This was completely predicted by Peter Thiel in Zero to One. There's a common set of personality traits, a little related to Asperger's, where one works from first principles, is less influenced by what other people think, has less groupthink, and is more comfortable being outside of social norms.
This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.
Social norms are powerful. People outside of them often see better ways to do things (or what they believe to be such). Constructively, they might start a business to fix the world. Destructively, they might blow up what they don't like.
That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.
"This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three."
Are management-level terrorists coming from former entrepreneurs? None of the top people in al-Queda were engineers. Bin Laden did come from a family that runs a huge construction company, but he himself never did anything in that area. Within ISIS, many of the top people were either career military or religious. Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi al-Dulaimi was a computer science student, though.
He probably earned it because his family is in construction and so it was the 'path' for him.
This is different from some suburban geeky guy who likes computers and decided to study electrical engineering in university. It reflects on his personality more.
In most companies management level people aren't engineers on entrepreneurs either. Isn't it sad that whether you work for a corporation or are a terrorist there's usually a management level guy that's better off than you?
The smartest people tend to do the most 'good' and the most 'bad'. It seems like no matter the endeavor, intelligence makes you much more likely to be successful. It also tracks pretty closely with how high conviction you are.
It's really more likely -- and I'm replying without having read the topic article -- that this is related to the fact that developing states with "socialist" (I use the term advisedly) bents tended to privilege engineering, medical and scientific education in its universities, while not having economies capable of effectively supporting those graduates.
Take a bunch of middle and upper-middle class students whose parents had remunerative but unsustainable government sinecures, run them through the university system, then drop them into a repressive government and a poorly-managed economy, and you've got a potential tinderbox there. Now have the government suppress all political dissent so that only the ideologically-committed hard core groups survive, then release the pressure just enough for them to start recruiting those disgruntled students, and hey presto, there's your generation of terrorist engineers.
I've read that the old socialist government in India produced more engineers and other technical people than the economy could absorb. And it was nearly impossible to start a business either. Why a lot of Indian technical people came to the united states to work.
I'm under the impression that in a lot of middle eastern countries it's not real hard to get into university. However the universities are corrupt. To get good grades means cheating and subtle and or not so subtle bribes to your professors. And once you are out if the fix isn't in for you, you're not going to get a job.
I've noted in my career that you have three kinds of engineering students. Those that go into it for the money. Those that go into it because they have some grand narcissistic idea that they'll changed the world. And those that are more or less happy to spend the rest of their career designing trash pumps. The first drift into sales and management. The second are potential a source of terrorists. And the latter are guys like me.
I wouldn't discount the possibility of a correlation between radicalism and the "engineering personality" (or the limitations of an engineering education) playing a significant role, but this other, more Marxian explanation strikes me as the best starting point. A young, smart, ambitious middle-class man with thwarted personal ambition is a dangerous thing, because when he sublimates his career ambition into some other goal—and for people from an Islamic background, fighting for Islam and achieving glory in the next life is a very obvious alternative goal—he's likely to make something like the proverbial dent in the universe.
> It's really more likely -- and I'm replying without having read the topic article -- that this is related to the fact that developing states with "socialist" (I use the term advisedly) bents tended to privilege engineering, medical and scientific education in its universities, while not having economies capable of effectively supporting those graduates.
And to be fair that emphasis probably really is quite rational, because engineers are probably the kind of people a rapidly-developing middle-income country most needs. Unfortunately setting up the pipeline of trained engineers isn't nearly enough on its own to ensure the rapid development, of course.
One reason I find that interpretation plausible is that this seems to have happened before:
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
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.
"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.
Tunisian here. My country is sadly known as the first exporter of ISIS fighters. I couldn't agree more with this! It is mostly attributed to the educational system. Engineering studies are focused mostly on math and physics and albeit present, Languages are treated like scond-class subjects. You end up with a generation of students who are effective engineers (to an extent) but who can't think at all. They are not taught philosophy, arts and even the logic of mathematics is obscured by the nature of testing.
I think more than what we are taught in engineering, the field itself tends to attract more conservative minded people (maybe because it's a safe field?). There's also correlations shown between religiosity, conservatism and studying engineering.
I agree but those people are around 18 when they enroll into college, they can't be that close-minded. At least not until you show them (via curriculums) that there's to life more than science.
