Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?
slate.com
slate.com
Similarly, while the more traditional sciences (Bio, Physics, etc) are about observing and understanding our environment, their engineering counterparts are about mastering are about mastering and manipulating them in ways that we can take advantage of. At the end of the day, scientists are looking to be able to say, "This is how the world works". And, inevitably, an engineer will respond, "but does it really have to?"
If I had to hypothesize, I would say that there is some perception by outsiders of the study of engineering that makes it seem valuable. I once heard a chem engineering student say (in chemistry class, I took two semesters of chemistry for fun) "why would I want to be a chemistry major? you never get to blow anything up." I'm not implying that this young man would be interested in terrorism (I don't think so), but I just want to point out that his humor and point of view are completely foreign to me, and but we are both ostensibly students of science. It seems like many of the engineering students I know like science because its "awesome", whereas many of the science students I know like science because they think it is important and interesting.
What is more, there is a very, very large number of engineers who are also very deeply religious in America. Which is also interesting.
I would really love to read more research into this, if anyone has any ideas.
PS, no offense to anyone in particular if you are an engineering student. I think you understand that I'm not making statements about all engineers. I almost went that path myself, and actually can't remember why I decided to stick with computer science.
I think you're right on the money. I just finished an engineering degree and am now doing a MSc. I think my engineering classmates like science because they can learn things that are "true" and "know the answers". We would talk about projects, and standards and make bad puns using our newly-learned technical jargon. My science friends use words like "sexy" when describing theories, and they like to think about things in a far more epistomologically sophisticated way.
They mentioned the high religiosity and conservatism of engineers in the article. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are the traits that distinguish engineers from scientists.
It seems to be pretty obvious, construction and destruction are the two sides of the same coin.
In order to effectively destroy something it helps if you have knowledge of how things are constructed.
I mean if they were really smart, they'd have crashed one plane into one tower at just the right place to have it collapse on the other tower. They'd would have also saved one planeful of passengers' lives.
Plus you don't become a terrorist to destroy things just because you know how to destroy things. They obviously did it out of radical idealism and desperation, and something else lead to that other than the fact that they knew how to destroy things.
The guys that pulled 9/11 off got lucky in many respects, on the other hand if the situation would have been a little bit different there might have been many more people dead.
These guys weren't hired guns. They killed themselves.
Then at some point in their life they found themselves in a larger pool of people that were frustrated somehow, and because of their skills they got recruited in to those particular roles.
What made engineers more in that pool of frustrated people? They could come to the US and recruit all the engineers they want. They wouldn't be very successful, and even if they do get an engineer, it wouldn't be because he/she is an engineer.
Why the pool of engineers were frustrated is a likely cause, but because they know how to destroy things doesn't make them more likely to join radicalism.
Suicide attacks are mostly limited to religious people, I think that somehow traces back to the philosophical part of religion that sees your earthly body as just a temporary vessel for your eternal soul (for want of a better word).
Almost every religion has some component to that effect.
What surprises me is that I would think that most engineers know enough about how the world really works that they would be able to pierce the veil of religion with enough doubt that they would err on the side of caution in case this body is all they've got.
When you're prepared to die it is relatively easy to take a lot of innocent people with you in to the grave.
Engineers, especially mechanical engineers, don't have to understand why the world works to be good at their practice. I mean as long as you stay away from the theoretical and stick to only the practical, your religious beliefs can always be shaped to fit around your understanding of the world.
That being said, even incredibly intelligent people believe in God. Christopher Langan claims you can prove the existence of God with mathematics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan#Ideas.2C_aff...
m0th87, thanks for the advice, but I already read the article. I was simply providing a possible hypothesis, as were the suggestions in the article.
If asked how to end US or Israeli occupation, the liberal arts major would probably say: convince them with good arguments or vote. The engineer would say: make it very expensive for them to continue occupation.