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Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

I'm weirdly not too surprised due to this belief I have that software developers would make effective criminals. A lot of this boils down to a belief I have that not getting caught in the first place is easy. Murders have something like a 50% solve rate and you can decrease your chances of getting caught with a little knowledge on how to evade common forensic techniques along with some planning. Those who get caught doing one crime or another either were dumb to begin or eventually got lazy and made a dumb mistake in hindsight.

Besides that though, the ethos that we have lends itself well to acquiring advanced knowledge in more-or-less all domains, crime and forensics included.

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Careful. That solve rate is overall. When planning your life in crime you probably want to use the solve rate for the particular type of people you plan to murder.

The solve rate for murders of white people is generally in the 80+% range, which is probably what you'd want to use if going after CEOs.

I think race of victim is probably not the root cause in the solve rate.

There is a high correlation between being a non-white murder victim (in America) and being targeted by or involved in gang violence.

Gang violence seems to be less moderated by the police, for probably a variety of reasons both practical and political.

But yes, if you aren’t killing a rival gang member, you do probably have worse odds than the overall stat.

And 50% is a horrible baseline for 25 years to life in jail. Even 5%, with no statute of limitations, would make me uncomfortable my whole life.

Gang violence would often be random offender, random victim too. I imagine a motivated murder by a related party is significantly easier to solve than a random shooting where the perpetrator hightails it immediately.

Related parties are easy to name and find, unrelated murderers which you don't find immediately are only going to get harder to catch - where do you even start when with something like that?

A lot of gang violence is at parties and (sadly) funerals. The demographics of the injured bystanders thus tend to reflect the demographics of people who attend those events.

> A lot of gang violence is at parties and (sadly) funerals

Nice just-so argument.

Any basis in fact? Stats maybe?

- Gang-related homicides are less than 20% of all homicides in the US.

- Gang-related homicides includes the homicides of innocent bystanders of gang-related shootings.

- Over half of all homicide victims are non-white.

These three facts make it obvious that well above 60% of all non-white homicides are NOT “gang-targeted or -involved”.

If it is true that 80% [EDIT: not true (I misread stat in another comment) but gist of argument still stands] of non-white cases go unsolved, then more than 50% of all unsolved non-white homicides are NOT gang-related in any way.

And this is an extremely conservative estimate. Just fixing unfavorable rounding adjusts the percentage of unrelated unsolved homicides to above 65%.

Given that, it doesn’t seem wise to presume gang-involvement on the part of non-white unsolved homicide victims solely on the basis of them being… non-white unsolved homicide victims.

> If it is true that 80% of non-white cases go unsolved [...]

It's not nearly that bad. Around 40-50% are solved. There are around 30% more non-white homicides than there are white homicides per year in the US, which means that the overall homicide solve rate is closer to the non-white solve rate than to the white solve rate.

Thanks for catching my mistake and updating. I misread earlier comment.

With the ubiquity of cameras, tracking, I suspect any murder can be solved if we are suitably motivated.

Any one murder can be, or almost any one. It's generalising that effort to all murders that's hard.

More importantly, engineers are for some reason especially likely to be terrorists.

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29836/1/Why_are_there_so_many_Engi...

I think it's related to old physicist brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's field.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

Osama bin Laden had a degree in civil engineering. I wonder how mathematicians rank against engineers

I remember reading something like this but in relation to elite overproduction, how if you have engineers sitting with their thumbs up their asses instead of working, they will disrupt society in a bad way

Overproduction theory, whether you believe it or not isn't really about engineers.

The idea is that you get a lot of elites which are highly educated and expect high positions in society, but end up bitter because reality falls short. Engineers break with this because in general they are actually quite well compensated.

The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees

This doesn't align with the scholarship on the subject. See Gambetta and Hertog https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/engineers%20of%20ji...

Im not saying it is impossible, so I dont see that as some sort of gotcha.

From Wikipedia: >Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.

Im focusing on the USA, where engineers, STEM, and the like have high social standing, and do relatively well economically. Your "scholarship on the subject" is from 2007 and is from before the term elite overproduction was even coined.

Engineers are technicians/craftspeople, not elites. They are compensated well much of the time, and respected, which means that many of them have more opportunities to become elites, especially when considering the intelligence that engineering degrees tend to filter/correlate with.

You hadn't mentioned that your focus was on the USA, but rather a general "The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees" which is why I provided a paper that directly contradicts your statement. Elite Overproduction is not a US-specific topic, and the paper being from 2007 does nothing to invalidate its findings or lessen its relevance to Elite Overproduction. Funnily enough, I hadn't checked astrange's reference that prompted this discussion, which is Gambetta and Hertog.

Probably fairly peaceful, intelligence or weirdness aren't at play here. The dangerous ones are those who deal in the practical realities of the world in ways that can effect change - they are more likely to have the means to do something. Engineers and chemists are ones to watch (whoever did the script for Breaking Bad knew his chemist stereotypes).

In my mind, the common threads with organize terrorism is utilitarianism and consequentialism. This way of thinking has a big overlap with stem fields based in logic and physics.

The perhaps concerning thread socially is the rise of utilitarian and consequentialist morality.

Hm... Widespread adoption of utilitarianism is a net negative for society°, therefore utilitarianism says that promoting utilitarianism is bad?

°I guess because it's too easy to make calculation errors that lead to major badness?

Maybe mathematicians just theorize about committing violence while engineers lean more towards the application.

Well there was this guy called Ted...

But not physicists (at least, scientists), according to the article.

Reminds me of the Salem Hypothesis.

