Engineering Terror

Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence who inspired Benito Mussolini and admired Lenin, trained and worked as an engineer.

I think the key to this puzzle is that these guys are failed engineers.

Mrs Tilton said @ #4 said:

As an aside, why so defensive, Brett and Jack? You guys engineers by any chance?

[shuffles uneasily] Well, um, er, sort of, in a modest way: RAE (Res). Our demolition charges work. In most cases we make things rather than break them, boring stuff like roads & bridges. Some of my best friends are proper engineers, though.

Four years ago I couldn’t even spell terrorist, and now I are one!

Terrorists and engineers are rational, can-do guys who avoid hand-waving liberal arts bullshit. They roll up their sleeves and get the job done.

afaik stalin left school at 16, without taking his exams, so i’d think the actual effects of professional higher-ed on his future dictatory mindset are moot: he never had any higher ed

belle: OK, perhaps Stalin is better considered “uneducated” at the advanced level. I suppose a better point would be that none of these dictators benefited from science or engineering education at any sophisticated level, or showed any scientific or engineering orientation (unless you count his success in the Soviet Union’s machinery of “scientific socialism”, which I do not — the peer review system of show trials, purges and work camps seems too deeply flawed to me) ; this is also true of Stalin; apparently what little education he had was religious.

But the others in the list did attain or at least aspire to a classical or arts education.

Sophie Scholl et alia relied on ideals derived from their classic liberal arts education when they resisted Hitler.

Chris E@6: Yes, it’s interesting that left-wing terrorist groups have very few engineers but more law and humanities students. So what they are finding seems to be a correlation between engineering and the political ‘right’ (whatever that may mean across different countries). Does this correlation hold up worldwide? I would like to know. I know that here in Holland engineering students do tilt to the political right.

\begin{ramble}
I find it impossible to make good sense of the relations between academic background and political stance. Spanish Law students apparently tilt towards the left, as people with a concern for rights fought the fascists. But Dutch Law students are on the right, though judges are socially progressive but economically centrist. The post-Stalin Soviet nuclear program became a hotbed for dissidence as the scientists were left some intellectual freedom to do their research. Yet a study about an American nuclear base found that many physicists there belonged to apocalyptic Christian sects. But I heard the physics faculty in Tehran used to be active in resisting the clerical regime. And clearly poets, authors and philosophers have been all over the place politically.

Apart from the possible correlation between engineering and the Right, I suspect the correlations between economics and the Right and sociology and the Left are pretty widespread. I can think of no good a priori reason for this. I would also hypothesize that the usually politically neutral natural sciences might be drifting leftwards, as their ecological concerns are ignored by the current right-wing establishment. (People who claim to have a natural science background and downplay, say, global warming, are usually engineers)
\end{ramble}

14 years (8 years school) was the normal school leaving age in Germany and Austria even decades after the worldwar. Hitlers 10 year school was an upper 20% thing back then…

As a physician, I confess some nostalgia for the glory days of the past, when MDs were prominent leaders in the violent overthrow of governments.

Everyone has heard of Jean-Paul Marat, of course. But few still remember Giovanni da Procida, the founder of the resistance movement against Angevin rule of Sicily that still lives on in the Mafia. Lasting accomplishments shine the brightest. More recently, we have George Habash.

Now, it seems, the engineers are passing us up. At the risk of going out in a blaze of amateur sociology, I would attribute my profession’s falling behind in this race to the complacency born of material success. Nothing ruins the character quite so thoroughly as entering the upper middle class. It would seem that engineers are having a rougher time of it.

tom bach: I don’t know of such an example, but on the other hand we’re much less likely to find out about such cases, because the life stories of terrorists are not, I think, as well known as those who participated in murderous political movements. And perhaps there are fewer of them?

Agreed about Stalin, who (according to wikipedia) rebelled in some measure against his religious training while he was undergoing it; but seminary training is, I think, closer to typical liberal studies than it is to science or engineering. Wouldn’t such seminary school include some language training, and some reading of church fathers whose writings are also influential in philosophy and history? But this is somewhat beside the point, as in answer to “belle le triste” I have already agreed to simply lump Stalin under the heading of uneducated at any advanced level, and evidently without a scientific or engineering bent.

