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posted by n1 on Friday November 27 2015, @07:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the fightin'-words dept.

Henry Farrel writes in the Washington Post that there's a group of people which appears to be highly prone to violent extremism - engineers - who are nine times more likely to be terrorists as 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 for why it is that engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. 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. 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. Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it.

Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, 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, 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."


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 27 2015, @07:39PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 27 2015, @07:39PM (#268764) Journal

    Engineers are "do something" people. A lot of other people are "let's watch what happens" people. And, a hell of a lot more people are "WTF is happening?" types. For good or bad, people with engineer mentalities go out and get things done.

    Or, as my Dad put it, “There are three kinds of people in the world: people who make things happen, people who watch things happen, and people who wonder, ‘what the hell just happened?’”

    Oh - that quote is attributed to some fool on an idiot "reality show". Funny, my Dad quoted it without attributes many, many times, but he didnt' live long enough to ever watch a "reality show". More of the dumbing down of America. Lemme see where it really came from . . .

    Astrophysh attributes it to George Carlin. I doubt that . . .
    Brainyquotes attributes to Tommy Lasorda. Maybe, at least Lasorda was older than my Dad was.
    wikiquote doesn't seem to have any entries on it.

    AHA! http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/those_who_make_things_happen_those_who_watch_things_happen_and_those_who_wo/ [barrypopik.com]

    Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947), the president of Columbia University who Butler Library is named after, spoke before the University of California on March 23, 1931:

    “The vast population of this earth, and indeed nations themselves, may readily be divided into three groups. There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens. Every human being is born into this third and largest group; it is for himself, his environment and his education, to determine whether he shall rise to the second group or even to the first.”

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  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday November 27 2015, @08:54PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Friday November 27 2015, @08:54PM (#268798)

    I was thinking the same thing. Engineers solve problems, both real and perceived. They act.

  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday November 27 2015, @09:07PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Friday November 27 2015, @09:07PM (#268805) Journal

    Very recognizable, I've talked to my brother about this a lot, because he's the same as me in this regard. We easily get annoyed at things that "don't work right" and tend to go searching for solutions to make them better. While most people just keep using for instance a tool, just because it happens to work that way. It's almost like they just don't see what we see, don't immediately recognize that something could be improved. Or maybe they even don't get annoyed at technology at all and always have a sense of resignation instead of resistance to bad or incomplete design.

    We're in no way inclined to terrorism at all, but I can see that this type of attitude could lead there if engineers also have something like Asperger syndrome. The need to "fix things that are badly designed or simply don't working right" might then be applied to people rather than things.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:42AM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:42AM (#268896)

      Well when you take that kind of can-do mindset and add religious nuttery ("the holy book says such-and-such and it's unquestionably true so I need to make this happen"), you get what TFA is talking about.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @09:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @09:29PM (#268809)

    Yes. Another group which is over-represented among terrorists are doctors. Do... something... anything... now... or he will die.

  • (Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @10:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @10:51PM (#268848)

    Leave it to runaway to turn this submission into a chest-beating story about he and his pappy are "do something" people and all the lamers are "watchers" and clueless idiots. Also known as liburals.

  • (Score: 2) by jmoschner on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:11AM

    by jmoschner (3296) on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:11AM (#268880)

    It could have something to do with those that come from a culture/region that is likely to have terrorists are also more likely to encourage their kids to become doctors and engineers. Since doctors tend to value life a bit more than engineers and make more money, they are less likely to become terrorists. So that leads to more engineers filling that role.