal.
3) The paper argues that the 'styles of thinking' that predispose people towards engineering, also predispose them towards right-wing radicalism. Engineers are more reliably right-wing than even economists! (who are the second-most reliably right-wing academic group). Likewise, a liberal arts education is correlated with left-wing radicalism (e.g., communist bombing campaigns [wikipedia.org] in postwar Western Europe). But there have been relatively few left-wing bombing terrorist acts after the end of the Soviet Union, while right-wing radicalism is on the rise. Hence mad engineers rather than mad Marx-spewing liberal arts graduates.
jounalism degrees don't enable you to make bombs (Score:3, Insightful)
The obvious point: Terrorists need people with money and people with the skills to make bombs.
Not much room for English or Journalism majors at the Al Quedia training camp.
The communication skills from those disciplines are useful, but the Islamic terrorists already have the SUV/Saudi Arabian funded clerics taking care of brain washing and recruitment.
The Best and The Brightest (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, can you think of any recruiter in any field and any country who isn't out to snag the best and the brightest?
Wouldn't it be recruiting malpractice so not do so?
Re:Ease of travel? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's just western paranoia. Most of the the deadliest terrorist attacks happen in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. You don't need engineering degrees to get into these countries. Get over it, 9/11 was one attack. Go count the terrorist attacks in India or Pakistan.
Re:Thomas Jefferson != murder (Score:2, Insightful)
Slavery?
Bum bum bi bum..
You heroes are no better than the heroes of your enemy.
And that is exactly the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The article even hits on it.
Who is more likely to commit an act of terrorism:
1) A doctor who works 60 hours a week and golfs with his buddies
2) An unemployed engineer who is socially inept and having difficulties earning a living wage
The article points out that in Saudi Arabia, where the rapidly growing economy has resulted in very low unemployment for engineers, there is no over abundance of engineering degrees in terrorist organizations. But in other countries where grow has been slow or stymied and engineering education has been heavily promoted, unemployment, specifically in the engineering sectors, has been especially high.
The best way to fight against extremist recruiting is to maintain low unemployment and to keep people socially engaged. So long as people are comfortable with their existence and have hope for the future, any extremist group will have a hard time coming up with fresh recruits.
That is why, IMO, the most critical aspect of world wide security is not nukes or armies, not even police or surveillance laws. The most important factor to peace, stability, and security is the Middle Class.
-Rick
First rule of engineering: (Score:3, Insightful)
Never blow yourself up!
Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineers are ALWAYS right. ALWAYS. Even when (especially when?) something is clearly opinion based.
Ask a non-eng what their favorite color is, you get a simple answer.
Ask an eng the same, you get an answer PLUS reasons why it is superior to other colors.
As I said, I am an engineer. It was only after I noticed behavior like this in other engs that I noticed it in myself as well.
I don't like having that trait (flaw?) and have had to make a conscious effort to be less judgmental. (Yet remaining critical.)
So, yeah, as RobotRunAmok pointed out - engs tend to think/say "Right is right - AND I'M RIGHT" even when it isn't a correct/incorrect discussion, sometimes when they are clearly incorrect (they defend what they've said, clearly wrong.)
Also, and again this is something that I've caught myself doing, is that these personality types can and do play the Devil's Advocate rather well - up to a point. There is a difference between seeing the other side of a discussion and being contrarian for the sake of "being right."
The above may not be worded all that well, but I need my morning coffee. Besides, it hardly matters if you disagree with me, since I KNOW that I am correct.
Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why science reporting is so crap - no, saying that the LHC will create a black hole the will destroy the earth is not an 'equally valid viewpoint' that the BBC should report in the interest of balance.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think the terrorist recruiters are specifically seeking out Engineering students.
No, they are specifically seeking out Muslims. Or in the case of Northern Ireland, Catholics or Protestants (depending on which side of the divide they are on) and in India, Hindus or Sikhs.
Oddly enough, everyone is recruiting based on religion, almost as if strongly held beliefs for which you have no evidence is a prerequisite for killing lots of people in the name of them.
