Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers? 769
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to their September 2008 article, IEEE Spectrum revisits the question of why a disproportionate number of terrorists have engineering degrees. According to their own summary of the interview with political scientist Steffen Hertog, 'nearly half of [individuals involved in political violence] with degrees have been engineers,' a rather ambiguous statement especially for a publication targeted at engineers. The interview makes some interesting points (lack of job opportunities for engineers despite a relatively high social status) and some suspect ones (e.g. framing Islamic culture into the western left vs. right politics). Above all, IEEE Spectrum tries really hard to associate engineers with terrorism for some reason."
Wellington Grey has done this (Score:4, Interesting)
http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/02/18/enginneers-vs-sociologists/ [wellingtongrey.net]
Engineers vs. Politicians (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe is because Engineers have a more technical & logical mind and once they set their sights on a goal are more likely to finish it ?
I don't think any Politicians/Lawyers would be able to do the same. They will just stage a theatrical act out of which they can escape untouched or just switch sides.
More about economics than engineering. (Score:5, Interesting)
The revolutionary mindset has something to do with it. Your average goat herder or basket weaver isn't all that interested in toppling whatever ideology he resents. That kind of stuff is generally a product of an angry, middle class; those who aren't as concerned with where their next meal comes from. Those coming from an emergent middle-class often follow fields that are more necessary. You need doctors and engineers before you need psychologists and art majors.
Re:Aptitude (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of a joke a friend told me.
A professor brings a new and amazing device to school to show to his students:
The Science students ask: How does it work?
The Engineering students ask: How is it made?
The Business students ask: How can we market it?
And the Arts students ask: Do you want fries with that?
The best part is, it's usually the Arts students who laugh the hardest at it. Some of them laugh so hard they start crying. I think.
And Creationists (Score:5, Interesting)
As Bruce Salem notes those who support creationism and claim scientific credentials tend to be engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
Well if I were going to guess (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be that Middle Eastern culture seems to value engineering as a "real" degree and many others as not. So the bight students are forced in to engineering degrees, like it or not. My freshmen year I met a guy like that. Hated engineering but his government was sponsoring him to come to the US and learn it so he had no choice. In China you actually see this go further in that more or less everyone in the government is an "engineer" now I put that in quotes because they have lots of degrees that we wouldn't call engineering that they do. Basically the word is what matters. If you are an "engineer" you are good to go. However if you get the same kind of degree but are not an engineer, well then too bad for you.
Our engineering college sees more foreign grad students from a few places than any other place. It isn't like it is the only "hard science" college. Computer science, chemistry, optics, pharmacy, then are in different colleges. However only we award "engineering" degrees. Get a masters in Chemistry and it is just that, it is not Chemical Engineering. That title of "engineer" seems to be the only thing acceptable to many.
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
Religious contradictions? (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps engineers, trained to think logically, are less able to ignore the more violent verses of their chosen religious texts, or more prone to come to logical but extreme conclusions.
For example, if an engineer believes that there is an afterlife, he may see mortal life as of very little value. It's only a temporary waiting place en route to eternity - all that really matters is making sure people are believers in his religion when they make their exit. Thus there is no violence in dieing for the cause - it isn't really dieing. Nor is there a problem with killing the unbelievers: They were going to hell anyway, this just sends them there a little earlier and aids in expanding the True Faith.
A non-engineer, on the other hand, has the ability to believe in an afterlife and yet completly ignore that belief. This is why devout believers will still spend vast amounts of money on medical treatments to stay alive just a little longer - because they may say they believe heaven awaits, but they have compartmentalised their religion away from their everday actions.
Note this works just as well for either Christian or Islamic terrorists. Right now the Islamic types lead in the kill-rate derivitative, but they arn't really so different from medival Christianity - a religion just as willing to have it's members kill and die for the cause, and for the same reasons.
If my guess is right, then engineers will be less able to tolerate the contradictions of moderate religion - and so will either abandon religion entirely and become atheists (or at least agnostics), or will turn to the more self-consistant fundamentalist sects.
Re:Aptitude (Score:2, Interesting)
This is not some coincidence of psychology, it is a fact of necessity.
And in other news, most of the people working on the Manhatten Project were nuclear physicsts, chemists, and engineers.
What is it about these people that makes them want to blow up the world?
That said, looking back now it is clear to anyone with an ounce of empiricism that political violence is such an inefficient and ineffective means of achieving political aims that no one who actually cares about achieving political aims will ever use violence as their primary weapon.
