5 ms·

Google's approach presumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by ignorant people. They will link to media from outside the viewer's filter bubble, so the ignoran

by panarky 10y ago

Google's approach presumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by ignorant people. They will link to media from outside the viewer's filter bubble, so the ignorant Daesh recruit would become educated and choose another path. But is ignorance really the root cause? Researchers found that Islamist radicals are disproportionately well educated, and frequently have an engineering background. https://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Jihad-Connection-Extremism-Education/dp/0691145172/ https://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Jihad-Connection-Extremism-... Using rigorous methods and several new datasets, they explain the link between educational discipline and type of radicalism by looking at two key factors: the social mobility (or lack thereof) for engineers in the Muslim world, and a particular mindset seeking order and hierarchy that is found more frequently among engineers. Engineers' presence in some extremist groups and not others, the authors argue, is a proxy for individual traits that may account for the much larger question of selective recruitment to radical activism. If prospective terrorists are already well educated, will linking to alternative viewpoints tell them anything they didn't already know?

nickff 10y ago
To further your point, there are a number of studies that show how exposing political partisans to opposing viewpoints (and people on the other side) usually pushes them further into their own camp.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Probably related: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  On the other hand, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes fact.
tptacek 10y ago
Uh, don't the people who buy shitty SaaS products also tend to be well-educated? Do poorly-educated people tend to have a strong need for A/B optimization tools?
- byebyetech 10y ago
  The only difference is that in normal ads you provide ads to people who are looking for such product. While here you are trying to do the opposite. For example, I am searching for Drone because I really love them and decided that I want to buy one. What google ad will make me not want it ?
  - forty 10y ago
    I am sure it happens often that advertisers target search for some competing products to convince you to buy their product instead.
mindslight 10y ago
To be fair, not running an adblocker is a form of ignorance.
77pt77 10y ago
> If prospective terrorists are already well educated, will linking to alternative viewpoints tell them anything they didn't already know? Of course not. People joining know what they're getting into and why. These approaches are borderline delusional.
js8 10y ago
> But is ignorance really the root cause? Researchers found that Islamist radicals are disproportionately well educated, and frequently have an engineering background. Yes, ignorance is the root cause (well.. technically speaking there is never a "root cause" since you can always ask another round of whys). The problem is that smart and well-educated people can become ignorant. The studies of these people also found that they are typically big believers in conspiracy theories. And I think that's the crux. Conspiracy theory is like a cancer of the mind. When you believe in some conspiracy theory, then everything that other people are saying, or evidence they provide, is categorized as invalid, with reasoning that either those people are part of conspiracy itself or hapless masses brainwashed by the conspirators. So effectively, you decided to discount all external inputs on the matter (in other words, you chose to be ignorant). The ingenious part is that it's not strictly irrational. Even if you close your mind to external evidence, rationality can have its field day, you can still work things out through logic. (And for sure, external inputs can be confusing and look inconsistent too.) It's like in a logic system which is inconsistent - anything can be proven within it, and that limits seeing its own inconsistency. (Luckily, the diversity of possible opinions of conspiracy theorists significantly limits spread of their theories.) I have seen very smart and educated people fall prey on this. Libertarians, AGW deniers.. They tend to argue on rational/logic grounds rather than look out for the evidence. I think we should teach people, if your theory requires conspiracy of more than, say, 10k people, then it's a giant red flag and you should by all means reconsider the evidence.
- peterkelly 10y ago
  I agree with your comment, but I can think of one example, depicted in a recently-released Oliver Stone film, that is a counter-argument against your last statement. The most unfortunate thing about conspiracy theorists is that they can occasionally turn out to be right.
  - js8 10y ago
    > The most unfortunate thing about conspiracy theorists is that they can occasionally turn out to be right. Well, them being correct from time to time doesn't justify the method they use (pure logic ignoring empirical evidence). What I call "conspiracy theory" is an unproven claim, or something for which there is contradictory evidence. Once proven, it's simply a "conspiracy", and there is nothing wrong with belief in existence of (proven) conspiracies.
Jugurtha 10y ago
You're right, but there's more to it. This is a complex issue that when people talk about candidly most often provokes violent reactions. I give you an example: I live in a country that has suffered a bloody civil war that involved Islamist radicals. After a certain time, there were people from the intelligence community, the military, and eye witnesses that came forward telling that security forces committed acts of violence disguised as Islamist radicals. This is an old recipe (false flag). The rationale is that other states and local population started to worry about the situation and pushed the local government to negotiate, so the armed forces allegedly burned any legitimacy of the Islamist factions committing things that would so badly damage their image, they'd dictate the name of the game. There was a debate called "Who kills who?" (i.e: who's really committing this?) and the other old recipe was used: calling the people who ask such questions conspirationist and pointing at their tin foil hats (as if nobody ever used false flag tactics and it was impossible for it to have been the case). Whoever even hints that the government had something to do with that would provoke a dismissive reaction and called a traitor for even acknowledging the possibility or failing to assert the impossibility of the government's involvement. The very act of not climbing on roofs and saying you're against something tags you as a sympathetic and/or a terrorist, even if you're truly against and adopting a neutral posture for the sake of intellectual debate and trying to have a cold, clinical, approach. You're expected to dance and jump and scream to prove you're against terrorism, or you're a terrorist. Similar to