Which, given what an abysmal record political violence has at achieving its purported ends, is no surprise: only someone who is willing to believe strongly in the absence or or even opposed to the evidence would think that political violence was a useful or interesting way to further any particular cause.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:3, Insightful)
The terrorist actions we have seen have all been high profile - intended to make the most of the headlines in newspapers and TV news.
If the TV and newspapers hadn't reported a crap about the WTC attack then the intended result had failed. For the terrorists even a failed result is a success since the step up in security will cause a lot more harm and annoyance to people than what a single terrorist could do.
Not that I'm advocating censorship here, but I'm just presenting the reasoning from the terrorist leader point of view. They want their 15 minutes of fame. It's a PR trick to find out where to go for most visibility.
But for best long-term effect from an attack I could think of several other actions that would be a lot more effective - and easier to pull off.
Re:Maybe the ones with drama degrees not so good? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps the students who put some effort into studying pointless subjects like history, philosophy, politics, sociology, psychology, and whatever other underwater-basket-weaving people who aren't engineers take, might have learned enough to say "Hey, you know what? This has all happened before and it didn't work then. This is the wrong way to do it. Have you considered an alternative to blowing things up?"
The students who only studied engineering never learned what the right questions were, let alone how to ask them.
As an aside, US Colleges have been cutting liberal arts education budgets far more than those of sciences and engineering. One might say that this is an example of a country where asking questions is considered much less important than knowing how to blow stuff up.
Re:Insecure personality (Score:2, Insightful)
In the West, you can substitute "Islam" with "Ayn Rand" and see the same fanatical attraction to an all-encompassing, all-answering philosophy at work, especially in the mindsets of those (engineers or not) who crave a perfect order which just happens to put them at the top of it.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh, news to me.
Signed,
FatAlb3rt - BSME, MSCompE
Re:Lets see (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly what I was thinking. What good is 72 women going "Oww, oww. Wait...slow down. Are you sure your doing it right. It hurts." or "Eww, you want me to put that in my mouth" or "balls are funny looking" or "OMG, you can make it MOVE".
Re:Not so fast ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Engineering vs science? (Score:1, Insightful)
You can't "carefully follow [...] laws of physics". The "laws" of physics are just words that describe how the world around us behaves. They are the condensate of many, many observations. Noone has a choice in "following" laws of physics. IOW, what you said is meaningless. Science doesn't really allow for much common use of "understanding" -- what we usually usurp for understanding is the question of "why". Science doesn't tell us why, it tells is how. The why aspect is taken up by philosophers and theologians. And xkcd :)
Re:Not so fast ... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I might somewhat agree with the notion that engineers disdain ambiguity, I completely disagree with the statement that engineers hate compromise
But does this same hold true when you're idealistic and still in college learning your trade? What I learned in school in no way prepared me for the compromises required by real life... just because you must be able to compromise doesn't mean that you like doing it -- most folks don't (engineers and otherwise).
Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score:5, Insightful)
As a CS grad from a liberal arts school, I got to deal with the liberal arts types that parent is referring to quite a bit.
There were generally 3 modes of thinking for the less bright liberal arts students: ..." These folks are easy to find in the English or psychology departments, and by avoiding ever drawing any conclusions avoid having their conclusions being demonstrated incorrect. Often, they were extremely good students in high school, because their high school classes emphasized memorize-regurgitate over critical thinking.
1. "I'm right, because I'm morally right, and anyone who disagrees with me is mysogynistic / racist / classist / homophobic." This would be found most commonly in the [insert historically disadvantaged group here] Studies departments. They also tend to join up with identity-based groups on campus.
2. "On the other hand
3. "These 'facts' make me feel like I'm right" This is where truthiness trumps facts. You find these people in the political science and history departments. They also spend a lot of their time in on-campus activism, and are often humorously misinformed.
All of them have real trouble in fields like math and science because in those fields there are correct and incorrect answers, and incorrect answers cannot be met by "that's just, like, your opinion, man". Of course, xkcd [xkcd.com] shows it far better than I ever could.
Worth mentioning is that the smarter liberal arts types aren't like this at all. For instance, smart English majors can point out the structures of literature that make it all tick, or exactly how a sentence can be better phrased. Smart history majors can provide all the major sources for a historical event, explain what biases each source had and how that affected their description of the event, piece together what probably actually happened, and are probably some of the best BS detectors out there.
