Sunday, November 11, 2007

Engineering and Terrorism?

There is an incredibly interesting paper on the relationship between engineering and jihadist terrorism. It is even more interesting as it relates to the way people think in general, particularly in relationship to the mechanistic world view that came about during the Enlightenment and which resulted in scientific socialism. I learned about this paper from Arnold Kling at http://econlog.econlib.org/ , who learned about it from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution

The original paper can be found at:

Engineering and Terror

Razib also talks about it at Gene Expression where I left the following comments:

I recently read an article on student epistemological beliefs (that is, beliefs about how one gains knowledge) that points out some interesting facts about engineers (and other majors, of course). First, it seems that more "conservative" people have more naive epistemological beliefs. To be more accurate, those with less complex world views have more naive epistemological beliefs. An example of a naive epistemological belief is the belief that knowledge comes exclusively from an authority figure. Those with less naive epistemological beliefs believe that knowledge can be gained from numerous sources -- the more advanced the epistemological beliefs, the more sources are considered valid (but we also get into the danger of postmodern egalitarian epistemological beliefs, where all sources are valid, though the step beyond that is where you consider all sources, but are able to judge which ones are best. As it turns out, engineers 1) start off with the most naive epistemological beliefs, and 2) end up with even more naive epistemological beliefs. Every other discipline resulted in students having less naive epistemological beliefs, though some were better than others. The hard sciences moved students along the least, followed by the social sciences, with the humanities moving students along the most (though typically abandoning them at postmodern relativism, the next to least naive epistemological belief). So it seems that engineering makes people prone to totalitarian thinking even more totalitarian thinkers (insofar as they believe that there are absolute experts whose authority we have to defer to). This fits incredibly well into the spiral dynamics model as developed by Don Beck and Christopher Cowen.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Minor point: It was Razib, not Jason, who posted about this on GNXP.

Troy Camplin said...

Fixed. Thanks

Todd Camplin said...

I always knew those engineers where evil!

Todd Camplin said...

Hey, remember that engineer at Starbucks you talked to a bit. I seem to remember his belief was that it would take a small part of the world economy (or the world democracies, or national identities) to stop working and the whole world system would fall to dust. Engineer thinking on a global scale is a simplistic type of thinking. Simple thoughts a dangerous in the same way complicated thoughts are dangerous. The complex thinker is the truly getting closer to the nature of the universe.

Not that I am trashing engineers. The engineer has her/his purpose, but their thinking can not be applied to engineering complex systems like people's behaviors.

mikej said...

Actually, engineers learn by experiment. They try something and if it doesn't work, try something else, until they get it right. Politics, personalities, and authority are much more influential in the soft liberal arts disciplines. Isn't the uniform political correctness of American universities sufficient evidence?

It seems unlikely that the terrorists who purportedly threaten the United States are engineers. Engineers would have better sense than to waste resources on purely symbolic targets such as the World Trade Center. They'd attack our mostly unguarded infrastructure (e.g., pipelines, bridges, the power grid) for maximum economic impact. By depriving Americans of their weekly episode of Desperate Housewives, they'd bring this country to its knees in short order.

Obviously, that hasn't happened. If the terrorists are engineers, they must have been at the bottom of their classes. Considering their poor strategy and lack of initiative since 2001, it seems more likely that the terrorists are pot-smoking liberal arts majors.

Troy Camplin said...

Well, isn't bin Laden himself an engineer? And of course, the paper I sited shows that there is a high correlation between being a terrorist and being an engineer. I was talking about epistemological beliefs during education. And engineering is much more mathematical than experimental, esp.compared to the other sciences. It seems that engineers too, who see how easy it is to control and build simple structures, think society is a similar structure, and that it can and should be structured -- by them (Pres. Carter was an engineer, and he still thinks he can structure society as he sees fit). The point is, engineers are deeply, fundamentally conservative -- which can also be seen in their high religiosity vs. other scientists.

Now, to address the issue of the liberal arts, let me say that what we have there is egalitarian collectivism influenced by Marx and the Nazi philosopher Heidegger through the postmodern philosophers. They are prone to think that, because they are more sensitive and understanding, that they should be put in charge. And since they know more than you, they should be put in charge of your life. They are very much of the opinion that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. It's a different kind of thinking, that puts them in the position of authority. Either way, we have two different kinds of collectivist thinking with each of these groups. Butthe fac tthat they are collectivist 1) makes us mistake them for being the same, and 2) makes us also tend to disregard those similiarities too easily, when they appear to be inconvenient to our own ideology.