> More importantly, engineers are for some reason especially likely to be terrorists.

Seems more likely you learn about engineers who become terrorists because they have the tools/knowhow/resources to pull something off. Without that it seems like it is more likely to get caught, give up, or do something no one would label terrorism.

edit - and it seems likely that this stat encourages terrorists organization to send members to get those degrees and recruit from engineers so it might be self reenforcing to boot.

Also, this assumes a similar demographic distribution to identified terrorists to unidentified ones. It's quite possible another class of people are more likely to be terrorists murders etc but don't show up in the data because for whatever reason they're better at hiding it.

"Engineers are more likely to be terrorists" is different from "terrorists are more likely to be engineers".

You can imagine that engineering is a useful skill for terrorism and thus terrorist organizations might spend extra effort trying to recruit engineers. They may also have a higher survival rate working on behind the scenes tasks rather than firefights and suicide missions, which could cause a survivorship bias in data collection.

(It's also interesting how many foreign leaders and dictators have engineering or science degrees, and/or went to US universities prior to becoming leading figures in their home countries.)

It's not Dunning-Kruger, it's because engineers have a very black-and-white view of the world. When they're engineering something, either it works according to specs or it doesn't. Also, engineers tend to be more religious and conservative for some reason; this is very different from scientists who are the opposite. I think this all works together somehow to make engineers more prone to extremism, to try to force the world to act the way they think it should.

I think that, more generally, intelligent people don't get arrested for crimes for several reasons. First, because they are smarter, they just don't get themselves into jams where murdering someone seems like the best way to get out of the jam. Second, because they are more successful they have more to lose in terms of wealth, happiness, good living situation, so they risk more when choosing crime, so they're less likely to choose it. Only thirdly is actual proficiency in the planning and execution of the crime.

Software developers are also more likely to have weird eccentric beliefs, and to take them to extreme endpoints.

Given enough resources dedicated to hunting you, it doesn't seem that easy to be sure, considering how many cameras there are, how easy it becomes to narrow down DNA considering services like 23andme etc.

Most murders wouldn't have this much resources dedicated to it though.

Hans Reiser was far too smart to ever get caught.

Reiser killed his wife. Suspicion was always going to immediately fall on him.

> Those who get caught doing one crime or another either were dumb to begin or eventually got lazy and made a dumb mistake in hindsight.

>Besides that though, the ethos that we have lends itself well to acquiring advanced knowledge in more-or-less all domains, crime and forensics included.

I wouldn't give too much credit to law enforcement. Perpetrators need to get it (opsec/disposal of evidence/etc.) right every single time, sometimes for decades. Law enforcement only needs to get it right once. And yet, clearance rates for murder are still pretty low.

Location seems to be a factor. NYC has better statistics. Overall it is 54% since 2020. Washington DC had 1,088 murders, 559 clearances (51%) from 2020-2023. Baltimore is 1,042 and 315 (30%). NYC is notably better: 1,740 and 1,190, (68%). https://www.murderdata.org/p/blog-page.html

Murder is a really interesting crime. There are really two kinds of murder: those where the perpetrator and victim are known to each other and those where they are not. The first category is way more common [1]:

> Among homicides in which the relationship could be determined, between 21% and 27% of homicides were committed by strangers and between 73% and 79% were committed by offenders known to the victims

Another data point is that the recidivism rate for murder is incredibly low, roughly 2% [2], among the lowest of any crime.

The point is that the vast majority of murders are personal in nature. Police will tell you that when someone dies, it's always the spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend as the prime suspect until it isn't. Murders with no personal relationship (eg serial killings) are quite rare.

So if you, as a software developer, want to get away with murder you first have to be irrational and/or insane enough to murder people for pretty much no reason, which will get you pretty far to not getting caught, but still want to murder people you really have no reason to.

You can further increase your odds of not getting caught by not leaving a crime scene or a body but also picking a victim who won't necessarily be missed. It's why serial killers end up preying on runaways and prostitutes. There's also the MMIW phenomenon [3]. Lastly, going outside your geographical area would further help your odds.

This suspect allegedly had no relationship to the victim but they still had a reason (it seems). Now it so happens that being upset about private health insurance quite literally would leave police with millions of suspects. But the point is, they weren't necessarily acting rationally even if it was premeditated and planned.

I still find it insane that the suspect didn't rid himself of every identifiable possession. Had they done that, I think they'd have a shot at acquittal (depending on DNA evidence from the water bottle and/or coffee cup). Now? Almost impossible.

As much as we talk about jury nullification, people like there to be something to hang their hat on in terms of doubt. If a blurry partial photo was the only evidence I could see that as being way more likely. Having the ID used in the hostel and the mask, bag and clothes as well as the gun makes that harder to justify.

[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf

[2]: https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/a-new-lease-on-lif...

[3]: https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-w...

I think it was insane to go somewhere like McDonalds or anywhere, even the Starbucks anytime near that time period. There was just no need. Unless he was toying with the idea of getting caught, surely he would have just gone to some prebooked motel type of thing somewhere far away and huddled in there for quite a bit.

You have to eat. If you're in a strange city with limited transportation options a fast food place seems pretty reasonable. I'd have probably taken the food to go, but realistically you can eat in ~15 minutes and depending on the route back to where you're staying you might be seen by fewer people.

There's always delivery.

"due to this belief I have that software developers would make effective criminals. A lot of this boils down to a belief I have that not getting caught in the first place is easy."

Ummm.... You understand that the software developer was just caught by a McDonald's cashier?

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