What's the difference between perceived and real? Someone preceiving it thinks it's plenty real. I've never been in a traffic accident - is the need for seat belts and air bags real?
Ask people you know if they know anyone who's been involved in a plane crash, however minor. Most people are at least two degrees away from such an event even if they know a lot of people. It's rare to know someone who knows someone who's been involved in a plane crash because as traumatic as these events are, they impact a very small number of people, under 1000 per year world-wide. There are significantly more people that win over $1M in the lottery in the same time period, and most would agree that's a huge long-shot.
Now ask the same people if they've personally been involved in a collision. Most people over 30 have been involved in at least one, and it's not uncommon to know someone who's been involved in two or three. You probably know at least one person who's lost a friend or relative to a car crash.
The need for seat belts and air bags is absolutely real. You'd know this if you did even a cursory amount of research.
Numbers are made up.
Perception is not reality.
Another example: Trayvon Martin was a dark-skinned young male wearing a hoodie. Perception: he is a criminal casing the houses in order to commit a future crime. Reality: he was a kid walking home to his house.
Other examples: * Perception of the likelihood of terrorist attack, vs likelihood of dying in a fatal traffic crash.
* Perception that vaccinations cause autism, vs reality that vaccinations prevent fatal disease.
E.g. number of kids falling and breaking their arm will be larger, but the population is larger and medical care is better, now. So, overall, I think the risks are actually lower than when I was a kid running around unsupervised.
I don't know about the number of pedophile predators per capita, but I imagine that may be a roughly fixed proportion of the population. Kids now also have cellphones, so that's a lifeline kids never had in the past. So, I'd imagine that percentage would not really rise, either.
OTOH, when I look at how my ex has raised our kids I'm terrified that when they become independent they are going to get themselves into trouble and not have the experience to stay calm and get themselves out of it.
To put it differently, what if I point an unloaded gun at someone an pull the trigger? No harm is done, but if I believed the gun was loaded, the moral calculus would change. The reality that no one was harmed or even in danger is not necessarily decisive. What I believe to be true at that moment is the difference between a prank and attempted murder.
From the viewpoint of US law, you have almost certainly committed a serious crime, unless the other party is playing along, and also believes the gun is unloaded (and there has been at least one recent tragic training fatality where the gun indeed turned out to be loaded).
1) Yes, child abduction/predation is unlikely ... because we've adopted a huge number of countermeasures that close of this vector. That doesn't (by itself) mean you can just stop doing those measures and act like the risk is still low.
2) The risk of death by bathtub is not 75%.
3) Terrorists ramp up efforts against any vector they've found to be weak. While they currently account for a very small percentage of deaths, that doesn't mean we should have just shrugged our shoulders and done nothing, even basic measures like locked cockpit doors and ending the recommendation of passenger compliance.
4) Trayvon Martin was acting suspiciously and similarly to burglars -- peering into houses around the time there had been other burglaries and reports of similar behavior [1]. OBVIOUSLY he didn't deserve what happened (let's count how many people miss this clause!), but we don't know, as you're implying, that Martin was somehow merely walking home and not casing houses during a spate of robberies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin#Bac...
Actually, most of the social "countermeasures" were adopted after high-profile single incidents in the 1990s (perhaps largely because the larger 1960s-1980s crime wave that had been the pretext for expanding government powers in the law enforcement arena previously was ending, and a new pretext was needed) and later, when the overall rate of incidents had been dropping for decades (since, IIRC, the 1950s or 1960s), but media attention to them -- and hence public perception of the prevalence of incidents -- had, at the same time, been increasing.
AFAIK, there is little-to-no evidence that any of the "countermeasures" have had any significant effect on the prevalence of child abduction/predation.
Say someone cracks a major bank account by guessing "password" as the password. The bank changes the password.
I claim that the weak password was a security risk, and changing it was the right response.
Someone comes a long and gives me a data-intense lecture about "well, electronic bank theft was already declining, and it accounts for only a tiny fraction of financial losses, so changing the password was a waste of time, and was in the context of the IT department using a bunch of pretexts to order people around".
How would you refute that, given all the evidence on their side?
Mind trying again with a different example?
If you agree with that, then you agree with my general point and it's just an issue of which specific countermeasures survive a CBA.
[1] In fact, I chose a small change specifically to highly the absurdity of being bound by low/declining attack rates.
Your argument seemed to me to imply that terrorism is small fraction of deaths because we as a society have implemented countermeasures keeping their kill rates low. This article argues that we have few deaths from terrorism not because society is great at preventing terrorism deaths but because terrorists just aren't that motivated in causing large death tolls.
