Engineers of Jihad: Connection between Violent Extremism and Education

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry." — Charles Sanders Peirce, "First Rule of Logic"

What does studying people who "can't calculate a tip" has to do with understanding extremism/intolerance? Seems the cap fits.

Edit: I'll also add that I'm STEM and I don't agree that "binary thinking", "intolerance of ambiguity", etc are bullshit things, so watch out when you put a whole category of people in your camp. I'm rigorous in rationality and I've come to this stuff through my own questioning, watch out because the non-conservative can also put an aggressive rethoric to use.

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.

This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.

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.

That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.

This is the best explanation.

Besides engineering, the is another field that offers similar opportunities for upward mobility: medicine.

But medicine has a humanizing nature, just by virtue of having the betterment of the human condition as its main concern.

There are, of course, exceptions, like Ayman Alzawahiri.

There is no left, there is no right. There are two levers, connected to nothing, which we pull occasionally to quell dissent and give the illusion of self-determination.

We are like children in a shopping cart, pretending we're at the helm - we aren't.