Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees? | Hacker News Reader

Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?

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31 pointspchristensen33 comments

This isn't the first article to suggest that engineers and scientists have some specific, roughly opposite traits -- scientists are exploring, querying, doing research, and engineers (note that they mostly mention mechanical engineers here, so ignore your computer science background for a moment) are usually applying established results rather than exploring the problem space.

I can see how an application-focused, problem-solving discipline would be attractive to more rigid people with an interest in applying their principles to the world to "fix" it, and how such people might also be more likely to be terrorists.

Computer engineers seem to be somewhat less represented by this article (again, all they actually mention are mechanical and architectural engineers), and I'll bet that holds up even in the west -- being a computer "engineer" isn't like being a mechanical engineer, in that we just don't know enough about our discipline to do much rote applying of well-known principles.

That may change when and if Moore's Law stops doing its thing and we can start getting a good feel for the relative balance of computer resources and human resources in terms of cost. As long as that changes by a factor of two every eighteen months I don't see us settling into any well-established principles of work balance between people and computers, ever.

"How should one put the balance right?" - recent Nigerian terrorist

I think this is the key point - the conflict muslims feel between the western lifestyle and the islamic lifestyle. This conflict is not just between cultures. Even in muslim lands, some muslims feel a conflict between the earthly life and the life after death. I suppose most muslims deal with this conflict in a healthy way. But my experience as a muslim in the west, is that there are many more who struggle with this. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Islam does not provide a central theological authority (like the pope) to address these issues.

Muslims are left to their own soul-searching/research or the local imams. The local imams are either not trained to address such issues or offer solutions that dont work in real life.

One institution that is trying to address this problem is Zaytuna College (http://www.zaytunacollege.org/). It is the first American Muslim college. They are trying to create Muslim imams that are trained in both the islamic laws but also in the broader western philosophies and ideas. Presumably, this training will enable them to address such spiritual conflicts.

Interestingly, creationists with advanced degrees often turn out to be engineers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis

Thanks, I hadn't heard of this before!

Perhaps learning how things work makes you more sympathetic to the idea of a creator, or suspicious of complex things occurring spontaneously, or seeing how complex systems can arise from a few well chosen first principles.

I've found that the more I learn about society, neurology, human psychology, and organizing principles of systems, it makes me more confident of two things. First, that the world could definitely and logically be the product of a certain kind of Creator (not all visions or ideas of God apply). Second, that such a Creator is not necessary if you believe in infinite universes.

The thing that bothers me about #2 is that if you believe in infinite universes, shouldn't there be a universe with a God in it?

Which infinity? If you believe in infinite rational numbers, shouldn’t there be a rational number equal to the ratio of a circle’s radius to its circumference?

(I don’t believe in God or infinite universes. Standard Model FTW!)

That doesn't really work. Fundamental scientists (especially academics) tend to be the least religious.

Maybe I should go into biomedical engineering.. I can't imagine that they have religious people there ;)

As a guy just about to graduate from a BME program it's anecdotally just not the case.

The writings of Mircea Eliade need to make their way into the Muslim world. The need to separate the "sacred" from the "profane" will greatly benefit Muslims to experience transcendental views internally instead of imposing superficial ideals externally.

It is difficult to have a transcendental experience without an appreciation for the sacred, and these two things are not mutually exclusive or only reserved to those who follow a religion. I don't think anybody here can argue that witnessing the birth of a child is anything but a sacred moment; perhaps for some achieving some level of success in their profession may translate into a sacred moment; even something as mundane as sipping a fine brew of tea can be sacred. (These are things that don't require you believe in a "higher power" or even a religion - but it could mean something to you and to you alone; when it happens in the presence of somebody else and they feel it positively at the same time, you could call that "bonding", and that too is sacred.) It really doesn't matter what the worldly manifestation is, but rather how it may positively affect you internally on a purely human level. The point is that "sacred" is internally directed and brings peace to your being. For me, defining "profane" or that which is worldly is a bit easier to define: anything that is not sacred.

