Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals? | European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie | Cambridge Core

Section 9 - The Engineering Mindset was an interesting part of the article.

edit: Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2009
This is an ooold paper

The proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than in any other disciplinary group: 57.6 % of them are either conservative or strongly conservative, as compared to 51.1 % of economists, 42.5 % of doctors and 33.5 % of scientists, 21.4 % of those in the humanities, and 18.6 % of the social scientists, the least right-wing of all disciplinary groups.
[...]
The Carnegie survey reveals an even more surprising fact, hitherto unnoticed, that strengthens the suspicion that the engineers’ mindset may play a part in their proneness not only to radicalise to the right of the political spectrum, but do so with a religious slant: engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 %, followed again by 61.7 % in economics, 49.9 % in sciences, 48.8 % of social scientists, 46.3 % of doctors and 44.1 % of lawyers.
[...]
One could question whether this mindset is unique to academic engineers. The answer is likely to be negative: similar results are found on the political and religious opinions of students, both for “un-socialised” beginners in the first four semesters and more advanced ones.
[...]
Still, one could further object, the phenomenon could be uniquely American. Some old evidence suggests that at least the right-wing bias occurs in the Middle East: a 1948 survey of 3,890 Cairo University students recorded the highest sympathies for fascist ideology among engineering students (Botman Reference Botman1984, p. 70). A survey of Canadian professors also found that engineers are the least liberal of all (Nakhaie and Brym Reference Nakhaie and Brym1999).

Unfortunately, non-US data that would allow us to combine political and religious attitudes are of much lesser quality.
[...]
The results from 2,816 cases in 16 mostly Western countries show that engineers were not more religious than other graduates and only insignificantly to the right of them. However, the combination of the two characteristics occurred far more often among engineers than the null hypothesis of non-correlation would predict – the only professional category in which this happened. Whereas based on individual scores on religiousness and right-wing attitudes we expected 9.4 % of engineers to share both attributes, 13.9 %, actually did (significant at 0.05).

Go on Youtube sometime and listen to the "rationality" of retired engineers.

Gotta be imperialist AF to ask a question this dumb.

Any informed person with a spine will oppose the imperialism and colonialism that's genociding people (esp muslims) and literally destroying the planet.

It's not that complicated if you're outside the imperial bubble.

edit: The abstract doesn't even make sense. Pretty sure that people with an engineering degree would be more frequent among engineers. Kinda obvious.

This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries.

edit2: They include "hamas" of course. This is pure propaganda trash.

edit3: The admission that their tiny sample is probably highly biased:

Our sample could be biased. For instance, lower-level operatives in certain groups are less likely to be reported, and these might have generally lower levels of education. Yet, there is no reason to expect a systematic reporting bias regarding the type of education.

edit4: Serving the Sauds...

Out of a “core” of 70 violent Islamists active in the recent domestic insurgency in Saudi Arabia, he found educational data on 36, 17 of whom had college exposure.

edit5: It's kind of "weird" (aka "normal") how they don't talk about the imperial terrorists. There are tons of engineers working for the MIC spreading terrorism. Why not use that as a comparison or baseline?

edit6: Equating left-wing and right-wing? Of course!

edit7: Their data is on the "left wing" is garbage. It's mostly one study from 1977 and a random batch of cherry-picked tales. Yet the authors feel comfortable making this extreme claim:

Among non-Islamic extremists, we find virtually no engineers in the violent left-wing... Only in some Middle Eastern countries has there been a significant presence of engineers among left-wing radicals.

edit8: lmao.

As the human resources manager of a large Saudi bank told one of us, in contrast to other countries where business graduates are the most sought after, their first recruitment target was engineers.

Conclusion: The imperial gaze and the lack of self-awareness is overwhelming.