Re:Lets see (Score:3, Insightful)
because engineering is a world of black and white thinking, and it doesn't challenge their religious dogma
Knowing a lot of religious social conservatives (being a religious social liberal myself), there's a simpler reason. All the people I know want to get married, have kids, do all the normal socially conservative things, and engineering is the fastest path to all that 'cause it comes with great pay for only 4/5 years of work. The article says as much when it talks about how the countries these people are from were pushing engineering as the stable well paying route to success.
Most other professional degrees take longer for less pay, though you'll also probably find a very high percentage of religious social conservatives in jobs like accounting and the therapies (occupational therapy, speech therapy, physical therapy, social work to a lesser extent). (The therapies are where most of the orthodox Jewish girls I know end up.)
Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score:1, Insightful)
Well said but to just stress one subtlety a bit further...
I think engineer/analytical/critical thinker types are so opinionated exactly because they feel they have arrived at their opinions after rigorous thought and reason. They have felt the need to answer a question for themselves by deconstructing it fully and building up a seemingly air-tight response to this question based on provable, always-true type principles and axioms.
So when you argue with an "engineer" (like me) he/she can easily become emphatic and seem stubborn because your disagreement may feel to them like a casual dismissal of something he/she thought carefully about, or your disagreement only serves to highlight to him/her (the engineer) some error that you must have made, violating one of the various principles or supporting facts they have used to answer the question in their own mind.
And yes I suppose that type of principled logical thinking can certainly correlate with a commitment to very black and white, and possibly very misguided, principles.
Bottom line though, there are terrorists and bad people with all kinds of personalities and backgrounds. If there is any higher occurrence of engineering training among the ranks of "terrorists" I would say it is simply because people with that kind of training are more likely to have the skills and critical thinking abilities required to make a detailed technical plan, usually involving technical know-how, and to execute it. Engineering training, like any tool or skill, will always have equal potential for good or bad use.
Blindly swallow authority? That's engineer to a T (Score:3, Insightful)
...Ability to blindly swallow what religious authorities tell me? Uh oh. We're a "no-go" on that one, Houston.
Engineers not religious? They are more religious than anyone, it's just that the religion is engineering and they take a ton of convincing that engineers they consider to be "above" them are wrong even when the evidence is clear. Absolute obedience to authority comes naturally to an engineer because they spend so much time early on gathering facts from authority figures that over time they lose the ability to question what they are being told, they just accept it naturally.
I know because I'm one too.
Re: Lets see - RTFA? No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently few engineers are actually using their engineering skills in an engineering capacity, which would argue for something else going on. As the article notes, engineers are apparently more religious than their brethren in other majors.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny!
Lots of people (especially engineering types and other nerds) go through an Ayn Rand stage in early adulthood. Most of them get over it, though.
Easily the most ridiculous author in post war literature. "Selfishness is the only virtue" - the philosophy of a 6 year old.
Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I am an engineer.
It's not a flaw. It's a difference in how most engineers think compared to the general public. For most people, their favorite color is a personal, internal choice. The color may make them feel warm inside, or it was the color their mother liked to wear, or a color that they strongly associate with many positive events in their life, etc. It's their favorite for reasons which matter only to themselves.
Engineers tend to make choices based on external, practical criteria. What uses does the color have? How does it compare to other colors for different tasks? etc. It's their favorite for reasons which apply to everyone, not just themselves.
So even though you're asking the same question, you're essentially asking two different questions to engineers and non-engineers. Most people parse your question as, "Which color do you feel the most personal affinity to?" Engineers parse it as, "Which color is the most useful?" (And no, asking the engineer the "personal affinity" question won't help - their brains are wired so that a great deal of personal affinity is based on an item's usefulness.)
Since the engineer is basing their choice on external factors, there is one best RIGHT answer, depending on your criteria. (In their defense, their answers do tend to be right. Other people tend to assume the engineer picked a favorite color for similar personal reasons as them, and so interpret the engineer's reply as conceited. They are being judgmental too.)