What about everyone who didn't go to school at all, at least not more than three of four years? They don't have an education in arts, philosophy or languages either.
Of course, knowing that extremists are usually engineers only helps you if you have a known extremist and want to guess his profession. Extremists are a pretty small group, and engineers a much larger one, so I'd have to assume that extremism is still very rare among engineers, meaning knowing whether someone is an engineer or not is completely useless for predicting if they're an extremist.
But hopefully, you've got a STEM degree, and can figure that fact out out yourself ;)
>> But hopefully, you've got a STEM degree, and can figure that fact out out yourself ;)
Sadly I bet someone in some ostensibly serious conversation will suggest increasing attention based on major (the person making the suggestion will have no understanding of statistics).
I don't think it's totally useless information as it informs us about the type of person who joins such groups. It might be useful in terms of tailoring counter-extremist propaganda. If the most susceptible to recruitment are of group X you want to make your counteroffer tailored to group X.
I can't think of a good example for transnational groups but it could be that after removing a government (or whatever you call ISIS) prioritizing reconstruction/aid projects that need local engineers is an effective way to reduce the likelihood that insurgencies start at all.
Also from the summary, if you're afraid of communist extremists you need to find work for English and International Affairs majors and you're really in trouble :)
When I studied insurgency/extremism more actively I would always hear the assertion, generally voiced in advocacy of increased foreign aid or nation building efforts, that extremists are generally recruited from the ranks of those left behind by the political and economic worlds and violence remains their only recourse. It's a nice narrative because it feels intuitive and provides an addressable problem, the downside is that it's not really true[0]. The 9/11 hijackers were very well educated and not impoverished and while this work looks awesome (can't wait to read it!), there has been previous work that showed that extremists do tend to be more educated than not.
My working hypothesis on why extremists tended to be more educated was (is at least until I read this book?) that educated people are just more likely than uneducated to do the unconventional in any sense, including extremism, since they're aware of more options and know/can learn how to pursue them.
It had occurred to me how it always seemed like the attackers had engineering masters degrees in their little [bios|obits] but I figured that for some reason I was just not noticing the social science degrees. It's nice to see this book and data in general on the subject. I find it interesting the engineers are more likely to split towards right-wing extremism when the extremist ideology is highly likely to be religious or have religious pre-conditions. I generally get the impression that engineers are less religious than their liberal arts counterparts, perhaps the engineers that remain religious are more inclined to become more so?
[0] At least in expeditionary attacks and transnational orgs like AQ, generally attacks on targets in places not at war (i.e. 9/11, Mumbai, London, Madrid etc.). I'm not 100% sure about insurgent attacks that could be termed terroristic so it might depend on the definition you're using.
It's not that they personally are affected negatively by negative political or economic circumstances. It's that their people are. Identity is a powerful thing. Humans evolved a strong sense of belonging and an urge to do everything they can for their tribe.
When it comes to actual attacks, there are more engineers. When it comes to merely joining the ideology itself, however, there are few engineers.
'We realised immediately that this was an invasion, but we couldn't fully process the thoughts. My mother sat there shaking her head from side to side and said: 'Nothing bad will happen.' We were not Shi'ites who they hated. We were just Yazidis who they wanted to have control over.
'We quickly put long dresses over our night dresses. We then ran out onto the street to see the fighters who were approaching. They waved their black flags with white Arabic writing on them in the air.
'The first faces we saw from the passing vehicles were known to us. Regardless what jobs they did before, whether they were craftsmen, teachers or doctors, all of our Arab neighbours seemed to have joined up with ISIS.
This echoes stories from what happened in ex-Yugoslavia, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and even older stories from Israel's independence war. The same story keeps repeating : a lot of people who lived in areas with lots of muslims suddenly found that nearly all of them hold extremist ideologies. Enough to kill and rape at least. And the thing is, we don't even know most of the time that this happens.
What I think is that most people can't be bothered to actually do anything. If the effort they'll put into their life doesn't include getting an education and the sacrifices an education demands, it likely doesn't include fighting and the sacrifices that demands.
