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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but i still wonder how big the chance really is ? All the numbers you see are usually country or even worldwide averages. But for example, if you live in Paris as a young professional who uses public transport a lot, flies a lot and goes to big public events regularly, i could see the likelihood being significantly higher than for someone living in a smaller town. Sure the average is really low, but as someone who is constantly around really crowded areas in a big european capital, i wonder how high the risk really is. Of course it's still irrational fear, i get that.

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If they really wanted to include this as a factor, that's the sort of analysis which they should be doing. I'm pretty sure that it would show the fear is almost totally irrational.

For example, 35 people died in the Brussels Metro attack. Inshallah that's the only attack on the Brussels Metro this year.

That's 35 out of an annual ridership of 135 million. [0] Thus the chance of you being a victim on any particular journey is 35/135 million. If you take the subway twice a day, your likelihood of being a victim of a terrorist attack is 0.019%. It's just not a real risk.

What really annoys me is that they already include the crime rate is a separate consideration. Is terrorism not a crime? I don't particularly care if I die at the hands of a suicide bomber or a random mugger, so it doesn't make any sense to dramatize the risk of the former when it can already be captured in the standard crime rate.

[0] http://www.stib-mivb.be/figures.html?l=en

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=35%2F135+million*365*2

But 135 million is the number of journeys, the number of unique people taking these journeys will be much much lower. If you take the metro twice every weekday, that is already around 500 journeys per year for one person, so the number of unique passengers per year would probably be much lower, more like single digit millions. The resulting likelihood is still low, but the chance of something happening over the next couple of years in a place that you are in frequently, thus forever shattering your sense of security in a city that otherwise has a super low crimerate is not that off. You don't have to be killed to be affected in a negative way by something like this after all. Adding to that is the fact that these kind of events have increased in frequency as of late and who knows how it develops in the future, especially if you country just took in huge amounts of syrian refugees without any background checks whatsoever.

I'm not sure what you're point is, because I captured that.

Each journey has a 35/135 million chance of you dying in a terrorist attack. I multiplied that by the number of journeys you would take per year.

"your likelihood of being a victim of a terrorist attack is 0.019%. It's just not a real risk"

If you do that for 50 years, your risk is now almost 1%!

I am sorry, but the risk of dying from cancer, heart problems or car accident in the working life period of ages 20-65 lifespan is comparable to that 0,95% "composite subway terrorism" risk.

So if the security problems in Belgium continue, you should totally worry about it.

Your lifetime risk of dying from heart disease is 20%. For cancer, it's slightly lower. [0]

So yea, even if you ISIS continued to carry out a major terrorist attack on your subway every year for the next 50 years, it would still be a relatively tiny risk.

[0] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/how-scared-should-w...

Most of your heart disease risk is after the age of 65 (if you live in a developed country).

However, most of your terrorism risk and car accident risk is before the age of 65. This is where they dominate.

Do you think that car accident risk is real? How much fatalities from car accidents were there in Belgium this year?

"Lifetime risk" is stupid metric, borderline fradulent. I don't care about dying at the age of 85, would welcome it after all. I'll care a great deal if my relative dies at the age of 30 or 40.

This does not make sense. The bombs don't select by age.

Also, one would have to accumulate an overall score, cancer, heart, terror. I'm quite sure all these factors are different per region.

"35 people died in the Brussels Metro attack […] It's just not a real risk

28 people died in traffic in Brussels in 2015 (https://bestat.economie.fgov.be/bestat/crosstable.xhtml?data...), and Belgian traffic is dangerous, compared to Western Europe. So, if the 35 is not an outlier, I would call it a real risk.

Yes, it isn't large, but I would guess most unnatural deaths are from causes that each have 'negligible' probability.

Personally, I don't think fear of dangerous traffic is a very useful metric for deciding where to live either.

Also, if ISIS does successfully conduct an annual terrorist attack on the Brussels Metro then it might be something worth being more afraid of. At this point, treating it as a major factor in deciding where to live is just fear-mongering—especially when I personally think a place having previously suffered a terrorist attack lowers the future risk.

I read the same thing after the Paris attacks. Attacks caused 137 deaths and 368 injuries. This is low compared to the Paris population (2 million in the city, 10 million in the urban area). But personally, several friends were seriously injured in the Bataclan, and many of my colleagues knew victims too. You don't have to be a direct victim to suffer from an attack. Nearly every young parisian is linked to a victim. So, no, it's not a "totally irrational" fear.

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