As for the original topic, personally I think it's this tendency to emphasize external criteria and de-emphasize personal factors which make them more likely to become terrorists. Just look at the Keirsey temperament [wikipedia.org] which engineers fall under - it reads like a recruiting checklist. You'll get someone has technical expertise, has good planning skills, does not weigh heavily the human impact of their actions, and will arrive at a decision and be resolute in its correctness.
Re:"Playing Nice" is Not Considered a Virtue (Score:2, Insightful)
Right on. There is a good comment on the article's page mentioning that engineers have build the Space Shuttle, but they also blew it up - this due to an inherent ineptitude to deal with the social responsibility of stepping up to the plate and shutting down the launch based on the facts that engineers love so much. There are plenty of brilliant engineers right here in the US who are social misfits, don't go out more than twice a year, don't have kids and they vehemently express their hate for one having to change diapers; living in a box is safe and close to the mental attitude of religious extremists.
One of the issues is what we require from engineers to get a degree, including graduate schools in aerospace and the like; or should I say what we don't require in terms of one's ability to express themselves. A lot of engineers I work with don't have an idea how to write or say what they want in simple ways so they can be heard - and they get very angry when inadvertently reminded of this. Emails that could comprise of two phrases turn into two pages where one has to dig for the purpose of the respective email for hours. Many engineers are angry a lot and they think someone should pay attention to their obscure, but important facts. Guess what: humans read angry first and don't get to the facts most times. So a pissed off engineer, just like the ones who didn't have enough social skills to convince the launch pad managers to postpone the launch until it got warmer, is just that: a pissed off engineer who doesn't make much difference regardless how brilliant she is. Sad; very sad.
As an engineer going through a decent business school, I had a crazy hard time with the writing-for-a-purpose courses. But once I learned to chill and revise multiple times, taking the volume of my message or documents to the key facts and cut the anger down, I noticed that a majority of people respond much better to a kind context that included critical data. It is still surprising sometimes how much more attention this gets: "Please do this today; it may prove a critical asset to our contribution to this major project" rather than "If you don't do this today, your ass is fired." The former format gets the job done while the latter gets a knee-jerk reaction of "yeah, right, you don't have anyone to replace me with, so I'm going to play my video games instead."
It's pitiful the level of writing and social skills required to graduate with an engineering degree, even at our best schools. This leaves engineers in their safety little box from where they can justify blowing up things in the name of whatever. Sad, very sad.
Re:And that is exactly the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what you're saying is that neoconservative corporatism is the real terrorist threat?
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:3, Insightful)
By "get over it", of course, you mean, "compromise their principles out of convenience, instant gratification, or short-term benefit."
No, I'm pretty sure he meant that they grow up and realize that the world is more complicated. They come to realize that people don't divide nicely into white-hat noble genius captains of industry and black-hat greedy communist do-nothings. They may come to understand that people who disagree with them simply have different priorities and probably aren't mustache-twirling cartoonish villians. They come to discover that while there certainly is a correlation, in the real world, brilliance and hard work don't always result in success, and that poverty isn't always an indicator of sloth or a lack of ambition.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real answer to this is that if you actually want something done, get an engineer. Or a mathematician. Or a physicist. If you want to write tracts, pamphlets, get media attention, or anything like that, then you go prospect the philosophers and the liberal arts folks.
But if you want to build something, you find an engineer. Especially as the math/physics guys are likely to spend an infinite amount of time trying to figure out how to do it right rather than just getting it done. ;-) Why is this newsworthy, again?
Re:It's a cultural thing (Score:3, Insightful)
You are on to something but then totally miss it: titles are big in Egyptian Arabic, not the profession itself.
Speaking as someone born and raised in Egypt, Arabic being my mother tongue, the society there is very large on titles. If you are writing a letter to an official in the USA, you address it to "Dear Sir/Madam" or to "Mr. John Doe/Ms. Jane Doe". In Egypt, you are asked to address the official with all the titles that he/she got. For example "Al Sayed Al Ostaz Al Doctor Al Kimya'ee John Doe" (Mr ? Dr Chemist John Doe, meaning he has a Ph.D and a Chemical Engineer).