> This echoes stories from what happened in ex-Yugoslavia, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and even older stories from Israel's independence war. The same story keeps repeating : a lot of people who lived in areas with lots of muslims suddenly found that nearly all of them hold extremist ideologies. Enough to kill and rape at least. And the thing is, we don't even know most of the time that this happens.
Not sure if it is good for my ulcer, but here goes.
I think its a bit of a jump to go from those examples to "lots of muslims".
In all instances i see situations where you have lines drawn as much, or more, based on ethnicity than religion. That the two often blend over in various places, because certain lineages has held to certain beliefs over generations, is a confounding variable, not a causation.
Never mind that i wonder how many plays along to save their own bacon. Humans will be humans when push comes to shove.
Lets not forget that Europe had its 30 year war over a disagreement on Christian doctrine.
That's why I specified the difference with expeditionary vs insurgency/local civil war-ish kinds of attacks. Examining ISIS as an insurgency or a civil war (as you hit on with the Yugoslavia comparison especially) has a lot more explanatory power than as a terrorist group.
In this sense I mean terrorist group not as a moral distinction, but as a structural and methodological one. Terrorist group in the sense I mean doesn't really hold territory like ISIS does; they hit civilian targets in order to sway those citizens' governments, not to intimidate them into accepting their own governance; they are not governments.
Once you control lots of territory where people live you'll get all sorts of people joining. The reasons people join transnational terrorist groups are very different than the reasons people join murderous super-rapey governments in the middle of a civil war.
Even if it feels emotionally correct to call ISIS terrorists it's not the best way to analyze them and I think it's part of the reason that our policies and doctrines regarding terrorism, nation-building, foreign intervention are so schizophrenic.
ITT: plenty of silly speculation from people in armchairs about what they would prefer the causes of extremism to be (ignoring the well-researched book full of evidence written by experts). A lot of "No, all of the experts must be wrong and I alone am right. I'm an engineer and I'm /smarter/ than my peers, not more easily radicalized". Do you not immediately see how people with this attitude are so easily swayed toward extremism of all stripes?
But we've been pretty effective about doing away with the humanities in our culture. The sneering, the derision, the contempt in which many STEM people hold those from the humanities is disgusting, and this is one side effect of it; our best weapons to combat terror and extremism are not engineered or built -- there is nothing stopping terrorists or extremists or radicals from understanding technical facts about the world and building things according to their desires. Crafting a weapon or circuit or bridge does not require that you think critically about society or culture. Engineers even here rarely think about how their work effects others, simply about the technical problems involved (wonder why so many engineers are complicit in surveillance/backdoors/etc?) since that is how they are trained (perhaps a throwaway ethics course jammed into an already-overloaded schedule in college).
The way to combat extremism is with culture; a strong, vibrant culture with art and dialogue and critique and critical thinking. Every time a kid tells you he's studying philosophy and you say "remember in 5 years I'll want fries with that lazy humanities scum, get a real job" you're throwing our culture away.
When our culture is gone and something like ISIS comes knocking, it's difficult to point to the iPhone or reality TV and say "look, our values are different from (better than) yours". We need to point to poets, philosophers, public intellectuals, artists, and say -- look. Our people are free to create* where yours are not.
*So long as their creation has wide appeal and does not step on too many toes and can be mass-produced and turned into a viable business model.
Contrast the argument with and without the asterisk.
> Maybe engineers are just more likely to be effective extremists?
No , it's just that the educated are just more likely to become ideologues (thus more dangerous) because more articulate than the common thug. Ben Laden was an educated man, al-Zawahiri is a surgeon, al Baghdadi has a PhD . A lot of them actually spent time in the West, even in US and the culture shock triggered their hatred for the western civilization, the women roaming free in the streets, uncovered, the "debauchery", ... it went all against their upbringing and they can't accept people living in a different culture than an Islamic one, and they are also worried in would "infect" the culture back home. That's partly why Saddat was murdered, because he was turning Egypt into a place way too "westernized", along with the peace with Israel.
As for the thugs who become terrorists like the ones who killed 130 people in Paris, Jihadism give them a divine justification for their violence, like religion give them a justification for their hatred of the west or their misogyny. They feel one with themselves since they can express their violence while, they think, following their religion to the letter, since the enemy is just a non-believer,worse a atheist thus can be killed and the killing be sanctioned by their "god". But these thugs aren't ideologues, they are the useful idiots that get strapped with the explosive belt, while the ideologues stay safe.