The mixture of technical problem solving and "religiosity" is a perversion of the highest degree because then there is no distinction between x and y and to simply delete one of these variables becomes a technicality without emotion, insight, or appreciation for one another or even oneself. In my experience, this is happening in the Muslim world because there are schools of thought (such as engineering or science) that solve problems wonderfully and in a methodical way to give excellent results in the real world; when combined with the uneducated view of treating every word in scripture as fact then these two things can be intermingled without distinction: religious views are explained through logic (sans sacred/transcendental experience) and wordly methodologies that otherwise benefit humanity enable actions to be carried out in the name of "religion".

If only this simple distinction of "sacred" and "profane" can find their ways into the hearts of all people from all walks of life, I think we will be a step closer to relating to one primarily as human beings. It is a universal and even human understanding that anybody from any belief system can appreciate. Anybody who mixes sacred with profane and proclaims that they understand the belief system they adhere to is either fooling themselves or is a flat out liar.

If you are Muslim and reading this, please reflect upon what I mean by this distinction and discuss it at your next Halaqa, if that's your thing.

It seems a bit of a stretch to apply data from American engineers (who very rarely attempt to blow up civilians) to Islamic terrorists. My school also had conservatives disproportionately represented on the faculty -- i.e. they were almost within a stone's throw of their representation in the general population, not the smallest minority on campus like they were in ArtSci. As a conservative with degrees in both making stuff and making stuff up, I always figured this was because nobody at the engineering school ever said, in as many words, "You're a Republican? Who let you in here?"

On the contrary in France, many of my professors were either anarchists or communists and for some had chosen to become professors because they didn't want to contribute to 'loathsome' corporation.

That's probably the reason why, while the theoretical teaching in my university was excellent, my teachers lacked the experience in industry and were not very practical... On the other hand, in the US, the professors often had practical examples from when they worked and were less perfectionists and more pragmatic.

Sometimes you have to use the data you have and not the data that you wish you had.

They included the American data set because it was the best data set available on the question of political leanings of engineers. They sanity checked the result of that data set against available data sets in other countries and places, including a 1948 data set from Egypt, and the other data sources were consistent with the American one. When you add the other lines of evidence they had there strongly suggestive evidence that engineers broadly tend towards right wing conservative politics across multiple countries and cultures.

And having right wing conservative politics within the Muslim world is likely to make you sympathetic towards al qaeda and related organizations.

Here's an exceptionally good hypotheses explaining why western educated Muslims tend to be radicalists:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...

I think it would be helpful to summarize:

"Western education forces lifelong Muslims to more thoroughly analyze their beliefs, which until that point they just accepted without questioning. They then go to one extreme or the other: either they reject those beliefs, or take them to their logical conclusion and decide to convert/kill infidels."

It's interesting, but it doesn't address why this would happen to engineers in particular, rather than just all western educated Muslims.

Presumably because engineers are trained to be analytical and to trust their analysis, so they are more likely to follow through on the outcome of their soul searching.

Or presumably, as in another post here, that engineers tend to be more educated in the west and work more in the west than those in other disciplines, and so have more exposure to the west.

An article I read some time back explored why many terrorists of the Islamic bent seemed to be well-educated, had spent some time in American/European universities, and often had established careers in "the west". The speculation was that some of those who came to "the west" and tried to stay longer term had a hard time adapting. This portion tended to become radicalized. The article further speculated that if they had stayed in their country of origin they would have been happy and not been radicalized.

Of all career paths someone in the middle east might choose, the one their societies/families deem most worthy of the extra expense of a western education is engineering. Engineering + Islam might not be the key to radicalization, rather it's Exposure-to-West + Islam that seems to be the stimulus for radicalization. And Engineering students from the middle east have a much higher Exposure-to-West level than, say, art historians or geographers.

As Oriental philosophy said "Stupid questions bring stupid answers". I propose new questions:

Why do so many terrorist have black or brown hair?. Why do so many terrorist are men? Why do so many terrorist are young? Why do so many terrorist are raised out of USA?.

Extracting conclusions from over generalizations is not only usefulness, it's dangerous.

HN is becoming more and more like reddit this days.

Putting aside the egregious spelling and grammar errors (I assume English is not your native language), I fail to see your point.

Why [are so many terrorists male]? Why [are so many terrorists younger than average]?