In Sri Lanka, in Spain, in Ireland, in Darfur, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and on and on and on morons have decided that political violence is the best way to do... well, something. It's not clear, at least to me, what the "something" is: people who choose violence generally have vague and abstract goals, because any more specific and concrete goal would make it obvious even to the average person how stupid it is to use violence to pretend to achieve it.
In fact, one might even suspect that people who choose violence do so because they like violence, not because they honestly believe it makes realizing their purported goals any more likely.
Re:Aptitude (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. Engineering in particular seems to draw some of those who are a little too wacky to pursue real science. In a field where you apply the ideas of others, you can get away with being crazier than in a field where your own ideas are subjected to peer-review. It's a lot more common to find a fundamentalist engineer than it is to find a fundamentalist research scientist.
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
An ounce of empiricism, eh?
So.... not an ounce of sense, or an ounce of insight, or even an ounce of understanding....
I would worried about anyone that has employed an empirical method to the question of how effective political violence can be.
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
One year at my university, the students in the engineering college had a "I Wish I Was a Business Major" week. They had organized trips to bars, a golf outing, and other related activities. They were replications of events business students had actually done that semester.
The organizers had to issue a mea culpa.
Re:And Creationists (Score:1, Interesting)
As Bruce Salem notes those who support creationism and claim scientific credentials tend to be engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
Because if you admit believing it in any other PHd filed that depends on peer approval for funding your career ends. This is the true danger of science, the scientist.
Science says everything is fantasy until it can be explained to others in a way that they can test in the future without further interference from the originator. At this point its elevated to theory. Only when anyone rational who wants to throw rocks has found the theory sound is it elevated to fact.
Evolution Scientist says that every new day changes his theory (aka fantasy as it lacks credible tests) by proving the older version false and that this somehow indicates that it is fact. Evolution scientist doesn't publish numbers because they keep changing. Anyone here know the rate of genetic mutation that is in vogue today? I am talking years per base mutation. Why don't you know such a simple tenant of a "FACTUAL" Theory. Because the "FACTS" change every time there is a discovery. I would accept a graph with the historical values if you argue there is some time based component but you can't supply that either.
Evolution may be true but it isn't science until it can make claims regarding the future and predict these future events at the same accuracy as any other science that is considered fact. The parts of evolution that actually do predict future events are generally not argued about because that small subset is actually fact but that small subset is insufficient proof for the top level theory as a whole. That things change from A to B is proven and we observe Z therefore we think A->B->C......Y->Z is proven should indicate a massive flaw in logic to any real scientist. Science needs a different name when its pointed backwards. I propose backwards science. This would allow normal people to understand that big bang, black matter, evolution where scientists are actively changing the constants and finding dramatically unexpected outcomes are not the same flavor of science as the science that makes predictions about future events and tests them.
Re:Aptitude (Score:4, Interesting)
Engineering can be an exact science. It can also be an inexact science. for example, you are designing a relatively simple structure, such as a desk. How much load will you design to desk to support? Ideally somebody would tell you that, but there are many cases where that does not happen. You probably have a per item budget, but should you use it all? Possibly not. If you can design a product that comes in under bellow the budgeted cost, but still looks good, and can function in the desired use-cases that is a good thing.
What components do you use? The permissible material types are almost always predetermined by the company, but even those have often have a three-way trade-off between looks, strength, and cost. Ideally the engineer should be outlining the basic possibilities, and have the company choose which trade-off to make, but since in complex projects there are hundreds of such decisions, the engineers usually need to make at least some of these calls.
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting fact, Fritz Haber [wikipedia.org] won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing synthesized ammonium nitrate. He also weaponized chlorine gas and invented zyklon B (ironic, as he was Jewish himself). He's probably responsible for more death in the world than just about anyone, while simultaneously being responsible for a massive boon to agriculture (which, when mixed with diesel fuel, brought us the OKC bomb).
Re:Engineers are Smart (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Smart==unhappy (Score:1, Interesting)
I have noticed a disproportionate number of intellectuals are depressed. Probably because they are smart enough to know no matter what you do you are screwed. This in turn leads to acting out against the dumb/happy people. The dumb/happy people are generally unphased because they didn't even realized you just dissed them making the intellectual even more furious. Which in turn leads them to target the dumbest group of all...that's right...government officials which gets twisted to be a political statement instead of the "kill all dumb people" it was truly intended as.
This was supposed to be modded as funny, right?