There is that. The FBI's list of terrorism prosecutions [1] shows a few suicide bombers, some gun nuts, some druggies, the losers who talked about blowing up the Sears Tower (the FBI director said their plan was "aspirational rather than operational"), and some bigger losers who were trying to blow up a bridge in a park in Cleveland.
Students of the humanities, like those of the “pure sciences”, tend to have “more sophisticated and less closed views of knowledge than do students in engineering . . . Scientists learn to ask questions, while engineering students, like followers of text-based religions, rely more strongly on answers that have already been given”. Engineering students from all backgrounds, they suggest, share a more rigid outlook than students of science and humanities. Intolerant of ambiguity, they show a preference for authoritarian systems and have more simplistic views about how the status quo can be changed. Far from them being more “religious” than other Muslims, it seems that it is the Islamist vision of a “corporatist, mechanistic and hierarchical” social order, combined with “well-regulated daily routines” that attracts them, and accounts for their over-representation.
This actually sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. As some anecdata, AQ at least a while ago was notoriously paperwork heavy (systems!), I forget the book (I think it was out of West Point) but they got a ton of data essentially out of their meticulous funding spreadsheets.
Thought experiment: replace "engineers" with "followers of Islam". The math still checks out, but suddenly I'm not so comfortable discussing the sociological/psychological reasons behind the correlation.
Except it doesn't. IRA, LRA, KKK, Mormon extremist groups, Cubans (for a while if you got hijacked you could safely assume you were being forcibly redirected to Havana), Nationalist movements too numerous to count etc. No one who has seriously studied violent non-state actors believes that Muslims are more prone to violent extremism than any other group.
Islamist groups have certainly gotten the "best" press for a while and have the most prominent groups whose stated goals essentially boil down to "world domination" (but their plans for world domination have only slightly less chance of success than mine, so relax on that front). That, however tells us exactly nothing about the propensity of Muslims to become extremists.
Extremism is no more common among muslims than it is among any other large group unless you limit your definition of extremists to Islamic extremists.
Pardon my bayseanity, but the article discusses P(Engineer|Terrorist), not P(Terrorist|Engineer). I'm saying that a similar claim holds for P(Muslim|Terrorist), while your point is regarding P(Terrorist|Muslim).
But this is way off topic and my argument has nothing to do with Islam. I'm just pointing out how easy it is for us to play couch sociologists when weighing the merits and problems of "Engineering" culture, vs how difficult it is to hold a similar discussion about the issues of "standard" religions or cultures.
Neither direction is significant. Given reasonable definitions of terrorist (and the ones I think are best) terrorists are not significantly more likely to be muslim. In order to make that the case you need to extend "terrorist" status to a lot of groups that are really governments or insurgencies and not give "terrorist" status to a lot of Christian and political anti-government groups.
P(Muslim | Terrorist the US currently gives a shit about) is interesting, especially given the propensity to regard certain terrorist groups as criminal elements for political reasons.
Also interesting, other countries sometimes negotiate disliked groups onto our lists to legitimize their crackdowns (ironically the crackdowns can push the group to actually become terrorists. Hi Turkey!) and make their international fundraising efforts effectively illegal.
It is important to refute you because the implicit points when you talk about "how difficult it is to hold a similar discussion about the issues of "standard" religions or cultures". It isn't difficult for scholarship to have that discussion. It has been had. It disagrees with what you suggest to be true.
Maybe it's simply that (civil) engineering is the go to higher education path that is vouched for by parents in arabic cultures? As it is considered one of the few pathways of upward mobility plus and crisis/future proof. At least from my experience in german higher education, that was my takeaway.
Would be reluctant to read too much into personally traits, when there are convincing other explanations.
More accurate than what? If you're implying it would be more accurate than profiling Muslims, I think you are incorrect. Muslims as a group make up 1% of the US, but a generous, biased study [0] found that they are responsible for 48% of deaths from terrorism since 9/11. From this it follows that the average Muslim is responsible for approx 48 times more deaths than the average American of any religion.
And this is without considering whether the TSA considers categories that have more predictive power than simply being Muslim, e.g. following a particular kind of Islam.