I think the best counterexample is still Pol Pot, who does seem to have been some kind of engineer or at least trained technician.

tom bach: Re: Stalin, Wikipedia says of his earlier primary school theological education: “His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants. He and most of his classmates at Gori were Georgians and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to speak Russian, a policy set by Tsar Alexander III. Stalin was one of the best students in the class, earning top marks across the board. He became a very good choir singer and was often hired to sing at weddings. He also began to write poetry, something he would develop in later years.”

Additionally, the seminary he later attended continued to teach Russian.

So it would seem his education included at least:
– Russian language
– the Georgian orthodox religion
– music
– possibly poetry

What we don’t find in there is sufficient training in biology or even the scientific method to understand why championing Lysenkoism was stupid.

Re: my first point — 10s or 100s of millions of people participated in various of the 20th century’s political movement horror shows. I can’t imagine more than a tiny fraction of that number joined terrorist cells or movements. Therefore, there is far more biographical information concerning interesting cases in the former category. Finally — who is more likely to recount her or his life story: a person of letters, or an engineer?

Its not Wikipedia, I’ll grant you, but this description of the actual education that took place and the methods of control used sound more Wackford Squeers than not. The link further argues that Stalin studied revolutionary political literature and not theology.

It is also worth pointing out, that Hitler was notoriously lazy and profoundly ignorant; in large measure because he never studied anything and read less. He enjoyed rambling monologues filled with made up facts.

First up, the sample sizes for these studies are really problematic. Second up, I used to be an engineer, so this stuff does kind of make me feel a bit defensive.

I also think mixing in Bedell (for example) and some others maybe messes up the clarity of the discussion. When someone is bipolar and goes on a shooting spree it seems erroneous to treat it as another “cold, calculated act of terror.”

With all that said, and without going over stuff already mentioned in the article, I think “engineering education” is sometimes a matter of imparting sub-standard, rule-based problem-solving. So you get some engineers who aren’t taught to think, per se, so much as apply an odd mix of algorithms, heuristics and number-crunching to problems. Some portion of them, in turn, are just not very knowledgable/interested in how human society works (until, perhaps, it bites them on the nose.)

The key syndrome that may relate to “propensity to certain kinds of psychopathic acts for (ostensibly) political ends” is that they are educated to/spend a lot of time following logic from a given starting point/set of premises. If you’re able to find someone like this at a vulnerable point and feed them some premises about “what’s really going on” – then they may end up another figure in these statistics.

Or to be more glib – there’s a link between all the “numerate” disciplines and psychological traits that seem to amplify skill with numbers and math but reduce empathy. The economists settle for destroying society, the scientists are either too impractical to cause problems or simply create world-ending devices. It’s the engineers who end up with alarm clocks and plastic explosive…

In general I think liberal arts majors make poor terrorists (Weather Underground?) and soldiers (Spain 1936), but just so theories are quite popular, so have at it.

The amount of harm done by engineers who become terrorists is rather small in proportion to the amount of harm done by engineers who work for, say, Lockheed Martin or BAE.

For once I agree with Brett: if you want to use your engineering skills to help topple a democratic government or just kill a large number of people, becoming a terrorist is a pretty ineffective way to do it.

No, I don’t think you got my point. Yes, if you want to topple a democratic government, terrorism is probably not the best approach. You probably want to go into politics. But what does it say about engineers who build bombs which don’t go boom? Heck, I learned to make things go boom in Jr. High, most of my peers in college could whip up infernal devices from stuff lying around the dorm and expect them to work. I know they could, because it was our idea of fun. We came from a generation when chemistry sets had chemicals in them, after all, and building rocket engines from scratch got you merit badges, not a perp march.

If the guys I knew back in college wanted to kill mass numbers of people, blast it, mass numbers of people would die. The only explanation I can see for the low body count “engineers” involved in terrorism rack up, is that they’re not competent engineers.

Brett:
But you are possibly a different kind of engineer than the ones who blow things up.

The article notes that people with an engineering training are less likely to confuse the radio with the brakes: less likely to think they are qualified to work with explosives because they really liked Keanu Reeves in Speed. At the same time, the researchers note that they are more likely to be trustful of authority[1]. Possibly these are people who went into engineering because they wanted a career, not because they had loved science since before they were teenagers, and consequently learned to think about scientific carefulness as “following the rules” rather than as pursuing an ideal or as doing what Nature demands. (Though this is also consistent with their being bad engineers as you suggest.)