the masquerade in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or waving flags to show your patriotism. Gung ho and motto. Now, I'm not very qualified in these matters and I'm not a Statecraft guru, but the same people who are called terrorists in an armed conflict and are bombed in a certain geographic location (say Syria), are called allies and armed in another geographic location (say Libya). Sometimes some people are terrorist in a location, but other terrorists in the same location aren't considered terrorists. Where do people get the idea that Jabhat Annusra is different from Daech and where do they think Daech comes from? They all have a black flag and it may look the same for most people. Can be confusing. As the saying goes, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", and it's pertinent it came from the POTUS because if I'm not mistaken, the United States Declaration of Independence is, technically, an act of treason and terrorism against the Crown. Again, most of the people who'll read that will probably be outraged and think I'm sympathetic or that I don't know what I'm talking about when they've never actually seen a terrorist or been in a terrorist attack. I've outlived half a dozen bombs were on my butt more than I'd have liked (but I had it good, it beats being dead). We've seen what humans are made of inside. I mean "inside" literally. So if there's someone who'd fit the posturing anti-terrorist cliché like a glove, I'd come close. From my experience, though, it's the people who know the least who have the most clear cut opinions on that. It's simple from the outside. They even have more clear cut opinions than the people actively involved, as we speak, in counter-terrorism or intelligence who are more nuanced and think in terms of leverage, positions, weakness, operations, incentives, allegiance, practicality, etc. (This is why many in the Military for instance roll their eyes when they're greeted by too enthusiastic a display of patriotism and "thank you for your service" or just can't understand why on Earth someone is posturing as a tough guy and calling for "killing them all" from the comfort of a sofa). For the average citizen, a bomb is the end of the world and sets terror. For the entities involved, it's a message. They reason in colder terms that use armed factions as a means to achieve a political goal. States do it to each other, too. So what's a terrorist? Well, what's a douchebag? For most people, it's someone who doesn't do exactly what we want them to do. For the British, Americans were terrorists. For the U.S., Nelson Mandela was on a terrorist watch list until 2008. What's a terrorist attack? A bomb? Sabotage? Disruption? Killing? All in the playbook of every single Army through covert operations/Intelligence services of every single Nation. These are the things they have covert operations and special forces for. Everyone is a terrorist to someone and all of them think they're the good guys. If you accept that one is true to their cause and think they're justified and that people have different causes, it only makes sense that conflict is bound to happen sooner or later. Now, this is just one guy on Hacker News who's lived in a country and who could be a terrorist for all we know. But you read books written by U.S. former Intelligence Officers who have decades of experience on the subject. People who know what they're talking about and who've tracked AQ operatives for a long time. They understand the rules of the game. They point out that the discourse politicians have is very far from the truth, but it's the kind of discourse that's easier to sell. Scheuer for instance points out that terrorists attack the U.S. not because they hate freedom, but mostly because of the U.S. foreign policy. Someone can accuse me of knowing jack about this, but the guy who tracked UBL knows at least something about the topic. We get back to where you're right. The role of Engineers. Engineers are a special breed. I like to joke that if God exists, Engineers are the closest creation to it for he just made an MVP that seriously lacked features (and maybe funding, YC didn't exist back then), and Engineers took it from there. When the conflict started here, there were a lot of Engineers who took part in it in the start. There were a lot of EE majors, some ChemE and CS majors and they constituted the backbone of the early days. They knew exactly why they were doing it, the stakes, the arguments, etc. It was political and they were the armed branch. Then things got really nasty and the quality of the recruits degraded to the brainwashed who left school in 3rd grade and were in it because, well, they don't know and their recruiter told them there were virgins in paradise (USMC recruiters sell it with sex workers in Thailand to the ones who seem in need. They also sell it for patriotism). I think Engineers got in because they felt they have what it takes to do things. But here's something funny. Here's an article with an interesting infographic that illustrates the backgrounds of the Intelligence Community in the U.S. pre and post 9/11. https://news.vice.com/article/doctors-of-doom-what-a-phd-really-means-in-the-us-national-security-community-1 https://news.vice.com/article/doctors-of-doom-what-a-phd-rea... Do you notice anything interesting? I haven't read Engineers of Jihad, but Michael Scheuer touches on that in his books and you're saying the same thing: many of these people aren't the ignorant dudes the media make them to be, although their soldiers are for the most part. Many former Intelligence officers direct our attention to why these things are happening. There's a quote I liked from Mankiw's "Principles of Microeconomics": "People respond to incentives, the rest is commentary". Here's something interesting to read: https://20committee.com/2014/09/25/what-if-everything-you-know-about-terrorism-is-wrong/ https://20committee.com/2014/09/25/what-if-everything-you-kn...
yodsanklai 10y ago
> Researchers found that Islamist radicals are disproportionately well educated, and frequently have an engineering background. Those that attacked France were not the educated engineer type at all, pretty much the opposite.
bbctol 10y ago
There's a large difference between being well-educated and exposed to many political views; it's perfectly possible to be an engineer and ignorant of politics.
caub 10y ago
Those are not the ones who suicide-bomb
- pgeorgi 10y ago
  Mohamed Atta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta) wants to have a word with you. oh, wait...
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
True. Hate to say it but anyone who regularly reads and follows the Quran is likely to be more extreme. The book draws a clear demarcation between believers and nonbelievers and has a hosstile attitude to the latter.
- rubberstamp 10y ago
  have you read original quran to come to that conclusion. I have many muslim friends. We are very close and they have no hostile attitudes to non-muslims. From where I am, well educated people who are not muslims have converted to muslim and joined isis whereas 99.999% of born and brought up as muslims in this area have not.

