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throw0101ayesterday at 2:08 PM0 repliesview on HN

There's a decent amount of research that finds a correlation between engineering degrees and terrorists:

> According to two European social scientists working in Britain, Italian Diego Gambetta and German Steffen Hertog, who present their case in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, the presence of engineers among known Islamist extremists is 14 times greater than can be explained by random distribution. It was a finding the authors reached with caution and even a certain resistance. “We are social scientists,” Hertog explains in an interview, “so we are always seeking socio-economic explanations. We accepted this idea that there might be personality traits, expressed first in choice of profession and then in political ideology, very reluctantly.”

* https://macleans.ca/news/world/why-do-so-many-jihadis-have-e...

> This article demonstrates that individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent among violent Islamists worldwide than other degree holders. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.

* https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/29836/1/Why_are_t...

* https://spectrum.ieee.org/extremist-engineers