Unlike a few other places in the Arab world, you never call someone with their first name, unless they are a close friend or relative of the same age as you. Anyone else has to get a title, even menial labor. For relatives there is "uncle" for older male. "Father and mother" for parents. "Abeh" for male older cousins (From Turkish Agabey), "Ablah" for older female cousins ...etc. So, this is where Ostaz comes in (derives from Farsi Ustad, meaning "Master", but used for anyone you don't know the qualifications for). Then comes Bash Muhandes (Bash is Turkish meaning "Head", so this means Head of Engineers), which applies to the man who fixes your car who has no degree at all, the untrained plumbers ...etc. Then comes Doctor, which applies for physicians, pharmacists, dentists and vets too. And so on and on and on ... In some cases calling someone by the wrong title annoys them, for example calling someone a mere Ostaz, while he is actually a doctor!
In other parts of the Arab world (Levant, Gulf), the kunya [baheyeldin.com] is used (hence the names, "Abu-something"), so the titles are used less.
It has gotten annoying that you find email addresses and Facebook profiles with the title in the name "Dr Ashraf Something" or drsomething@gmail.com.
Two professions are at the apex of social respect: they are doctors and engineers (architects, civil engineers, ...etc.) because the universities ask for the highest marks to admit students. Doctors being more respected I would say.
So, being an engineer is not something everyone just craves. There are other social status professions that are perhaps more appealing. But the main point is that the overuse of titles is rampant, and means little in practice.
Re:Obvious answer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Easily the most ridiculous author in post war literature. "Selfishness is the only virtue" - the philosophy of a 6 year old.
I think that's a little unfair, even though I've had some unflattering things to say about Rand's writing elsewhere in this thread. Her work is just very much "of its time." If Rand hadn't said it, someone else would have -- it makes a certain amount of sense as a reaction to communism, and it does successfully point out some of the key ways that communism falls down in practice.
It does go too far in the opposite direction -- that is, it essentially assumes that if communism is bad, then the exact opposite of communism must be the best way to do everything -- but at the time, I think the world at large was more undecided about its viability, and writing about these ideas helped keep the conversation going.
Re:Thomas Jefferson != murder (Score:3, Insightful)
Doing bad things is fine, just so long as you don't do them the worst.
Re:Reincarnation: am I me, or some dead guy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, I'm aware of the theories. I'm just not buying it. It's a cop out, a trite explanation for the unfair, uncaring and utterly random events of life. It's a means to excuse unfairly gained power and wealth, and a method of severing compassion with the less fortunate. Each 'deserves' their lot in life, and some imaginary cosmic balance is maintained. But all it does is serve to mask the most basic mistake that ego makes: the idea that it is a separate thing to begin with. Forget karma and reincarnation and even free will, it's all a sop to an ego that sees itself as separated from the universe. Balance happens between two separate things. The concept of balance is alien to unity. Without the need for a settling of accounts, there is no need for rebirth. With no need for rebirth, suffering ends.
Surprise! Competent people get things done! (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that they were "engineers" is not surprising. Look throughout history at the people who may have gotten engineering degrees, if such things had existed then:
* Thomas Jefferson (who was something like a surveyor's assistant, and a botanist of sorts)
* Michelangelo (who was a tinkerer and inventor, making new things)
* Edison (of the lightbulb)
* Ford (of the automobile, was known as a self-taught watch repairman as a youth, and once even held the title 'engineer')
Problem is, in today's society, an "engineer" is a really wide definition. If you're getting a useful 4-year technical degree, it's an engineering degree or a technology degree. Getting a "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering" degree would be the most likely means to gainful employment, regardless of where you live.
And in reality, many men are well suited for the role of "engineer". They're tinkerers, problem solvers, and fixers. If a man is generally competent, he's more likely to make a decent engineer - and by association, is more likely to go into that field. ...
As for the implications of the article, I am keenly aware of the disturbing social implications resulting from widespread dispersal of this "study". I can easily see security theater like the TSA moving to profile against, say, "religious technical people", making sure to adjust their procedure to not "unjustly discriminate against Islamic engineers with one-way tickets and no luggage.
The only thing this study really tells me is that men who are of a regimented mindset and/or an engineering background are more likely to become successful terrorists when coming from an Islamic culture. To read anything more into that is foolish, but we should at least heed that correlation.