by panarky 10y ago

nickff 10y ago

To further your point, there are a number of studies that show how exposing political partisans to opposing viewpoints (and people on the other side) usually pushes them further into their own camp.

rhizome 10y ago
Probably related: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
On the other hand, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes fact.

tptacek 10y ago

Uh, don't the people who buy shitty SaaS products also tend to be well-educated? Do poorly-educated people tend to have a strong need for A/B optimization tools?

byebyetech 10y ago
The only difference is that in normal ads you provide ads to people who are looking for such product. While here you are trying to do the opposite. For example, I am searching for Drone because I really love them and decided that I want to buy one. What google ad will make me not want it ?
- forty 10y ago
  I am sure it happens often that advertisers target search for some competing products to convince you to buy their product instead.

mindslight 10y ago

To be fair, not running an adblocker is a form of ignorance.

77pt77 10y ago

> If prospective terrorists are already well educated, will linking to alternative viewpoints tell them anything they didn't already know? Of course not. People joining know what they're getting into and why. These approaches are borderline delusional.

js8 10y ago

> But is ignorance really the root cause? Researchers found that Islamist radicals are disproportionately well educated, and frequently have an engineering background. Yes, ignorance is the root cause (well.. technically speaking there is never a "root cause" since you can always ask another round of whys). The problem is that smart and well-educated people can become ignorant. The studies of these people also found that they are typically big believers in conspiracy theories. And I think that's the crux. Conspiracy theory is like a cancer of the mind. When you believe in some conspiracy theory, then everything that other people are saying, or evidence they provide, is categorized as invalid, with reasoning that either those people are part of conspiracy itself or hapless masses brainwashed by the conspirators. So effectively, you decided to discount all external inputs on the matter (in other words, you chose to be ignorant). The ingenious part is that it's not strictly irrational. Even if you close your mind to external evidence, rationality can have its field day, you can still work things out through logic. (And for sure, external inputs can be confusing and look inconsistent too.) It's like in a logic system which is inconsistent - anything can be proven within it, and that limits seeing its own inconsistency. (Luckily, the diversity of possible opinions of conspiracy theorists significantly limits spread of their theories.) I have seen very smart and educated people fall prey on this. Libertarians, AGW deniers.. They tend to argue on rational/logic grounds rather than look out for the evidence. I think we should teach people, if your theory requires conspiracy of more than, say, 10k people, then it's a giant red flag and you should by all means reconsider the evidence.

peterkelly 10y ago
I agree with your comment, but I can think of one example, depicted in a recently-released Oliver Stone film, that is a counter-argument against your last statement. The most unfortunate thing about conspiracy theorists is that they can occasionally turn out to be right.
- js8 10y ago
  > The most unfortunate thing about conspiracy theorists is that they can occasionally turn out to be right. Well, them being correct from time to time doesn't justify the method they use (pure logic ignoring empirical evidence). What I call "conspiracy theory" is an unproven claim, or something for which there is contradictory evidence. Once proven, it's simply a "conspiracy", and there is nothing wrong with belief in existence of (proven) conspiracies.