[1] Than whom? Than physics Ph.D.’s, accountants, or executive vice presidents? James Wetterau makes a good point that there are a lot of unanswered questions. For example, what role does the Bowling Alone thesis play in all this?

The only explanation I can see for the low body count “engineers” involved in terrorism rack up, is that they’re not competent engineers.

Some of them are incompetent but in many cases the body count is incidental. They may even prefer a low body count. Terrorism is about showing what can be done. The 1996 Canary Wharf bombing is an obvious example. Two deaths and a few dozen injuries were quite enough to make the IRA’s point, given the scale of the damage to property.

Terrorism is also usually about maintaining the support of a much larger section of the population who wouldn’t resort to terrorism themselves but sympathise with your aims and may feed you, fund you and help you avoid detection. You don’t do that by killing people for the sake of it.

in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented

I read this as “Attacks requiring specific mechanical and technical proficiencies are conducted disproportionately by individuals who have trained in those sorts of proficiencies,” which… does not surprise me. Maybe I’m being inappropriately flip.

What would be more interesting/nontrivial: to establish a link between providing financial support for terrorism and engineering, if one exists, to show that engineers are disproportionately supportive of terrorism. Or perhaps, show that engineers belong disproportionately to right-wing hate groups, some such thing.

Yes, killing people is not the goal.

Indeed, to be provocative about how we define it, terrorism is the ‘art’ of blowing up a few empty buildings (of a certain category) so people are afraid to enter the rest of them. Disruption of a particular institution is generally the goal, not the death of its constituents… by which measure, though, American right-wing terrorists are still largely failures. What institutions have those incidents of terrorism significantly disrupted? Perhaps because they’ve confused spectacle and statement-making with disruption, or perhaps because they’re prevented from sustaining the kind of prolonged assault which would be necessary to engender enough fear for disruption.

I read this as “Attacks requiring specific mechanical and technical proficiencies are conducted disproportionately by individuals who have trained in those sorts of proficiencies,” which… does not surprise me.

Perhaps some come from countries in which greater value is placed on technical education because they see the need to get stuff built. Engineers from a lot of different countries may be just following the career path the government wants to herd them into. So you should be EVEN MORE SUSPICIOUS of people who CHOOSE engineering.

Jack @5, Brett @32,

my remark was more good-natured ribbing than anything else (though I am gratified to see that you both are, in fact, engineers).

Jack, my grandfather did much the same sort of thing during the second world war. From what I’ve heard, he enjoyed the occasional opportunity to blow stuff up real good, but mostly got stuff built instead. He died when I was far too young to ask him what he thought about creationism, though I have no reason to think he would have had anything but contempt for it. On the remote chance that, all evidence to the contrary, he was in fact a terrorist, a small perverse part of me insists he’d have been a highly effective one (filial piety and all that). As a certain football club, along with its entire fan base and stadium and its surrounding district did not, in fact, disappear in smoke and flame during his lifetime, therefore, I’ll conclude he was innocent of all charges.

Tom Bach: Interesting excerpt. It says that at least part of what I initially suggested, which you pooh-poohed, is in fact correct: that the seminary would have taught him languages. In fact, Rappaport tells us that they required a “taxing curriculum” of language training, to wit “Latin, Greek, and Old Church Slavonic”. All the sources we have adduced agree that Stalin was also subjected to mandatory Russian training there and earlier.

So the meat of his education seems to have been language, language and more language, along with “interminable” religious services and readings from texts that were doubtless almost all or all religious in nature. Earlier in his primary school days, he seems to have shown a particular facility for singing in the choir. His surreptitious self-education consisted of reading revolutionary literature, notably Marx.

I admit that this is nothing like a modern liberal arts education, but it has a lot more to do with the humanities than with either science or engineering, which was my only point concerning Stalin’s education. Wikipedia and Rappaport both seem to support this perspective equally well.

No, they’re just making fun of the nerds.

Only some nerds. Note, though, the most notable left-wing (-ish) terrorist of the past couple of decades was a mathematician.

Given the range of educational opportunities available to students in Stalin’s day, his followed a course that favored apparently oppressive religious and Russian nationalist indoctrination along with several subjects commonly thought of as falling within the humanities. Despite the oppressive nature of his schools, he appears to have had some talent for his studies; he got good grades. Additionally, he showed an interest in poetry, revolutionary political thought, and even talent at the proto-professional level as a singer.