These questions in particular seem to be fine. Questioning the pathology and psychology of dangerous radicalism is an interesting and worthwhile question.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0912/09122601

The Pantsbomber (or whatever we're calling him) graduated from my old department! Ermm... This won't do anything for our reputation as being halfway competent engineers :-/

Is it surprising that terror plots requiring larger cash outlays, improvisation and greater precision tend to be staffed with better-trained/smarter operatives?

It's not like they're sending architectural engineers to die in pedestrian human-bomb attacks. They just do it in the cases where the operative needs to understand/learn how to package, nitrate and detonate a crude explosive under stress, or learn to fly a plane.

Only through selective reporting do engineers appear over-represented.

In addition to selective reporting, perhaps the terrorists who are trained creative writers get caught much earlier so we don't hear about them at all. Or when they try to create explosives, they blow themselves up, so we don't hear about them. Or can't think of any way to take destroy an airplane because they don't know how they work, so they never get anywhere.

When people ask why so many terrorists have engineering degrees, they really mean why do so many successful terrorists or high-profile terrorists have engineering degrees.

You obviously have not read the paper that they are summarizing. Else you'd not have brought up a point that they addressed directly and came up with strong evidence against.

In different times and places there have been many terrorist organizations who are supporting different kinds of causes. Engineers are significantly overrepresented in right wing religious ones, and are virtually nonexistent in various left wing ones.

Were it a simple case of selective reporting and economics then you would not see a correlation between the profession involved in the terrorist organization and the cause that organization is for. But there is a strong correlation, and therefore something deeper is happening than us noticing engineers because their skills and economic status make them useful to terrorists.

I hadn't read the whole paper, no.

The article went only as far as suggesting that right-wing ideologies appealed more to the engineering mindset. And I'm hardly convinced that any given extremist ideology is more, or less, seeking to bring order and unambiguity to the world. That the summary went on to note that fundamentalist extremists were actively recruiting engineers didn't exactly help the argument that the over-representation is a natural result of mind-sets.

All things being equal, perhaps there are more engineers willing to kill for Allah than ELF. But the summary in that article is so unconvincing that I'm not particularly motivated to spend time with the paper.

This is all summarized from a paper they say was posted "this summer". That's poor fact checking because if you follow the link to http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jih... you'll see a big fat 2007 on the title page for a reason.

That said it is an interesting paper, and I recommend that people read it. I certainly learned something when I ran into it a couple of years ago.

Engineers are smart enough to see how fucked up everything is; their lack of social skills make it easy for them to justify its violent destruction.

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligenc...

Depending on the specific age and gender, an adolescent with an IQ of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females.

What does this have to do with the article? How did you get so many upvotes? Are you that creepy guy who was banned for bringing up "casual sex" in every other thread?

edit - seriously though... did I miss something? I didn't see the word sex mentioned in the original article, or the word terrorism mentioned in the second article...

He's trying to make a tenuous leap to suggest that engineers are smart, smart people are sexually repressed, and sexually repressed people are more likely to be violent. I understand what he's saying, but I don't buy it. Claiming that terrorists' grievances are based in deeply-rooted sexual problems is juvenile, and doesn't respect the gravity or history of the situation, IMHO.

Especially as (e.g.) there doesn't seem to be any similar terroristic tendency among physicists, who are also very smart (anecdotally I'd say: slightly smarter on average) and smart in broadly similar ways.

(Note: "on average" means just that; I know some very, very smart engineers.)

And? Where are all the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. Virginal Nerd Terrorists? Where are the Sufi VNTs?

That's beyond the silliness of blindly applying American sexual patterns to Middle Eastern societies, of course.

We could more sensibly ask, "Why are radical Wahhabi groups (and those of some sects) so good at/so focused on recruiting Muslim engineering students?", except even that's too broad and dubious a claim. A pool of 400 people (over decades, no less) doesn't strike me as a great pool for analysis beyond, "international Muslim terrorists tend to be educated and have some resources", a point you'd expect.

because engineers don't get laid enough - everybody knows this! ;-)

Ok I've heard this before.. Let's look at other subjects.. for example philosophy: What about the great Philosopher Dr Joseph Goebbels or Karl Marx? The discussion is quite ridiculous.

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