Jugurtha 10y ago

You're right, but there's more to it. This is a complex issue that when people talk about candidly most often provokes violent reactions. I give you an example: I live in a country that has suffered a bloody civil war that involved Islamist radicals. After a certain time, there were people from the intelligence community, the military, and eye witnesses that came forward telling that security forces committed acts of violence disguised as Islamist radicals. This is an old recipe (false flag). The rationale is that other states and local population started to worry about the situation and pushed the local government to negotiate, so the armed forces allegedly burned any legitimacy of the Islamist factions committing things that would so badly damage their image, they'd dictate the name of the game. There was a debate called "Who kills who?" (i.e: who's really committing this?) and the other old recipe was used: calling the people who ask such questions conspirationist and pointing at their tin foil hats (as if nobody ever used false flag tactics and it was impossible for it to have been the case). Whoever even hints that the government had something to do with that would provoke a dismissive reaction and called a traitor for even acknowledging the possibility or failing to assert the impossibility of the government's involvement. The very act of not climbing on roofs and saying you're against something tags you as a sympathetic and/or a terrorist, even if you're truly against and adopting a neutral posture for the sake of intellectual debate and trying to have a cold, clinical, approach. You're expected to dance and jump and scream to prove you're against terrorism, or you're a terrorist. Similar to the masquerade in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or waving flags to show your patriotism. Gung ho and motto. Now, I'm not very qualified in these matters and I'm not a Statecraft guru, but the same people who are called terrorists in an armed conflict and are bombed in a certain geographic location (say Syria), are called allies and armed in another geographic location (say Libya). Sometimes some people are terrorist in a location, but other terrorists in the same location aren't considered terrorists. Where do people get the idea that Jabhat Annusra is different from Daech and where do they think Daech comes from? They all have a black flag and it may look the same for most people. Can be confusing. As the saying goes, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", and it's pertinent it came from the POTUS because if I'm not mistaken, the United States Declaration of Independence is, technically, an act of treason and terrorism against the Crown. Again, most of the people who'll read that will probably be outraged and think I'm sympathetic or that I don't know what I'm talking about when they've never actually seen a terrorist or been in a terrorist attack. I've outlived half a dozen bombs were on my butt more than I'd have liked (but I had it good, it beats being dead). We've seen what humans are made of inside. I mean "inside" literally. So if there's someone who'd fit the posturing anti-terrorist cliché like a glove, I'd come close. From my experience, though, it's the people who know the least who have the most clear cut opinions on that. It's simple from the outside. They even have more clear cut opinions than the people actively involved, as we speak, in counter-terrorism or intelligence who are more nuanced and think in terms of leverage, positions, weakness, operations, incentives, allegiance, practicality, etc. (This is why many in the Military for instance roll their eyes when they're greeted by too enthusiastic a display of patriotism and "thank you for your service" or just can't understand why on Earth someone is posturing as a tough guy and calling for "killing them all" from the comfort of a sofa). For the average citizen, a bomb is the end of the world and sets terror. For the entities involved, it's a message. They reason in colder terms that use armed factions as a means to achieve a political goal. States do it to each other, too. So what's a terrorist? Well, what's a douchebag? For most people, it's someone who doesn't do exactly what we want them to do. For the British, Americans were terrorists. For the U.S., Nelson Mandela was on a terrorist watch list until 2008. What's a terrorist attack? A bomb? Sabotage? Disruption? Killing? All in the playbook