Also, I've met a lot of dumb engineers. A lot.
Blowing yourself up to make a statement is a dumb thing to do. The Buddhists who self-immolate in protest make more of an impact and get their way with greater ease than the types who drive trucks full of explosives into buildings full of women and children.
The first act takes enormous courage and "faith." The second is like a spoiled child shrieking that he or she didn't get his or her way so now he or she is going to ruin everything for the rest of us. The types who do that were defective to begin with, we're better off without them. The types who self-immolate...well...each one of those is a real tragedy.
"engineering" in Asia is a male general degree (Score:3, Interesting)
A similar misconception arises when with the saying "China [or India] graduates many more engineers than the USA". When you normalize for the fact that engineering Asia covers things not considered engineering in the USA, then the difference is not that great.
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
I know that you want to be very intellectually strict but you come across as conceptually handicapped.
Firstly Murder and Theft are not opposed concepts like Up and Down or Left and Right so those examples are invalid.
The opposite of Murder would be something like Non-Consensual Resurrection.
Black and White if strictly defined like #000 and #FFF are also bad examples because they don't have degrees of flexibility.
Murder and Theft have degrees of seriousness and degrees of punishments.
A better example would be like cake and cookies from a diabetic's point of view.
Eating a cake is worse than eating a cookie but too many cookies are as bad as a cake.
Of course strictly defined Theft will never be Murder but too large a theft can be as bad as a murder and punished accordingly.
quantitative ability != critical thinking (Score:1, Interesting)
Engineers are highly educated in a tightly-focused field, and that field does not include the kinds of "why" critical thinking skills that are developed by a liberal arts or scientific education. Just as English majors, musicians, and philosophers aren't qualified to build a subway system, engineers aren't trained to consider or respect questions like "who are we," "why are we here," or "how should we get along with one another."
Smart people who are educated in one field of thought tend to think they're experts in all areas of thought (hell, plenty of people who aren't smart or educated think they know everything about every subject). So when engineers have an idea, or are fed an idea, like "blowing up this building will help bring about justice in the world" they don't have the critical training to unpack whether the idea is actually true. Lacking a rigorous way of coming to correct judgments about nontechnical ideas, they go with their guts, perhaps backing their impulses up with ill-informed or ill-reasoned justifications that nevertheless sound fine to them. Thus they're able to come to the same dumb conclusions as the totally uninformed, but to follow through in ways that most aren't equipped to pull off.
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of guys *working* in theoretical physics today are "particle accelerator operators". They get listed on many published papers, but it's clearly an engineering job. Freeman's job as we saw it was "get in the danger suit and move the materials around while the scientists make the measurements". Also, he sure knew his way around a crowbar.
Re:Aptitude (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly, technical degrees still do not provide very valuable training in the world of evaluation and judgement. "How to do this" is rarely more important that the ability to formulate an argument on why you should do it. I'd argue humanities, teaching you how to evaluate shades of gray and formulate arguments on subjects that don't have objective right/wrong answers, provide the ability to understand context -- and as a result is a better training ground for future managers and leaders.
That's why, even in engineering disciplines, the terminal degree is called a Doctor of Philosophy. At the PhD level, most effort is indeed spent on "evaluating shades of gray and formulating arguments on subjects," except that those "subjects" you are defending are your own technical contributions.
Re:"engineering" in Asia is a male general degree (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Aptitude (Score:3, Interesting)
i'd just point out that doing technical studies doesn't necessarily make you stupid. thank you very much, boss !
Being a manager seems to be what you declare as success, but might not be everyone's goal. I don't feel greater because I'm the boss of 50 people - but you do.
In fact, almost every acknowledged great mind has been deeply involved into the technical side of things. I'd even argue that philosophy is technical. In fact, everything can be taken on a technical level (how does it work?) and bring interest.
I'd also point out, while i'm at it, that these "clever" bosses usually have no clue how things work - that's not only the top management which you may argue "will have good sub management cause they're so smart" as you seem to idealize them a lot.
Having no clue how things work, usually makes it very hard to manage the project properly and end up in screw ups.
Finally, taking things one step higher, I'd be much more comfortable with a leader that has been trained as an engineer and ended up interested into management, politics, whatever, and became for example president.
He would have much higher chances to put things into perspective, less corrupt and probably more efficient, as long as he did do his homework to become a leader, compared to someone who has been solely taught how to lead, and to master the language and "humanities".
I suppose history backup this point very strongly as well - as your major should be telling you.