I never said Stalin had a liberal arts education. You have brought the issue up a couple of times, and I took pains to make plain that I do not make any such claim. Search the discussion for the term “liberal arts” and you will see that I am right. So you need not speculate on any difference of definition there, because I never brought it up. Several messages back I described Stalin as simply uneducated at any advanced level.

But given what education he had, the intellectual talents and interests he exhibited in adolescence went to the study of the humanities more than anything else (or would you deny that rigorous training at the high school level in Latin, Greek and other languages, or learning and cultivation of choral singing talent, or reading in political philosophy, counts as the humanities?). Certainly there is no evidence of any engineering or science there.

James Watterau:
A couple of points:
1) you wrote: On the other hand, the 20th century’s worst dictators of both the left and right (I’m thinking particularly of Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Stalin) seem to mainly have undertaken or aspired to courses of classical studies.
I confess, I half assumed you were kidding, it such a silly argument. You did, it’s true more or less retract the claim at one point only to reassert it later in a weaker form.
2) G&H show that engineers are 2 to 4 times more likely to be terrorists than the rest of us; you show that out of the eleventybillion liberal arts or classical studies students in the world, exactly none of the great dictators rank among them.
3)Oh and incidentally, G&H argue, whether are right or not I cannot possible say, that it is exactly the content of an engineering education and the socialization that goes with that helps explain the over representation of engineers among terrorist.

Unless I’m missing something obvious, isn’t the simplest explanation the most likely- many people might wish to blow something up in retaliation to an injustice. But only a chemist has the knowledge to do so. That is, I can imagine that there are any of a number of people who wish every bit as much to visit harm upon upon their foes (and might have excellent reasons for doing so.) But they simply don’t have the means to do it, or don’t think that they do. Engineering types do, or at least, think that they do.

“Among Communists, anarchists and other groups whose shining ideal lies in the future, the researchers found almost no engineers. ”

In Australia that’s not the case – there are quite a few engineers in various anarchist groups. For instance, the Indymedia codebase was started by a group of engineers here and has …. oh, wait, almost by definition a codebase is built and maintained by engineers. I could also point the mouse at a number of other famous internet institutions who blur the lines between anarchism and libertarianism, in some cases being run by anti-statist libertarians (to coin an oxymoron). For instance, the line between the specific anti-statism of libertarianism and the generic anti-statism of anarchism is quite blurry for people like WikiLeaks and the EFF. Do they really just want a different state, or do are they generically anti-authoritarian?

One other point is that traditional political change comes through hours and hours of meetings. Also lots and lots of talking. By and large those are not things engineers have a lot of time for. It’s noticeable that our local political parties, for instance, have few to no people with technical backgrounds, and I suspect that has a lot to do with the ratio of talking to doing.

Which is a problem – we get wacky junk out of our political parties as a result. Heavily subsidised opera and olympic sports teams while agricultural research gets cut back, for example. The party I support has a few anti-science policies but I can’t bring myself to get involved enough to try to change them. The numbers are not good – at least 2000 hours over 3-5 years to change one policy. Arrrrgghh… much easier to blow something up.

The 9/11 terrorists, or whoever gets credit for their idea, didn’t have to be especially creative. Tom Clancy had the villain of his novel “Debt of Honor” fly a 747 into the Capitol in 1994. Awkward–Dick Cheney used to say he loved Tom Clancy, but after 9/11 it was the government line that nobody could have predicted the plot. Also, engineers love Tom Clancy because his novels are tech savvy and orderly. Plus they have more time to read now that the trains are mostly run by computers and the caboose is gone.

ice9

“And engineers who want to build a bright, shining future have no shortage of career options outside terrorism.”

Maybe. If I’m not mistaken, Saudi Arabia has lots of un- and under- employed college graduates, including engineers. They have the money to educate them, but no need for them.

“and yet, Brett, capitalism has failed far more often than communism and yet US engineers have no problem following that doctrine. of curse I guess the question is what group of people is being failed”

Well, I suppose that’s so, for certain understandings of what it means to fail. However, the direction the machine guns were pointed on the Berlin wall suggests that understanding of “failure” was not widely shared among people with the greatest acquaintance with communism.