The argument I'm criticizing -- that you should change nothing merely because terrorism is a low fraction of deaths -- is actually rejected by the frequently-cited Bruce Schneier in the essay you linked. He advocated -- as I do -- that we change something in response to 9/11, specifically the cockpit doors and the hijacking compliance policy.
Next time, it might help if you put the argument your own words; when you only link to a massive document, I don't know which point you're criticizing and it shifts an enormous burden over to me without making it easier to identify the point of contention. Also, the headline is "terrorism is not effective", which is hard to reconcile with the several mass-kill attacks, and which doesn't appear to be related to the point you were using from it (that countermeasures are irrelevant in light of lack of motivation).
So I ask again, what are you criticizing? I agree that terrorist attacks are a small fraction of deaths, and most don't succeed. I am claiming it does not follow that nothing should be changed after an attack. If you have an argument against that, please explain why, as that would justify reversing the cockpit-door and passenger-noncompliance policies.
If you agree with those post-9/11 policy changes, you were agreeing with me the whole time.
I was just linking to what I thought was an interesting and related document that argues that terrorists are not kill maximizing agents.
We probably both agree that because of certain policy changes like a cockpit door there are a few less deaths. We probably also agree had we done nothing, terrorism deaths would not be anywhere near the magnitude of other things that kill us like bodies of water, cars, cancer, and heart disease.
I'm not arguing that all countermeasures have no effect. My intuition says how terrorists decide to go about terrorism has a larger effect on number of people killed than post 9/11 policy changes, but who knows.
Also I don't know who said we should change nothing in response to 9/11 but it definitely wasn't me.
>>Terrorists ramp up efforts against any vector they've found to be weak. While they currently account for a very small percentage of deaths, that doesn't mean we should have just shrugged our shoulders and done nothing, even basic measures like locked cockpit doors and ending the recommendation of passenger compliance.
There is no reason to think that the elasticity of crime is enormous and in ranges like 10 or 100. You can see this just by considering the tight range of crime across the US, and the considerable random variation over time, despite the huge differences in policing budgets and local factors which influence crime such as poverty. If everyone stopped caring about pedophiles, the rate of child abduction would be... very similar to what it is now, because there is not a huge population of pedophiles slavering at the fences and going 'darn! if only people would let their kids spend a few more minutes outside and take down that pesky 'neighborhood watch' sign, I would be able to kidnap hundreds of kids!'
Yes, there is -- people are fickle like that. Society often leaves methaphorical unlocked doors for a long time, that no one thinks to enter through -- but then once it becomes "a thing", you're an easy target if you don't secure it.
Do you lock your (literal) doors? If so, then I guess you must have mistaken beliefs about crime rates and the elasticity of crime with respect to door-bypass-difficulty?
See also my reply to dragonwriter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12346586
It's the car alarm problem -- if it's deterring theft, theft stats would go down, making us wonder if we need the alarm in the first place!
The likelihood of each is quite low, though - at least in western societies.
Risk is different - it's about what isn't even perceived to have happened in a given situation. If I walk in the street, there is a risk a piano may have fallen out of an airplane and be falling towards me.
If I perceive that as a risk, I may take countermeasures, in this example entering an underground garage would stop the (for me as a part of the example) hypothetical piano.
If I often take exaggerated countermeasures as a parent, I may cause harm to the child. The safest child would be the one locked in a bomb shelter on a healthy diet. It would protect against falling pianos, falling bombs, freezing to death, drowning, transportation accidents, school bullies, sexually abusive authority figures, house fires, sun burns - everything except an attack on the bomb shelter ventilation system.
The prohibitive costs excluded, no reasonable parent would do such a thing. (If air raid sirens go off, of course it still becomes reasonable to take the child to such a shelter - until the 'all clear').
If the child is never given a chance to be unsupervised, when will it learn to tell situations and behaviours that carry risk from those that don't? When will they develop their independent sense of judgement?
Anyways, to answer your -hopefully rhetorical - question: Transportation by car is risky on a population level. Playing in the forest or park is not even close. It may also be argued that allowing children a steadily developing autonomy from an early age leads to a lower risk over the course of a lifetime - since the child then steadily increases its ability to handle a risky world.
Therefore, I claim that unreasonable protection is the true neglect of the child.
[EDIT: Spelling]
It's an important distinction because it's impossible to have a discussion about how to manage risk without first having a true understanding about what the real risks are.