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Comment by drauh | Hacker News Reader

Perception: there's a 75% chance my kid will be kidnapped by a pedophile. Reality: there's a 0.01% chance of the pedophile kidnap, but a 75% chance of drowning in the bathtub.

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.

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The question is, would the factual probability go up if the perceived probability goes down? ;)

Like all questions, the answer is "depends". :)

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.

I would argue it'd be negligible. We live in a world fueled by fear, primarily because it's now so easy to hear about the edge cases. I used to blame newspapers for this, but it's gotten so much worse with social media. Now even the most obscure topic that would have not warranted the cost of ink is being broadcast to people, made all the more persuasive because of the anecdotal nature of the medium.

what makes you think they would go up? I was a latch-key kid growing up and by the time real risks of adolescence like sex, drugs, and driving came up I already had years of experience managing risk.

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.

OK, but what if a parent believes that there's a 75% chance of kidnapping (reality: 0.01%), but they leave their child unattended? Arguably they haven't done anything wrong because their child was not exposed to any risk in reality.

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.

The first two rules of gun safety is that there is no such thing as an unloaded gun (a rule of attitude, admittedly), and that you never let the muzzle of a gun cover something you're not willing to destroy. Rule 3 is to not to put your finger on the trigger until you're on the target, which is not violated here, 4 is to be sure of your target and what's behind it, you might not be doing the latter since you're so sure it's unloaded.

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).

I'm sorry, but I think this is making the same errors in the opposite direction.

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...

> Yes, child abduction/predation is unlikely ... because we've adopted a huge number of countermeasures that close of this vector.

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.

The problem in claiming "the evidence says..." in cases like this is that the body of potential perpetrators is intelligent and adaptive.

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?

I'm having trouble building an internally consistent response because of things like how "changing a password" is a trivial change, i.e. I'm struggling to take into account the hypothetical in a way consistent with your intent and with what reality would have to work like for the hypothetical, as given, to hold true.

Mind trying again with a different example?

The smallness of the change doesn't affect the point I was making. [1] The point is that you can't simply look at the raw incidence rates and conclude that specific added countermeasures are unnecessary or irrelevant to the attacker's incentives.

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.

Incredibly interesting article on how ineffective terrorism is.

https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

So then the kill ratio wasn't 150:1 on 9/11? What (among points I made) is that replying to?

"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."

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.

That doesn't contradict me; it's consistent with my claim, in that (some of) the post-9/11 countermeasures sufficed to raise the difficulty threshold. I'm trying to make the point that there's a difference between random and intelligent/adaptive causes of death. Thieves attack security holes once they're made known, while bathtubs don't somehow become "more drowny" after the first person drowns in one.

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.

"Next time, it might help if you put the argument your own words"

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.

This was my original comment:

>>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.

> 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.

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!'

>There is no reason to think that the elasticity of crime is enormous and in ranges like 10 or 100....

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

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