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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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?

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.

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