What do terrorists study?

[nancylebov]

There I was, thinking it's "Weak Points of Western Civilization", but no. It's engineering! It's well-known to habitue's of rasfw that electrical engineers are prone to crank theories, but unfortunately, New Scientist fails to break it down by specialty.

But first, the efficacy of profiling when you're just using plausible guesses:

The extraordinary lengths the German authorities went to after 9/11 to track down potential terrorists are a stark example of how useless profiling can be. They collected and analysed data on over 8 million individuals living in Germany. These people were categorised by demographic characteristics: male, aged 18 to 40; current or former student; Muslim; legally resident in Germany; and originating from one of 26 Islamic countries. Then they were sorted into three further categories: potential to carry out a terrorist attack (such as a pilot's licence); familiarity with locations that could be targets (such as working in airports, nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the rail service, labs and other research institutes); and studying the German language at the Goethe Institute.

With the help of these categories authorities whittled the 8 million down to just 1689 individuals, who were then investigated, one by one. Giovanni Capoccia, an Oxford-based political scientist who analysed this case, reported that not one of them turned out to be a threat. All the real Islamic terrorists arrested in Germany through other investigations were not on the official "shortlist" and did not fit the profile.

However, after partial clue acquisition, we discover....

The next move was to find out what they had studied - and we tracked down 178 of our 196 cases. The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12 economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences. The over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant groups in the sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.

I'm tired of typing "blockquote", so I'll just tell you it's possible that Saudi Arabia is an exception because it's easy for engineers to find jobs there.

We also collected data on non-Muslim extremists. We found that engineers are almost completely absent from violent left-wing groups, while they are present among violent right-wing groups in different countries. Out of seven right-wing leaders in the US whose degrees we were able to establish, four were engineers: for example, Richard Butler, the founder of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, was an aeronautical engineer, and Wilhelm Schmitt, leader of the right-wing, extreme anti-government, pro-localism group known as the Sheriff's Posse Comitatus, was an engineer with Lockheed Martin. Among the total membership of the Islamic groups, however, the over-representation is still much higher.

This may explain why right-wing terrorists are better at killing people than left-wing terrorists, but it doesn't explain the political divide.

Strange....

According to polling data, engineering professors in the US are seven times as likely to be right-wing and religious as other academics, and similar biases apply to students. In 16 other countries we investigated, engineers seem to be no more right-wing or religious than the rest of the population, but the number of engineers combining both traits is unusually high. A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

What about other sociological factors, like class and sources of family income? The social backgrounds of the 9/11 hijackers caused some reassessment back in 2002, but didn't raise as many questions as I was expecting, regarding our models of violence in history. They appear, essentially, to have been bourgeois/middle class - the class associated with enlightenment/liberty and the formation of democracy in Anglo-America, which involved no small amount of violent protest. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the revolutionary period and the rise of democracy are taught through some heavily-tinted glasses in the US, which might be impeding a better understanding of revolutionary impulses in general.

Other than that, engineering, medicine and law seem to be favoured "good son" professions in Arabia and India (I state without quantitative evidence...) - they're also professions where people migrate often to train. Of these, engineering offers the shortest path to wage-earning... so I wonder if we're looking at a very particular income stratum, a particular relationship between the family, the student and the learning institutions, specific social pressures.

[andrewducker]

A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.

Good Lord I've known too many people like that.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.

But you've just described the generation of classicists who were educated around the First World War..... (1argely no longer with us, but Victor Davis Hanson, who is slightly later, represents the mind-set).

This may support the economic explanation: while none of them were on welfare, they had reasonably expected to rule the academic hierarchy, as Greek and Latin had always done, and found themselves presiding over a dwindling speciality.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Some other articles I read a while back pointed at the combo of having a hard degree and being on welfare. Immigrants in Europe are often restricted from taking jobs from the native population, and Arab countries have corruption issues. Both leave technically skilled men with nothing to do but hang around the mosque all day listening to the ranters. So if you're worried about your engineers turning to terrorism the solution is to give them some flipping work to do.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

This. And it's been known since the first couple of months after 9/11 that most of what the Hamburg cell of al Qaeda had in common was that they went into college programs that they felt certain would result in them getting good jobs, graduated, and found out that European racism locked them out of all of the jobs they were qualified for.

[madfilkentist]

I get really tired of hearing the words "right-wing" and "left-wing" tossed about as if they had clear, well-defined meanings.

The Salem Hypothesis

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It is the "[c]onjecture that an education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to [Scientific Creationism] viewpoints."

Re: The Salem Hypothesis

[inquisitiveravn.livejournal.com]

Ah you beat me to it. I'd talked to Nancy about it in person, and she wanted me to post it in the comments.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Back in the early days of science fiction, there appeared to be an association of engineering with left-wing ideas. Consider the Technocracy movement, for example, which apparently thought that the engineers could bring us all unlimited abundance (remember the slogan "too cheap to meter" about electric power?) if they were not held back from working miracles by profit-obsessed capitalists who wanted artificial scarcity. Of course, in those days, it was common for leftists to mistrust democracy and favor boards of experts being put in charge.

[avram]

When you say "association of engineering with left-wing ideas", do you mean to say that these ideas were beliefs held by actual engineers or students of engineering?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Key sources of the ideas were Thorstein Veblen, an economist; Frederick Soddy, a chemist; Charles Steinmetz and Howard Scott, both engineers; and M. King Hubbard, a geologist and the man who came up with "peak oil." Hugo Gernsback seems to have been influenced by them.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

remember the slogan "too cheap to meter" about electric power?

Not only do I remember it, I remember who said it and when:

"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter," he declared. ... "It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."

Lewis L. Strauss

Speech to the National Association of Science Writers, New York City, September 16th, 1954

[New York Times, September 17, 1954]

He was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time.

I am unaware of a connection between Stauss and the Technocrats.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Hey, cool, I'm dangerous! Pity I don't lean right wing or religious...

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

wait, who edits New Scientist? Maybe this is just the old enmity between scientists and engineers, suggesting the meccano-heads are incapable of dealing with messy, complex ideas like democracy.

Next up: architects.