| Of course technical people would be the ones you find behind successful acts of destruction. But that does not mean that all engineering and hard-science types are more likely to become terrorists. Right, but that's not what I said at all. Regardless of why there is a correlation between engineering education and terrorism, there is a correlation; whether you're equipping potential terrorists with the tools to commit terrorist acts, or somehow making non-terrorists more terroristic, the end result is the same. It just means that if you take a random sampling of people and you test them for terrorist potential you will find that the technical ones will do better at it. That's interesting; I hadn't heard that the same kind of study had been duplicated elsewhere. Do you have a source? Before I saw the study, I was struck by how many of the 9/11 hijackers had an engineering, compared to, e.g., American terrorists. (The Unabomber is the closest analogue, and his academic background was fairly abstract). What I think is that if having an education will make them less susceptible to brainwashing. And yet that effect is clearly counteracted by whatever else it is that makes engineers more likely to blow stuff up. If they're half as willing but ten times as able to commit terrorist acts, we still lose. |
The high school kid with sharpshooter skills can do more harm than the one without, the professor with a good and solid understanding of chemistry will be able to do more damage than the one that studied English poetry in the 17th century.
Technology is a two-edged sword (for want of a better analogy), you can do good with it or bad. Technology education is neutral as well.
The people that have access to technology decide what they can do with it. And that means that if you educate people in a country where terrorism is high that you will proportionally educate more terrorists.
But that's not a reason to deny the others of that education, in fact that's an excellent reason to educate all of them, which will to some extent level the advantage of technically inclined people bent on destruction.
Check out the high schoolers that are technically inclined, I'll bet you that a good portion of those that studied chemistry got in to it because they liked to play with stuff, and in the process learned a thing or two about explosives, maybe even played with them.
I know I did. And if I should turn 'terrorist' I'd probably make a half decent one, as would anybody else with some understanding of technology.
What stops people from doing stupid stuff though is not just their technical education - or lack thereof - , but their overall education and worldview.
And if you were a terrorist in the making, aged 15 or so and nicely brainwashed by your environment, told to go study engineering, you would do it to and you'd possibly excel at it.
So, that might even be the spot where you might find out who these people are and deflect them before they can do real harm.
You'll stop losing by creating economic parity and making sure that those in the world that would turn to terrorism have too much to lose themselves.
You'll never achieve that goal by denying them an education, that makes the disparity even greater.