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Comment by TTPrograms | Hacker News Reader

The number of people killed by terrorism in developed countries per year is, what, a hundredth of those killed in car accidents? A tenth of those shot in Chicago alone?

http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrori...

Terrorists have to kill literally hundreds of times more people per year for it to justify even the meagerest response. And one may argue about the economic impacts, but that's just a reflection of this underlying irrationality. If we had media focusing on "Keep Calm and Carry On" like Israel does now or Britain did in WWII it would have a much smaller economic impact - and terrorists would stop doing it, since it would be less effective at achieving the subgoal of "terror".

So this post is really begging the question IMO.

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Counterpoint: As Taleb points out, car accident deaths are 'thin-tailed'; that is, the rate of car fatalities is essentially fixed (and predictable by looking at past data), while terrorism is 'fat-tailed', and the number of deaths that would be caused by a dirty-bomb in Manhattan does not appear in historical data, and so it can't be 'priced' in the same way.

In the example of the dirty bomb, I'm not sure that the number of casualties/cancer incidences is especially high, based on some brief search. Sept 11 seems like it was a more damaging attack, for example, and that seems roughly as difficult to replicate as a dirty bomb. Especially given the trade-off between payload and shielding your substances enough to prevent detection by the myriad of radiation detection systems I'm sure DHS has installed in major cities.

But you are certainly correct that statistically these events are more difficult to interpret, and raw averages are not a fair comparison.

I have made this exact argument (quoting Taleb) but HN users are not receptive to anything other than a do-nothing approach.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14262011

This was reply to the grand-parent comment, mistakenly posted to parent comment.

Unfalsifiable arguments are not especially strong.

If the media wouldn't cover terrorism it would probably go away by itself. Israel is probably the only country dealing with it effectively.

Not just the media. A lot of current U.S. politicians apparently believe their best path to power is endless fear mongering. And it works pretty well.

That's interesting. While studying the Reichstag Fire in grade-school history class, I ran across a quote from someone in the Nazi propaganda machine, who asserted something to the effect that exerting control over a democracy was simply a matter of manufacturing a large enough exterior threat for them to fear. Sadly, I cannot remember the quote nor the author.

It was a well-discussed idea at the time, so I'm not sure who you're referring to. But Hermann Goering famously discussed it with Gustave Gilbert:

"[...] the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

That was the one! Clearly I didn't remember the details of the wording well enough to use the right search term.

That's like telling a bullied kid to ignore a bully (or stop giving him/her attention) and that it will make the bully go away, eventually, sometime in the future (maybe). It may work in the long-term, but it doesn't fix the problem of people hurting and being scared in the now.

I'm a simple person. We have government, and we pay taxes so we can get services and have safety (that is what they tell us). So, terrorism is something we expect government to fix and resolve. Just like all the other things listed above that kill more people per year than terrorism. We can't just say "let's ignore it", and "we have to deal with X acts of terrorism per year for a N years before the terrorists lose interest". That is what some of these "anti-anti-terrorism" arguments logically lead to, and rightfully it's a tough pill to sell to the public.

The bully won't go away, but terrorism's purpose is to terrorize as many people as possible. By spreading the word about it, the media is essentially doing it a service - popularizing terror.

Did it ever occur to you that terrorism could be aided by your or other government, using the taxes you and others pay? The US is arming rebel factions in Syria now. We'll see how that turns out. They armed the Taliban with Stinger missiles during the Russian war in Afghanistan. The Taliban took over the country and then harboured Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda. US ally Saudi Arabia is sponsoring ISIS and sunni rebel groups in Yemen. Turkey also bought oil from ISIS. There's a huge scandal in the Middle East now due to Quatar allegedly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Have tou ever heard the quote: state sponsored terrorism? All of this is done with taxpayer money.

Author here. These are great points and I tend to agree. While the tech is interesting to me as a way to reconcile privacy and security, changing the incentive structure is a more straightforward initial response.

Perhaps this post is most useful as a counter-argument to any "privacy vs safety" arguments that might be used to justify unrestricted access to consumer data.

So if the media weren't flagrant whores for eyeballs things might be better. I'm not holding my breath. The fable of the farmer and the snake comes to mind.

Author here. So the techniques in this post aren't actually limited to terrorism, although it' s probably the easiest to talk about. It's broad enough to include homicides (as mentioned in the post), and hundreds of thousands of people are murdered each year because they aren't able to predict their own danger soon enough for law enforcement to be informed (and to intervene).

I should say - that's not to say that the technical content isn't very interesting. I just think that the solutions to violence are better considered from the perspective of preventing people from becoming violent people, rather than preventing violence from occurring. I think there's significant evidence to suggest that there are very powerful yet unused paths forward in that direction.

There are other applications that such a system could be interesting for, though. What about determining interest rates on loans for people and small businesses? Small businesses could benefit greatly if lower-rate small loans enabled them to grow. Maybe insurance rates too? Etc.

> and terrorists would stop doing it, since it would be less effective at achieving the subgoal of "terror".

And that's why there are no terrorist attacks in Israel.

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