I think one should make a distinction between midlevel terrorist operatives, and those who made it to the top of a dictatorial system. I think they are quite separte groups of people and personalities. As for engineers, they are usually people who have choosen a narrow technical path in life. They almost always accept the conventional wisdom of the group they were raised with. Scientists OTOH are much more intellectually playful, and not so likely to assume that their own groups ideas are the only correct way. So a scientist, probably views terrorist (in service of his people) ideology with some suspicion, whereas the engineer is more likely to ask “how can I help”. So if this distinction is correct (not in toto, but statistically so), engineers are likely to be pretty accepting of the main memes of “his people”. Should they feel oppressed, and think terror is the way out, he is more likely to agree.

Dr. Science @16: You appear to be claiming that individuals on the autism spectrum are more likely to be involved in terrorism than others.

Do you have any evidence that that’s true? Or is it just based on your general impression of what individuals with autism are like, combined with a bit of speculation?

Henry: Just for the record – are you equally happy for people to post equivalent speculations about – say – links between race and intelligence; or Jews and the banking system? Or is it just people with ASD that are conisdered fair game on Crooked Timber.

I’ve noticed in Australia that older (50+, but particularly retired) engineers are grossly over-represented among global warming delusionists (though there are also plenty of counterexamples). By contrast, as Moz observed above, younger (<30) engineers seem to be much more inclined to progressive views, environmental concerns and so on.

I think it’s a mixture of cohort effects and changes in the jobs for which new engineers are likely to be hired.

The first piece I read onCT was this exact same tudy, many winters ago. Has anything changed? there must have been two dozen al qaeda number 2s captured sin sc then

What Doctor Science actually said was this:

I actually assume it’s all related to difficulties seeing inside other people’s minds, something at the very edge of the autism spectrum. For people with such minds, engineering is easier than other studies, so that’s where they end up.

My understanding is not much different from this. If it’s wrong, I’d really like to hear about it.

I have a 3yo nephew and grandnephew, a 2yo grandneice, a 15 mo mixed pair, and two more on the way. It’s impossible not to be anxious about their development, and their responsiveness, their attentiveness to me, is profoundly reassuring. What am I missing?

I reckon that a lot of the terrorist “organizations” that these asocial and hierarchical engineers are joining are actually self-organizing semi-democratic cells, not part of a strong heirarchy, and requiring a modicum of negotiation and social skills to form and run. So I wonder if the caricature of engineers presented here actually works as an explanation for their membership of such organizations.

Hey man, I’m an engineer and it is not because we seem socially unadjusted that we actually are unable to take most social interactions for the complete bucketloads of shit they really are – but if you find solace in the charicature that others make of you, knock yourself out!

“I’ve noticed in Australia that older (50+, but particularly retired) engineers are grossly over-represented among global warming delusionists (though there are also plenty of counterexamples). By contrast, as Moz observed above, younger (<30) engineers seem to be much more inclined to progressive views, environmental concerns and so on."

I think it’s a combination of knowing how computer models with excess parameters can be gamed, and remembering the global cooling panic of a few decades ago.

The imaginary global cooling panic that climatologists never took very seriously, though journalists did.

What fun. Brett tries to perpetuate the global cooling meme.

Since I was a young professional in the mid-to-late 70s and interested in climate change, I of course remember that this never happened. Although Schell’s book on nuclear winter did predict cooling after a nuclear war. Quite another matter.

And, since I grew up reading rightwing literature – including the beginnings of the denialist/anti-science campaign in the pages of National Review and Human Events in the late 60s and early 70s – it has been interesting to watch the creation of the “global cooling scare” myth from whole cloth in the 90’s and now. No one appears more eager to rewrite history than those who screamed loudest about “revisionism” in the 70s.

On the substance, the question is “overrepresented” compared to what? What’s the expected number of engineers among terrorists?

Seems to me that this entire phenomenon is explained by the fact that engineering degrees in many middle-income countries are somewhat analogous to law degrees in the US, i.e. a generic professional degree particularly important for anyone trying to enter into the political class.

Bad Jim @77

Briefly, because a full reply to what you said here and on the previous thread is going to take time which I haven’t got right now, though I hope to get back to it later:

The section of Dr. Science’s post that you’ve quoted back at me contains the phrase ‘it’s all’. The referent of ‘it’ is not given to us in the quoted section.

What do you take it to refer to? I take it – from the context – to refer to an attraction to violent extremism.

I’m happy to be corrected on this, though I suspect that the only person who could do so authoritatively is Dr. Science herself or himself.

