Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

My hypothesis: The study of engineering simply brings people from less developed countries to the West, where they are exposed to the seeds of radicalism.

They study engineering for many of the reasons that we do: Aptitude in the preliminaries such as math, interest in the subject matter, practical applicability, and employment prospects.

There may be a couple of additional factors: Engineering has a cross cultural appeal, whereas fields such as the humanities and social sciences may be seen as solving "first world problems" for lack of a better term. And, engineering is in theory apolitical, meaning you can do interesting work without the risk of getting in trouble.

If I were a parent of a bright teenager living in the third world, I could think of worse things than sending them to study engineering in the West.

This is the best explanation.

Besides engineering, the is another field that offers similar opportunities for upward mobility: medicine.

But medicine has a humanizing nature, just by virtue of having the betterment of the human condition as its main concern.

There are, of course, exceptions, like Ayman Alzawahiri.

"The study of engineering simply brings people from less developed countries to the West, where they are exposed to the seeds of radicalism."

The authors provide evidence showing that the effect is not restricted to engineers who studied in the West, so this hypothesis seems to have been disproven by the authors.

As well, most of these countries will put more emphasis on math and physics rather than a liberal arts education. The defense of the liberal arts education is that you develop a rounder human being.

I think that is a hypothesis worth investigating. A good data point to look into would be what educational backgrounds do Western extremists come from.

My only data point is an old one, and probably good for no more than comic relief: The Salem Hypothesis.

But a potential difficulty interpreting data on Western extremists is that the higher education system tracks students into disciplines, to a considerable extent, based on their math ability.

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