ITT: plenty of silly speculation from people in armchairs about what they would prefer the causes of extremism to be (ignoring the well-researched book full of

ITT: plenty of silly speculation from people in armchairs about what they would prefer the causes of extremism to be (ignoring the well-researched book full of evidence written by experts). A lot of "No, all of the experts must be wrong and I alone am right. I'm an engineer and I'm /smarter/ than my peers, not more easily radicalized". Do you not immediately see how people with this attitude are so easily swayed toward extremism of all stripes? But we've been pretty effective about doing away with the humanities in our culture. The sneering, the derision, the contempt in which many STEM people hold those from the humanities is disgusting, and this is one side effect of it; our best weapons to combat terror and extremism are not engineered or built -- there is nothing stopping terrorists or extremists or radicals from understanding technical facts about the world and building things according to their desires. Crafting a weapon or circuit or bridge does not require that you think critically about society or culture. Engineers even here rarely think about how their work effects others, simply about the technical problems involved (wonder why so many engineers are complicit in surveillance/backdoors/etc?) since that is how they are trained (perhaps a throwaway ethics course jammed into an already-overloaded schedule in college). The way to combat extremism is with culture; a strong, vibrant culture with art and dialogue and critique and critical thinking. Every time a kid tells you he's studying philosophy and you say "remember in 5 years I'll want fries with that lazy humanities scum, get a real job" you're throwing our culture away. When our culture is gone and something like ISIS comes knocking, it's difficult to point to the iPhone or reality TV and say "look, our values are different from (better than) yours". We need to point to poets, philosophers, public intellectuals, artists, and say -- look. Our people are free to create* where yours are not. *So long as their creation has wide appeal and does not step on too many toes and can be mass-produced and turned into a viable business model. Contrast the argument with and without the asterisk.