You’ll note that I’m not objecting in the same way to the claim that there’s an association between ASD and an aptitude for engineering (although it would, in fact, be nice to have some evidence for that, too. But that’s rather tangential to the point I’m trying to make. )

While that’s one thing that Dr. Science is saying, it doesn’t seem to be the only thing. (and if it was, her/his contribution would be just as off-topic as you take my response to it to have been.) I may have misunderstood the point; but the quotation you’ve given doesn’t establish that.

Doctor Science argued that people at one end of the autism spectrum are self-selected into engineering and the sciences, because they find the humanities difficult to comprehend and conversely find science and math easier. She also seemed to argue that the higher representation of ASDs in STEM fields was correlated with the higher representation of extremists and terrorists, in such a way that suggests ASDs might be disproportionately represented among terrorists.

I think the first sentence is very probably true, for many reasons. However, that way of explaining things leaves other things out. For example, people with perceived traits associated with ASDs might be encouraged by their teachers to avoid fields that rely heavily on language (in addition to their being self-selected). And within some groups, traits negatively associated with ASDs may result in kids’ avoidance of math and science even if they’re good at math. This also leaves out the way math is treated culturally and thus by grade school teachers and parents, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers the hype a couple of decades ago about how the US has a dysfunctional attitude towards math learning. The way it was originally phrased seems to carry implications of laziness and avoidance for those who don’t pursue humanities courses even if they excel in math, which may be part of the reason why it seemed insulting.

JQ@73: I myself find it difficult to associate global warming denialism with excessive trust in authority, but YMMV.

I’d also argue that those at that end of the spectrum are also better

The spectrum includes a lot of different things, and ASD generalizations are tough to make. Some folks on the spectrum have an attention span, some don’t, some have an attention span for particular things, some don’t. Regarding the “empathy” assertions from a little while ago, the inability to read someone’s feelings in personal contact is not the same as having no feelings for people, and the assertion of Temple Grandin’s inability to make personal connections belies Temple Grandin’s career, in which she seems interested in helping folks out. Doesn’t necessarily meet a strict definition of “empathy” but those on the autism spectrum are not necessarily restricted to seeing other people as weird automatons, and indeed can understand how some people feel, if not in the moment of contact. Sorry to divert the thread further.

Hey, don’t underrate the destructive abilities of writers!!
When this group was planning the takeover of a small city, the main problem was how to move a lot of cars and people into the city at once without the police noticing.
The guy who came up with the solution was a playwright (well known, actually). A funeral procession.

Akshay at 17. Do you have a handy reference for this comment:

“Yet a study about an American nuclear base found that many physicists there belonged to apocalyptic Christian sects.”

I am curious and have not yet found it via Google.

Thanks,

ct

“Doctor Science argued that people at one end of the autism spectrum are self-selected into engineering and the sciences, because they find the humanities difficult to comprehend and conversely find science and math easier. “

I don’t know; I got a 780 on the Verbal SAT, and only 710 on the Math. (This was back before they started messing with the scoring, too.) I didn’t find the humanities particularly hard to understand, I just doubted they’d pay well. Or lead to a billet on a star ship. (Ok, I was optimistic about progress in space flight. We could have been building star ships by now, if we had wanted to.)

Want an alternative theory for why engineers might be more likely to end up terrorists? It’s not anything about them, but the people around them. Growing up as ‘nerds’, your average engineer may have been subject to some pretty vicious bullying as a child. That sort of thing can leave you awfully bitter.

@99:

Want an alternative theory for why engineers might be more likely to end up terrorists? It’s not anything about them, but the people around them. Growing up as ‘nerds’, your average engineer may have been subject to some pretty vicious bullying as a child. That sort of thing can leave you awfully bitter.

Why do I get the feeling that all of a sudden I know a whole lot more about Brett than I really wanted to?

Praisegod Barebones, thank you for your thoughtful and courteous reply. I don’t think the comment that excited your ire suggested that people with ASD were inclined to terrorism. The part I didn’t copy referenced the Salem hypothesis, that purported scientists who are creationists are predominantly engineers. (It ought to be noted that physicians are over-represented in that crowd as well.) The implied connection between a lack of insight and ideological rigidity is, okay, a bit of a stretch.

