lpetrich
Contributor
There's an interesting article in Slate on Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees? - By Benjamin Popper - Slate Magazine
The two main reasons:
* Difficulty of finding engineering jobs in their homelands. The main exception is Saudi Arabia, which has been able to create many more such jobs than most other Islamic nations have.
* Engineers have a mentality more suited to becoming Islamist terrorists than most other professionals. Some studies on US professors show that engineers are more likely to describe themselves as conservative or religious than professors in any other field.
Steve Bruce has noted something similar about engineers in his book God is Dead: Secularism in the West; that likely also explains the creationist-engineer phenomenon. It is sometimes called the Salem hypothesis, after it being noticed by a certain Bruce Salem. It's remarkably common for some creationist's scientific credentials to turn out to be an engineering degree.
That Wikipedia article quoted Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog:
Physics crackpots are also likely to be engineers: Pathological Physics: Tales from "The Box" - YouTube and its slides: Pathological physics
A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.
The two main reasons:
* Difficulty of finding engineering jobs in their homelands. The main exception is Saudi Arabia, which has been able to create many more such jobs than most other Islamic nations have.
* Engineers have a mentality more suited to becoming Islamist terrorists than most other professionals. Some studies on US professors show that engineers are more likely to describe themselves as conservative or religious than professors in any other field.
Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote.
Steve Bruce has noted something similar about engineers in his book God is Dead: Secularism in the West; that likely also explains the creationist-engineer phenomenon. It is sometimes called the Salem hypothesis, after it being noticed by a certain Bruce Salem. It's remarkably common for some creationist's scientific credentials to turn out to be an engineering degree.
That Wikipedia article quoted Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog:
Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of “monism” – ‘why argue when there is one best solution’ – and of "simplism” – ‘if only people were rational, remedies would be simple’.
Physics crackpots are also likely to be engineers: Pathological Physics: Tales from "The Box" - YouTube and its slides: Pathological physics