"Engineers are more likely to be terrorists" is different from "terrorists are more likely to be engineers".

You can imagine that engineering is a useful skill for terrorism and thus terrorist organizations might spend extra effort trying to recruit engineers. They may also have a higher survival rate working on behind the scenes tasks rather than firefights and suicide missions, which could cause a survivorship bias in data collection.

(It's also interesting how many foreign leaders and dictators have engineering or science degrees, and/or went to US universities prior to becoming leading figures in their home countries.)

> More importantly, engineers are for some reason especially likely to be terrorists.

Seems more likely you learn about engineers who become terrorists because they have the tools/knowhow/resources to pull something off. Without that it seems like it is more likely to get caught, give up, or do something no one would label terrorism.

edit - and it seems likely that this stat encourages terrorists organization to send members to get those degrees and recruit from engineers so it might be self reenforcing to boot.

Also, this assumes a similar demographic distribution to identified terrorists to unidentified ones. It's quite possible another class of people are more likely to be terrorists murders etc but don't show up in the data because for whatever reason they're better at hiding it.

But not physicists (at least, scientists), according to the article.

Reminds me of the Salem Hypothesis.

Osama bin Laden had a degree in civil engineering. I wonder how mathematicians rank against engineers

I remember reading something like this but in relation to elite overproduction, how if you have engineers sitting with their thumbs up their asses instead of working, they will disrupt society in a bad way

Overproduction theory, whether you believe it or not isn't really about engineers.

The idea is that you get a lot of elites which are highly educated and expect high positions in society, but end up bitter because reality falls short. Engineers break with this because in general they are actually quite well compensated.

The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees

This doesn't align with the scholarship on the subject. See Gambetta and Hertog https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/engineers%20of%20ji...

Im not saying it is impossible, so I dont see that as some sort of gotcha.

From Wikipedia: >Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.

Im focusing on the USA, where engineers, STEM, and the like have high social standing, and do relatively well economically. Your "scholarship on the subject" is from 2007 and is from before the term elite overproduction was even coined.

Engineers are technicians/craftspeople, not elites. They are compensated well much of the time, and respected, which means that many of them have more opportunities to become elites, especially when considering the intelligence that engineering degrees tend to filter/correlate with.

You hadn't mentioned that your focus was on the USA, but rather a general "The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees" which is why I provided a paper that directly contradicts your statement. Elite Overproduction is not a US-specific topic, and the paper being from 2007 does nothing to invalidate its findings or lessen its relevance to Elite Overproduction. Funnily enough, I hadn't checked astrange's reference that prompted this discussion, which is Gambetta and Hertog.

Probably fairly peaceful, intelligence or weirdness aren't at play here. The dangerous ones are those who deal in the practical realities of the world in ways that can effect change - they are more likely to have the means to do something. Engineers and chemists are ones to watch (whoever did the script for Breaking Bad knew his chemist stereotypes).

In my mind, the common threads with organize terrorism is utilitarianism and consequentialism. This way of thinking has a big overlap with stem fields based in logic and physics.

The perhaps concerning thread socially is the rise of utilitarian and consequentialist morality.

Hm... Widespread adoption of utilitarianism is a net negative for society°, therefore utilitarianism says that promoting utilitarianism is bad?

°I guess because it's too easy to make calculation errors that lead to major badness?

Maybe mathematicians just theorize about committing violence while engineers lean more towards the application.

Well there was this guy called Ted...

It's not Dunning-Kruger, it's because engineers have a very black-and-white view of the world. When they're engineering something, either it works according to specs or it doesn't. Also, engineers tend to be more religious and conservative for some reason; this is very different from scientists who are the opposite. I think this all works together somehow to make engineers more prone to extremism, to try to force the world to act the way they think it should.