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.<p>This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.<p>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.<p>That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>But hopefully, you've got a STEM degree, and can figure that fact out out yourself ;)
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>less</i> religious than their liberal arts counterparts, perhaps the engineers that remain religious are more inclined to become more so?<p>[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.
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?<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>*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.<p>Contrast the argument with and without the asterisk.
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.
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.
Let's see if we can avoid a flagkill this time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9118943" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9118943</a> . Perhaps the soothing presence of a princeton.edu domain name will do it.
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.<p>Would be reluctant to read too much into personally traits, when there are convincing other explanations.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-majority-on-campus-yes-were-biased/?page=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-major...</a>
I do wonder about their source data. I find it hard to believe that they have been able to perform proper surveys.<p>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.<p>And there i suspect we will find more engineers, because you need a certain set of skills and methodological thinking to pull them off.<p>Their equivalent of a engineering corps basically.
Interesting theory here:<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...</a><p>Basically applying reason to religion might end badly if religion is not weak enough to die in the process.
> Using rigorous methods and several new datasets, they explain the link between educational discipline and type of radicalism<p>Do they literally mean that the analysis was "rigorous", or do they just mean that some kind of quantitative analysis was performed?
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.
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.<p>The explanatory and predictive power of, "just sore losers" seems weak.<p>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.<p>Defense of any principles (right, left, or religious) is considered extremist and dangerously reactionary these days.<p>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.