[cpks]

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.

[Animats]

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

Are management-level terrorists coming from former entrepreneurs? None of the top people in al-Queda were engineers. Bin Laden did come from a family that runs a huge construction company, but he himself never did anything in that area. Within ISIS, many of the top people were either career military or religious. Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi al-Dulaimi was a computer science student, though.

[caseysoftware]

> but he himself never did anything in that area

Other than earn his degree in civil engineering?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_life_of_Osama_bin_Lad...

[diskcat]

He probably earned it because his family is in construction and so it was the 'path' for him.

This is different from some suburban geeky guy who likes computers and decided to study electrical engineering in university. It reflects on his personality more.

[wfo]

The bar for being an engineer is so high these days. Even being an engineer isn't enough.

I know some Scotsmen who might be upset, but they aren't true Scotsmen.

[Gibbon1]

Not having read the article, but never seemed to me that any of these engineers ever practiced once out of college.

[GreaterFool]

In most companies management level people aren't engineers on entrepreneurs either. Isn't it sad that whether you work for a corporation or are a terrorist there's usually a management level guy that's better off than you?

[nibs]

The smartest people tend to do the most 'good' and the most 'bad'. It seems like no matter the endeavor, intelligence makes you much more likely to be successful. It also tracks pretty closely with how high conviction you are.

[HillRat]

It's really more likely -- and I'm replying without having read the topic article -- that this is related to the fact that developing states with "socialist" (I use the term advisedly) bents tended to privilege engineering, medical and scientific education in its universities, while not having economies capable of effectively supporting those graduates.

Take a bunch of middle and upper-middle class students whose parents had remunerative but unsustainable government sinecures, run them through the university system, then drop them into a repressive government and a poorly-managed economy, and you've got a potential tinderbox there. Now have the government suppress all political dissent so that only the ideologically-committed hard core groups survive, then release the pressure just enough for them to start recruiting those disgruntled students, and hey presto, there's your generation of terrorist engineers.

[Gibbon1]

I've read that the old socialist government in India produced more engineers and other technical people than the economy could absorb. And it was nearly impossible to start a business either. Why a lot of Indian technical people came to the united states to work.

I'm under the impression that in a lot of middle eastern countries it's not real hard to get into university. However the universities are corrupt. To get good grades means cheating and subtle and or not so subtle bribes to your professors. And once you are out if the fix isn't in for you, you're not going to get a job.

I've noted in my career that you have three kinds of engineering students. Those that go into it for the money. Those that go into it because they have some grand narcissistic idea that they'll changed the world. And those that are more or less happy to spend the rest of their career designing trash pumps. The first drift into sales and management. The second are potential a source of terrorists. And the latter are guys like me.

[leoc]

I wouldn't discount the possibility of a correlation between radicalism and the "engineering personality" (or the limitations of an engineering education) playing a significant role, but this other, more Marxian explanation strikes me as the best starting point. A young, smart, ambitious middle-class man with thwarted personal ambition is a dangerous thing, because when he sublimates his career ambition into some other goal—and for people from an Islamic background, fighting for Islam and achieving glory in the next life is a very obvious alternative goal—he's likely to make something like the proverbial dent in the universe.

> It's really more likely -- and I'm replying without having read the topic article -- that this is related to the fact that developing states with "socialist" (I use the term advisedly) bents tended to privilege engineering, medical and scientific education in its universities, while not having economies capable of effectively supporting those graduates.

And to be fair that emphasis probably really is quite rational, because engineers are probably the kind of people a rapidly-developing middle-income country most needs. Unfortunately setting up the pipeline of trained engineers isn't nearly enough on its own to ensure the rapid development, of course.

One reason I find that interpretation plausible is that this seems to have happened before:

"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."

That's from /Nationalism/ by Elie Kedourie http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/063118885.... http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918 : he's talking about Germany around 1800. This group of radicalised students produced colourful people like Karl Sand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand , and of course an ideology which was eventually to burn Europe down at least a couple of times. And they tended to be literary-minded types who'd studied theology in university. (Though no doubt that partly reflects that fact that relatively few people did technical subjects at university at that time.)

[jacobush]

This was a great parallel to ISIS and also places the culture in these countries somewhat similar to European culture 18th to 19th century.