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NancyLebovitz comments on Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction - Less Wrong
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Apparently not.
There's a surprising correlation between studying engineering and being a terrorist. I don't know if the correlation holds up for people who actually work in engineering rather than just having studied it.
I also haven't seen anything that looks solid about why the correlation exists.
Might it be that engineering teaches you to apply a given set of rules to its logical conclusion, rather than questioning if those rules are correct? To be a suicide bomber, you'd need to follow the rules of your variant of religion and act on them, even if that requires you to do something that goes against your normal desires, like kill yourself.
I'd figure questioning things is what you learn as a scientist, but apparently the current academic system is not set up to question generally accepted hypotheses, or generally do things the fund providers don't like.
Looking at myself, studying philosophy and also having an interest in fundamental physics, computer science and cognitive psychology helps, but how many people do that.
It's hard to say especially since terrorists are a tiny proportion of engineers, and it would be good to study engineers rather than guessing about them.
Engineer-terrorists mystify me. Shouldn't engineers be the people least likely to think that you can get the reaction you want from a complex system by giving it a good hard kick?
As another datapoint (though I don't have sources), I heard that among evangelical church leaders you also find a relatively higher proportion of engineers.
Isn't that assuming the reaction they want isn't for part of the system to break? We wouldn't have inducing armageddon as a goal, but other optimization systems don't work exactly as we do.
The reaction they want is the one their religious system directs, and the process that created those rules was different than the process that created humans, so I think you're indirectly anthropomorphising the religious system.
Some religious people do want to set off armageddon, and some terrorists want to start ethnic/racial wars. However, my impression is that some terrorists have more specific political goals.
Anyone who's done much repair knows the value of percussive maintenance.