Can't wait for governors to say that, out of abundance of caution, they won't accept engineers into their state. https://t.co/MZsVp3tH9y
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) November 17, 2015
NEVER ARGUE WITH THE NUMBERS, THAT’S JUST SCIENCE. True, they tend to be rigid conformists with severely limited interpersonal skills, but with patience and understanding most engineering majors can be trained to enjoy happy and even socially useful lives… I get a strong whiff of “tongue so firmly in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice.” From Henry Farrell’s Washington Post article:
… In a forthcoming book published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta, a renowned sociologist at the European University Institute in Italy, and Steffen Hertog, an associate professor, provide a new theory for why it is that engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. The following post is based on their earlier article for the European Journal of Sociology.
Engineers are much more likely to become fundamentalist terrorists
… More than twice as many members of violent Islamist organizations have engineering degrees as have degrees in Islamic studies. Nearly half of those terrorists who had degrees had degrees in engineering. Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance. They find a similar pattern among Islamist terrorists who grew up in the West – fewer of these terrorists had college degrees, but even more of those who had degrees were engineers…This isn’t because engineers are technically skilled or belong to certain social networks
Terrorist organizations don’t seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy. They don’t actually need many people with engineering skills. Many of the engineers in Hamas, for example, play administrative roles. Nor is the abundance of engineers explained by social networks (in which, for example, a couple of engineers might have been recruited initially, who would then recruit friends who would also be more likely to be engineers).It seems that engineers are common in clusters of terrorists that sprang up independently from each other, suggesting that there is some underlying factor that makes engineers more likely to be militants.
Engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of mindset and lack of opportunity…
Survey data indicates that engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists.Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it. They quote the famous right-wing economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argues that people with engineering training “react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar.”…
While many of my life-long friends and acquaintances are engineers of one stripe or another, I certainly don’t think any of them could be called terrorists. Quite a few capital-L Libertarians, and a second outsized cluster of committed Marxists, but then who doesn’t experiment with exotic impractical ideologies during their college days?…
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Apart from picking on engineers (and Repub pants-pissers), what’s on the agenda for the day?
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: #NotAllEngineersPost + Comments (159)