Engineers Nine Times More Likely Than Expected to Become Terrorists | Hacker News Reader

Engineers Nine Times More Likely Than Expected to Become Terrorists

washingtonpost.com

36 pointsrichardboegli37 comments

> Survey data indicates that 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.

This statement seems to say as much about the sort of people who don't get non-engineering degrees as it does about engineers. In my experience, people deep into humanities fields—especially the social fields like sociology, anthropology and religious studies—are both significantly self-selected and externally selected. Perhaps even more so than engineers especially in niche fields. This selection has more of a moral, ideological and philosophical component than that for engineering. Put together, there is quite a bit of pressure against people harboring radical religious views in most of the humanities.

It's an interesting dynamic to think about.

I'm also a bit curious about what exactly an "administrative position in Hamas" entails. My sketchy understanding is that Hamas functions as more of a proto-government than merely a military organization: are they counting any role in Hamas as terrorists?

I'd say bullshit. Most terrorists come from religious minorities/immigrants that usually study engineering as it's more accessible than humanities/arts etc. due to language and/or cultural barrier. That's all.

If their explanation is correct then it has implications for how engineers should be trained.

E.g. that it would be beneficial to provide a more well rounded education that goes beyond the "engineering mindset" and exposes them to "messier" situations and means to deal with those.

Absolutely. My two semesters of a what was an extremely gentle intro to theology allowed me to appreciate that there are intellectual pursuits outside STEM that are worthwhile and challenging.

Nine times a really small number is still a really small number.

A well rounded education may well be beneficial for engineers, but if so it's not because of the terrorism potential.

The number isn't itself the important thing, it's the consequences of their actions on the world. I think we can agree that terrorism, and the world's reaction to it, is a pretty big thing.

[EDIT, in response to the two replies I've received so far: I'm making a pragmatic suggestion. In pragmatic terms what matters is whether the benefits, whatever their size, outweigh the costs. I suspect they might, and even incremental benefits are still benefits]

Unless engineers make up a huge proportion of terrorists then it wouldn't make any significant difference. The article doesn't quite describe that number. The closest it comes is "Nearly half of those terrorists who had degrees had degrees in engineering." But it doesn't say how many don't have degrees at all. I bet it's a lot.

If you're advocating for a change in how engineers are trained it should be on the grounds that the impact of an engineer becoming a terrorist is that much worse than a non engineer becoming a terrorist, not on the grounds that terrorists in general are really bad.

I think it would be more effective to educate the mass media. Western-world terrorist attacks work by playing on the dynamics of the mass media, and the mass media is definitely playing along, licking up the clicks and views.

Pragmatically speaking, amortized, the deaths and injuries are minor compared to other sources of death and injury (e.g. traffic).

Why not do both?

Responding to your edit: what you say is true if this were a purely isolated change that would have only this one effect. But terrorism is so unimportant that other effects will almost certainly dominate. For example, purely hypothetically, if changes in education reduced engineers' propensity for terrorism to the average rate, but decreased the quality of output from non-terrorist engineers by 0.001%, that would almost certainly be a net loss to society. Or if it increased the quality of output by 0.001%, that would be a nice gain but almost all of it due to non-terrorism reasons.

If a change in education hurts engineering in general then it's going to be a bad idea. If it helps, it's going to be a good idea either way. The only way terrorism would inform any changes in education would be if you could find some dial that had practically zero effect on anything else.

They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists.

"X times as likely to be Y as Z" doesn't parse for me. Is this an Americanism, and/or does it really mean "X times more likely to be Y than Z"?

Engineers are also a necessity for terrorist groupings. It may very well be that engineers aren't any more likely to become terrorists, it's that the ones that do are much more likely to find a terror cell that will take them, which then leads to actual terror. As opposed to, you know, dreaming about it.

The article covers this possibility, and argues that the evidence shows this isn't the case.

(I am not stating my opinion, only pointing out what the article says - and wondering whether you actually read it)

Article is delightfully light on data or references that could shed light on any of the one-line posited explanations for the measurement.

Gambetta and Hertog find strongly suggestive evidence that engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of the way that they think about the world.

From article

Survey data indicates that 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.

That's surprising to me. I'd like to know where they got that data, and look more into it. How likely are they to be conservative and religious than people with no degrees?

> I'd like to know where they got that data

Yes, given that the context seems to be people who go into engineering in Middle Eastern and North African countries which are too dysfunctional to employ engineers, you are left wondering whether the survey data was of those societies, or whether they extended some data to be an international truism. But I'm not paying $30 to find out.

I too would have thought engineers less likely to be religious in the west than people with no degrees, or humanities degrees.

From what I have seen of survey data in North American engineering magazines, their readerships (at least those who fill out surveys) seem to be fairly religious, as well as notably conservative and libertarian leaning. I have seen this consistently across a few trade publications for electronic and mechanical engineers, but do not have any citations handy at the moment of this post.

> fairly religious, as well as notably conservative and libertarian leaning

These are words I would use to describe North America ;)

So you'd want to remove regional bias by comparing engineers to people from the same demographic and region, i.e. not comparing liberal arts graduates in California against the petroleum engineering graduates from Texas.

These authors have published papers along the same lines of the book, if you have access to academic resources.

journal title: "Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?"

Hertog, Steffen has written a few articles along these lines.

Ask seymour papert and he will tell you,the education os will crash like ussr,the infantilization of the minds of people that have passed through school and easy crude oil money is the lifeblood of terrorism

We are all on NSA's lists now.

Engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of mindset and lack of opportunity

From article

I already want to bomb the shit out of everyone who talks against javascript.

You and I are enemies now.

PHP is a superior language in almost every way.

I think you mean "balm".

When will the liberals stop mincing words and admit we're at war with Radical Engineering?

Didn't get the joke I guess?

As an Engineer, I've been avoiding this conclusion for a while. Chalked it up to faulty conclusions from liberal arts majors jealous of funding cuts or a lack thereof (/s).

But this conversation is becoming more and more prevalent. Perhaps STEAM education (http://stemtosteam.org/) and not a purely focussed STEM education is the answer

>As an Engineer, I've been avoiding this conclusion for a while. Chalked it up to faulty conclusions from liberal arts majors jealous of funding cuts or a lack thereof (/s).

perhaps consider that your priorities may be divergent from other modes of thinking, and that your priorities may not be universal

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