Nitpick, Deaths due to TERRORIST attacks. Not arbitrary deaths....
"From this it follows that the average Muslim is responsible for approx 48 times more deaths than the average American of any religion."
^ This statement is false as it assumes all deaths are from terrorist attacks, based on your previous statement of 48 times more likely to commit TERRORIST attacks, of which has a silly low death rate compared to ANYTHING else in the US.
The left has managed to grasp control of academia, and shut other groups out[1]. I imagine the pattern will be reversed in countries where social studies means quran interpretation.
There is no left, there is no right. There are two levers, connected to nothing, which we pull occasionally to quell dissent and give the illusion of self-determination.
We are like children in a shopping cart, pretending we're at the helm - we aren't.
You're not wrong, but you're being a little rude. Your OP raised an earnest concern: people are being excluded from academia who shouldn't be. You responded by basically saying "the group of people you are alluding to doesn't even exist, the only purpose of that label is someone else's nefarious one".
It's quite likely there's another label besides "Right" which would point towards the group of people in question in a way you would accept. What is really gained by trying to enforce this nefarios depiction of what "Right" means?
We're like children in a shopping cart, some of whom are hogging all the books. Or at least all the good tenure-track jobs.
Where is the evidence for this? What are the points where Barack Obama and Donald Trump are actually colluding by supporting something that the average American would oppose?
You don't need a conspiracy for that to work. Elected officials in any country have different incentives to pass laws that will favour different groups. If some groups are more persuasive (or coercitive - "think of employment") than others (eg, the public at large), this leads to these groups having an influence out of proportion with their membership.
I didn't mean to imply a conspiracy with "colluding". Just tell me what the issues are where Barack Obama and Donald Trump are actually on the same side and the American people would really want someone on the other side. What was your point about employment, for example?
Haven't you got the causation wrong? Isn't it the more educated people become the more left leaning they are? It's not the left captured academia, it's academia created the left.
>they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent.
I do wonder about their source data. I find it hard to believe that they have been able to perform proper surveys.
Thus i wonder if what we end up with is a speculation based on the identities of those found to have performed spectacular operations in the name of some group or other.
And there i suspect we will find more engineers, because you need a certain set of skills and methodological thinking to pull them off.
Their equivalent of a engineering corps basically.
For a less-volatile example, my anecdotal/observational experience is that mathematics cranks (the angle trisectors, circle squarers, anti-Cantors, and so on) are disproportionally engineers, and in particular electrical engineers.
Engineering teaches that there's always a way to create an outcome. To not take 'no' for an answer. To dig into underlying fundamentals and figure out why things are the way they are. It also encourages you to find solutions to problems that you can implement itself.
It's only natural that someone who grew up in a shithole, that studies engineering would be attracted to terrorism as a way of solving political problems. It's the path that you can walk all by yourself.
Main argument according to reviews is the gap between aspiration and achievement that occurs when engineers' expectations of success are not met is what drives many of us, apparently, to join extremist groups.
The explanatory and predictive power of, "just sore losers" seems weak.
A review of the book (FT, paywalled) summarized other arguments about polarized, binary thinking, and an inability to accept culture, ambiguity, and a lot of what I see as sanctimonious bullshit the way non-STEM students do.
Defense of any principles (right, left, or religious) is considered extremist and dangerously reactionary these days.
One would hope that before laying the critical foundations to discredit educated conservatives (who largely take STEM degrees), academia might dedicate some thought to resolving why there are people with debt-funded $100k+ graduate degrees who read horoscopes, Piketty, and can't calculate a tip.
"Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry." — Charles Sanders Peirce, "First Rule of Logic"
What does studying people who "can't calculate a tip" has to do with understanding extremism/intolerance? Seems the cap fits.
Edit: I'll also add that I'm STEM and I don't agree that "binary thinking", "intolerance of ambiguity", etc are bullshit things, so watch out when you put a whole category of people in your camp. I'm rigorous in rationality and I've come to this stuff through my own questioning, watch out because the non-conservative can also put an aggressive rethoric to use.
This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.
Social norms are powerful. People outside of them often see better ways to do things (or what they believe to be such). Constructively, they might start a business to fix the world. Destructively, they might blow up what they don't like.
That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.