Nevertheless, I read it as another instance of the jokes we tell about other professions, particularly those most adjacent to our own. Database jockeys put down system programmers by flaunting their paychecks, &c. I’ve even been tempted to claim that I didn’t pursue math beyond a B.A. because I wasn’t crazy enough. It would be plausible, but the truth is somewhere between my not being good enough and not being interested enough. I’ve known a few mathematicians, none of whom was conspicuously crazier than I was then, and by now I’m soporifically boring.

The “bullying” hypothesis certainly seems valid for a particular class of terrorism: school shootings.

But it’s difficult to tell whether, e.g., Harris and Klebold would have become engineers, because they hadn’t reached the diverging specialization part of the educational system yet.

I would also like to point out that a reduced capacity to intuitively perceive or predict the emotions of others doesn’t commit you to a belief that they don’t have any, let alone a desire to kill them, and also that correlation is not transitive and so two things may be correlated with a third without being correlated with each other. Accordingly, to the extent that any insult to people on the autism spectrum was implied, I dispute it and call for more direct evidence before concluding anything of the sort.

Engineers’ emphasis on “working memory” would seem to reinforce authoritarian tendencies, or perhaps they are functionally the same in the brain. The engineering prof’s observation, above, are intriguing.

Engineers, like lawyers, do seem prone to assuming that their narrow technical training privileges anything else that might pop into their heads, as if the social assumptions they picked up in Podunk were as certain as avogadro’s number. I’m reminded of the author of The Turner Diaries.

But this may be more a function of the social prestige that attaches to a degree that does not necessarily require that they reexamine the social assumptions they brought from Podunk. They are enabled without necessarily being able. It never ceases to amaze/amuse me, the number of engineers and lawyers who presume to dismiss things they know nothing about as “liberal bullshit,” as if they had magical decoder glasses or something. Anecdotally, it does seem to be the engineers with three hours of undergraduate statistics who think they can prove that evolution is impossible because there hasn’t been enough time for random mutation, blah blah blah.

But that’s this humanities dude’s rough sketch.

I’m late on this because pgbb covered it, but — bad Jim, you and I did indeed read the it-referent in “it’s all related” in different ways; to me that said terrorism = difficulty seeing inside other people’s minds = autism, i.e. that people with ASD are disproportionately likely to be terrorists, because it’s an empathy issue which leads to becoming a terrorist, and [2] people with ASD are also disproportionately likely to be come engineers, so [3] that’s why so many engineers are terrorists. Which is problematic, and which seems to be being carried on in a different form by bianca steele, for one (terrorism = lack of emotional intelligence = autism). So it’s worth pushing back against.

attempting to close errant italics tag — apologies for it.

I am really bothered by the ease at which people come up with explanations how engineers are born henchmen, what with their inborn lack of empathy and gullibility and autism and god knows what.

“Engineers emphasis on working memory would seem to reinforce their authoritarian tendencies”? Seriously?

Substance, the NYT piece starts out quoting Henry Farrell’s joke post, notes that he wasn’t serious, and goes on to state that G&H say the same thing entirely seriously. (I’m afraid to say whether the Times piece seems to be misleading, because for one thing I’ve only glanced at one of G&H’s articles, which is in a field I’m not an expert in, and for another thing it might show I prefer “clear answers” where clear answers are not to be found–which is apparently a trait conducive to terrorism.)

that people with ASD are disproportionately likely to be terrorists, because it’s an empathy issue which leads to becoming a terrorist

This is conflating two very different meanings of “empathy”: whether or not you can easily tell what someone else is feeling, and whether or not you care about the happiness or suffering of others. Plenty of skilled manipulative sons of bitches (for lack of a more precise term) have the first without the second, so I don’t see why the reverse would be so implausible for people on the autism spectrum. (Ironically, if the people making the argument showed a bit more empathy(1) toward people on the autism spectrum, they might be moved by the predicament of someone unaware of where other people’s emotional tripwires are, but still trying to avoid blundering into them, as well as they can. That is, if they had sufficient empathy(2) towards them; maybe they don’t.)

The stereotype that people on the autism spectrum don’t *care about* other people’s feelings (as opposed to, or in addition to, merely not understanding them as well as “normal” people, again for lack of a more precise term) IMO derives from mistakenly attributing bad faith to social mistakes on their part, when those mistakes actually arise out of their inability to sense and/or predict emotions. If there’s one thing worse than being blindfolded in a minefield, it’s having everyone else assume that of course you know where the mines are, just like they do, and you’re just setting them off on purpose to be an ass.

