Sometimes columnists get it wrong! A recent example can be found in Aftonbladet, where Saga Cavallin in her culture article  ”Här är väljargruppen som ingen pratar om” (Here is the voter group nobody talks about) published on 13 September, uses vacuity as an argument to attribute all manner of evils to engineers.

Cavallin writes that “The engineering mindset of the Swedish national character has given us ball bearings, Bluetooth and dynamite. But it has also been blamed for racial biology, forced sterilisation and the global export of soulless arena EDM. Perhaps it is also partly responsible for four years of the most sadistic, inhumane and anti-democratic politics witnessed on this side of the 1930s.”

This argument is based on two unusually flimsy lines of reasoning. The first is a study of around a hundred people active in anti-media online communities, half of whom were found to have an engineering background. The second is the book Engineers of Jihad, which claims that engineers are over-represented among violent Islamist groups. In the study, around 200 people could be linked to a specific educational background, of whom just under 45 per cent had studied engineering subjects.

Even more serious is the conflation of over-representation with the characteristics of the majority. While it may be true that 50 people in a study of hostility towards the media are over-represented in relation to that group’s share of the labour market, to conclude that this characteristic is possessed by the majority of practising engineers is misleading and incorrect.

It is similar to when it has been noted that immigrant men are over-represented among rapists, and this characteristic is then attributed to all immigrant men. Similarly, when it is said that people with certain mental disabilities are over-represented among those convicted of violent crimes, it is assumed that all, or a significant proportion, of people with these disabilities are potential murderers.

Similarly, it seems somewhat odd to claim that an IT consultant in Mörbylånga is likely to have a hostile attitude towards the media and an engineering-oriented mindset based on a study of Islamist groups that advocate violence in another part of the world. This line of argument is reminiscent of a 31 May 2024 editorial in Dagens Nyheter by Gina Gustavsson, who used the same study that Cavallin is now relying on to claim that there is a link between engineers and white supremacy and neo-Nazism.

Drawing the conclusion that an entire profession suffers from a democratic mindset deficit based on a hundred or so hand-picked interviews and a book on terrorism is precisely the sort of reasoning that is usually labelled populism when applied to immigrants or young people, for example. It involves selective sampling, a simplified explanatory model and a dig at a group that rarely gets a chance to defend itself in the culture pages. To label media-critical right-wing movements as populist while constructing an argument based on the same method is, to say the least, both pointless and tendentious.

While it is not unreasonable to suggest that engineering education shapes a way of thinking – as does all education – it is illogical to single out an entire professional group as enemies of the nation. Moving from this observation to singling out an entire professional group as enemies of the nation requires considerably stronger evidence than has been presented. Until then, it is merely a prejudiced game of pick-up sticks dressed up in an unworthy scientific guise.