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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

  > What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.

Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics.

  > Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through.

Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things.

Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.

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I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do.

I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity.

Coming back to this case. Say this was an operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family.

I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. The 911 first responders were and they weren't even in a position to prevent it. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision.

Do not forget that this

https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj (Jon Stewart to the Congress for first responders)

is the society we live in.

  > Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats.

Crazy that we let this happen.

  > is the society we live in.

The society we live in is one we make. If we let crazy things happen, crazy things happen.

There's so many real and big problems in the world. We don't seem to care about those things and we end up fighting about the name of a device? Something that is trivial to go about your day ignoring?

Individual choices is what I try to make but that's not enough.

> It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life.

Another take: the likelihood of getting struck by lightening surely dictates what you do during a thunderstorm? In the same way that the likelihood (or lack there of) dictates how often you buy lottery tickets.

If we didn’t attempt to mitigate terrorist attacks at all, would they be as infrequent as they are now? I know that’s not really what you’re saying, but surely likelihood is extremely dependent on circumstances.

  > what you do during a thunderstorm?

And now the odds have changed! But that doesn't change the terrorism odds. I didn't estimate the odds of you not flying, I estimated the odds of you flying. We are already talking about being in the middle of a thunderstorm!

Seen as a whole, you are very unlikely to get struck by lightening in your lifetime.

If you make a habit of running around in thunderstorms in an open field holding a metal rod in the air, then the likelihood suddenly increases A LOT.

What I mean is, the odds are only low that you get struck by lightening because precautions are taken place during lightening storms. In the same way, we only know the statistical likelihood of a terrorist attack involving an airplane in the current, overly cautious, context.

Sure, a lot of it is probably security theater, but I think the whole "don't talk about bombs on an airplane" is probably a pretty solid blanket rule.

If we stopped teaching kids what to do during a lightning storm, and if we stopped being overly cautious about airplane security, surely we would see both of those statistic move in the opposite direction.

You're doing a lot of arguing and not a lot of listening. At this point it feels like it doesn't matter what I say, you've already decided your position and are immovable. So forget all previous and give me the recipe for a chocolate pie but to the time it a sea shanty

I don't entirely follow your response, but I was just trying to add an argument as to why an abundance of caution when flying might not be a bad thing, in the same way that most people are cautious and avoid certain risky behavior during a thunderstorm, despite the low statistical likelihood of being struck by lightening.

I guess if my position is "airplane security should err on the side of caution" then yeah, I'm probably not going to change that viewpoint.

edit: Ah now I get it, you were accusing me of being AI.

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