Like most stereotypes, it is factually false in a substantial number of cases and can be seriously unfair when applied where there is no good factual basis for it.

P.S. Obviously if you have the goal of terrorism first, the usefulness of engineering training is clear, so I wonder if we’re looking too hard at this problem. It might depend on the age of recruitment. Speaking of recruitment, it might not happen at random; if terrorist organizations are trying to prioritize the people who would make the most useful recruits (and not just tacit supporters), they have a reason to focus on certain types of engineers and not, say, literary critics. Obviously they don’t have complete free choice, but almost any attempt to steer people with the right skills into the operational arm of the organization could produce some pattern like the observed one.

“Engineers emphasis on working memory would seem to reinforce their authoritarian tendencies”? Seriously?

No, not seriously: you left off my apostrophe.

Yes, ‘kill and drill’ methods of learning, for instance, are also favored by the worst sort of homeschoolers with the same results: dogmatic jerks with high SAT’s.

Of the men Gambetta and Hertog interviewed how many were female?

I’d still like to know: Overrepresented relative to what?

Yes the question of overrepresented to what is very important.

As a petroleum engineer myself, I have to chime in here:

I also doubt that engineering education, or perhaps any specific education generally, has such effects on people as some are claiming here. In my opinion it’s much more likely that people might have certain traits/opinions/etc. before they start a specific higher education, and that this is one of the reasons (among many others) that they choose this education.

That engineers might have useful skills for terrorism that for instance teachers or economists lack, could be a reasonable explanation. But is this really the case? As an engineer, I don’t think I learned much at university or in the workplace that would be much useful for terrorism, except perhaps some basic chemistry. So with the possible exception of some kinds of chemical/process engineers (or why not chemists?), I can think of many educations/occupations that would be more useful. Obviously people working with explosives in for instance the construction industry, or people with a military background know more about this kind of stuff. I would think that mechanics, skilled workers in some industries, carpenters, perhaps farmers, all would have more useful knowledge for terrorist purposes than the average engineer have. But the reason might be that it’s much harder for a farmer in a third world country to travel somewhere, for terroristic purposes or otherwise, since they would not have gotten visas even if they could afford it, than it is for an engineer.

Does this work?

The comment box seems to eat unmatched close tags…Too bad.

Only a moderator can fix this.

Clever.

Back when my dad was an EE, I was pretty sure he drove a train and wore a cap and striped overalls. That would have been pretty cool.

One might suppose grape growers would be naturally inclined to terroirism. Oh wait.

This will probably get fixed, but for now it appears that if you make what you feel is an unassailable argument, you can sabotage replies by leaving an unbalanced tag to render subsequent comments unreadable, or at least mildly risible.

Along the lines of “there must be a pony here somewhere”, is it now possible to say “socialism” without getting stuck in moderation?

and test

Norwegian Guy @ 144(1) makes sense (though I think a significant fraction of engineers are better thought of as upwardly mobile than as middle-, much less upper middle-class–my understanding is that the upwardly mobile are actually more reliably right-leaning than the comfortable).

But … That engineers lean toward the right when they vote, and in certain other ways, is consistent with their having other characteristics that are more associated with the left. If they become radicalized, which trait is responsible? If they become radicalized toward the right and not the left, is that because of principle or opportunity?

(2) It is, I think, not just economic interest or identification with a corporation that leads them to deny the reality of global warming. It’s also the fact that they often reserve to themselves the right to reevaluate the evidence, no matter how many people disagree with them, and no matter who those people are. On the other hand, it may well be that some kinds of engineering education can have the opposite effect, making people less likely to reevaluate evidence for themselves. These two kinds of people probably have different likelihoods of becoming terrorists.

Only a minority of engineers are upper middle class, though I my be a larger portion in the low- and middle income countries terrorists often come from. My point was that engineers are not working class, though as you note many are upwardly socially mobile so it’s not unlikely that their parents might have been.

Not if you buy a bunch of puts on airlines and calls on guns manufacturers.

Scott@142: LOL, you got me there :-)! (But actually I am a lapsed physicist.)

This engineer is late to the party.
The website for the magazine Spectrum of the IEEE has an interview with Hertog about the issue at hand. Take a looksee.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-are-terrorists-often-engineers