Our findings about disciplines, personality traits, and political preferences are remarkably consistent. The outstanding result we obtained is that the distribution of traits across disciplines mirrors almost exactly the distribution of disciplines across militant groups…engineers are present in groups in which social scientists, humanities graduates, and women are absent, and engineers possess traits — proneness to disgust, need for closure, in-group bias, and (at least tentatively) simplism…
Wait a minute. There were no poets among the Islamic terrorists. Groundbreaking!
Although it could also be… there just aren’t many poets to choose from in the Arab world. As for women, I guess they just chose to ignore the Chechen Shahidka female suicide bombers or Tashfeen Malik, who was a pharmacy student. Come to think of it, my Walgreens pharmacist seems overly prone to disgust whenever I renew my anti-rash medication. I think I’m going to recommend surveillance.
Believe me, I’ve known some poets, and I dare say that I know a lot of women also. I can report that many of them have no problem expressing their disgust for a whole host of issues (Just an aside- never date a female poet when you have a rash unless you want to spark a holy war).
And in fact, there were/are plenty of left wing radical groups in the US and Europe populated by philosophers, social scientists, and poets. The book even mentions the Baader-Meinhof Group whose members were all lawyers and humanities graduates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
There are many others. Bill Ayers was an American Studies major, as was also a very good friend of mine. Ayers blew up the Pentagon. My friend is a journalist.
If disgust and group bias exclusive to engineers leads them over the edge, what is it that makes German poets go Che Guevara? I doubt it was a proneness to love and respect and societal openness that prompted the Red Army Faction to attack the German embassy and kill two hostages.
This book is a lot of spurious correlations grounded on speculative, unprovable assumptions. How do you measure simplism anyway?
Uh, no poets in the Islamic world?
Perhaps someone does not know what they talk about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Poets
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. You want to find a culture that honors poets–this is it.
Those arts loving Arabs certainly do have funny ways of honoring them
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/29/middleeast/saudi-arabia-poet-ashraf-fayadh-death-sentence/