of every single Army through covert operations/Intelligence services of every single Nation. These are the things they have covert operations and special forces for. Everyone is a terrorist to someone and all of them think they're the good guys. If you accept that one is true to their cause and think they're justified and that people have different causes, it only makes sense that conflict is bound to happen sooner or later. Now, this is just one guy on Hacker News who's lived in a country and who could be a terrorist for all we know. But you read books written by U.S. former Intelligence Officers who have decades of experience on the subject. People who know what they're talking about and who've tracked AQ operatives for a long time. They understand the rules of the game. They point out that the discourse politicians have is very far from the truth, but it's the kind of discourse that's easier to sell. Scheuer for instance points out that terrorists attack the U.S. not because they hate freedom, but mostly because of the U.S. foreign policy. Someone can accuse me of knowing jack about this, but the guy who tracked UBL knows at least something about the topic. We get back to where you're right. The role of Engineers. Engineers are a special breed. I like to joke that if God exists, Engineers are the closest creation to it for he just made an MVP that seriously lacked features (and maybe funding, YC didn't exist back then), and Engineers took it from there. When the conflict started here, there were a lot of Engineers who took part in it in the start. There were a lot of EE majors, some ChemE and CS majors and they constituted the backbone of the early days. They knew exactly why they were doing it, the stakes, the arguments, etc. It was political and they were the armed branch. Then things got really nasty and the quality of the recruits degraded to the brainwashed who left school in 3rd grade and were in it because, well, they don't know and their recruiter told them there were virgins in paradise (USMC recruiters sell it with sex workers in Thailand to the ones who seem in need. They also sell it for patriotism). I think Engineers got in because they felt they have what it takes to do things. But here's something funny. Here's an article with an interesting infographic that illustrates the backgrounds of the Intelligence Community in the U.S. pre and post 9/11. https://news.vice.com/article/doctors-of-doom-what-a-phd-really-means-in-the-us-national-security-community-1 https://news.vice.com/article/doctors-of-doom-what-a-phd-rea... Do you notice anything interesting? I haven't read Engineers of Jihad, but Michael Scheuer touches on that in his books and you're saying the same thing: many of these people aren't the ignorant dudes the media make them to be, although their soldiers are for the most part. Many former Intelligence officers direct our attention to why these things are happening. There's a quote I liked from Mankiw's "Principles of Microeconomics": "People respond to incentives, the rest is commentary". Here's something interesting to read: https://20committee.com/2014/09/25/what-if-everything-you-know-about-terrorism-is-wrong/ https://20committee.com/2014/09/25/what-if-everything-you-kn...

yodsanklai 10y ago

> Researchers found that Islamist radicals are disproportionately well educated, and frequently have an engineering background. Those that attacked France were not the educated engineer type at all, pretty much the opposite.

bbctol 10y ago

There's a large difference between being well-educated and exposed to many political views; it's perfectly possible to be an engineer and ignorant of politics.

caub 10y ago

Those are not the ones who suicide-bomb

pgeorgi 10y ago
Mohamed Atta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta) wants to have a word with you. oh, wait...

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

True. Hate to say it but anyone who regularly reads and follows the Quran is likely to be more extreme. The book draws a clear demarcation between believers and nonbelievers and has a hosstile attitude to the latter.

rubberstamp 10y ago
have you read original quran to come to that conclusion. I have many muslim friends. We are very close and they have no hostile attitudes to non-muslims. From where I am, well educated people who are not muslims have converted to muslim and joined isis whereas 99.999% of born and brought up as muslims in this area have not.