The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On

We here tend to work more of a spirit of freak-outery and cynicism. And as much as it annoys me, I think its more a symptom of how relatively little most of us and our ancestors have had to worry about in the US as much of our history was as a mostly rural international backwater that quickly transitioned quickly to a world power with oceans and, almost always, peaceful neighbors on its borders.

Which is something to be thankful for, even if it has led to a fairly weak resolve.

I'm less confident in this country's political leadership.

It's now 20 years and several terrorist attacks and bomb-blasts have gone by. Mumbai still carries on, but there is no pride in doing that anymore. Everyone just wants it to stop. It's been easy for the government to quickly clean up and talk about how terrorism doesn't impact us. The Mumbai residents keep calm, but no one wants to move on like this.

News media gives us a rather distorted image of how things stand. I remember when living in Beijing during the Kosovo bombing campaign in 1999. The Chinese naturally took great offence for deaths in their embassy.

CNN was day after day showing video of violent anti-US demonstrations outside US embassy in Beijing. Foreigners were warned of sticking their nose out. I took a walk in the Sanlitun embassy area. The closest thing to a riot I saw was an overweight woman walking her poodle. The demonstrations were well organised in front of the cameras, without causing disruption elsewhere. They were mostly over in a day; CNN just kept replaying the same footage for a week.

Chinese colleagues were clearly angry, but they also just carried on, as always.

1. A HUGE police presence, like nothing I've ever seen anywhere - that day it was the safest city in the world. 2. It was quiet, yes people were carrying on but it wasn't like the London you expect, people from outside the city were definitely steering clear.

One thing to remember is that London (and the UK) is "used" to terrorist attacks from years of the IRA. Back in those days it was a bit different as they generally gave a warning but still, I think over time it has built up a resilience.

"Bruce Schneier an American cryptographer, computer security specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier

It's statistically unlikely that you'll be the victim of gang violence, but does that mean it's irrational prosecute and punish gang members? No, because the activity threatens social stability vastly out of proportion with the probability of any given person being victim to it. In general, we punish crimes not because it's likely that we'll be the victims of one, but because if we don't the problem might grow out of hand and undermine civil order.

For me personally, I completely agree when reading this article but I'm here, on the west coast, not feeling threatened directly and knowing my friends are now safe.

But what if you were passing the finish line as these devices exploded. You might well be the most rationale person in the world, you would not think about probabilities. What if you were there in the public, wondering why your life has been spared because you decided to stand further away from that point.

If you're the victim of a bombing, on the other hand, you probably won't have any warning or any time to do anything about it. By the time you figure out what's happened, you're already maimed/ dying/ dead, or one of your loved ones is, or whatever. Remote though the risk is, the randomness and immediacy of it are a lot scarier. I've been in close proximity to a car bomb; it's shocking because it's a lot bigger than you are, and whether you are a victim or not has absolutely nothing to do with your skills or reaction time, it's purely a matter of luck.

It's like getting killed by a falling tree or a sinkhole opening up under you or something. The risk of that actually happening is tiny, but what's scary is how helpless you would be if it did. Unlike car accidents or confrontations with wild animals or people, you probably won't get the opportunity to think/talk/fight your way out of danger in the former situation.If you think about movies, TV etc., people are always getting in jeopardy but worming their way out of it somehow or another. We find it much more shocking when we see someone get killed without having any time to react to the danger they're in.

Look at it this way: the probability of me dying from heart disease is extremely low even though a lot of Americans have a high probability for that.

There are quite genuine concerns in AI that people have messed up uncertainty, probability and statistics.

http://www.agroparistech.fr/mia/agi-workshop/

So please stop the pop sci version of probability and statistics.

Carnap is probably spinning in his grave right now :)

Any good book on probability will show that there a half dozen ways to do probability from first principles and all of them are sort of equally valid but differ greatly.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Universal_Artificial_Int...

I really feel like a "keep calm carry on" ad campaign could do some good. Shift the mindset from 'ACKKK TERRORISTS!' to 'I can handle this'

I think this is my biggest concern.

Once in a while at the Back Bay subway/commuter rail/Amtrak station you will occasionally see Boston Police officers - sometimes accompanied by TSA agents - set up at the station, some of which are carrying submachine guns (MP5s). We're not talking one or two officers, but somewhere between half a dozen and a a dozen, several of which have the automatic weaponry at the ready.

On two occasions, I've asked one of the officers, "Hey, what's going on?". In one case it was simply a training exercise. In another, they were looking for a "person of interest".

In general, I don't want to be at a transit station trying to get home on the subway where there is a situation in which the officers feel the use of that kind of force is necessary, especially considering the fact that I can't recall a single situation in the time I've lived here where the use of submachine guns would've ever been justified.

What keeps most countries relatively free from terrorism is that they aren't occupying other peoples land or bombing their women and children all the way to hell.

Ever wonder why extremists haven't bombed the Cook Islands or Peru?

There's been no claim of responsibility, and it seems like these were not suicide bombings. These are interesting data points.

It is hard to find willing terrorists normally, it becomes easier if you provide your enemies with daily motivation and determination. As others have mentioned, and excluding home grown lunacy, it is easy to avoid terrorism, just don't occupy other countries, oppress their peoples and kill their children.

For all the flaws of the U.S., we have one of the most ethnically inclusive societies in the world. We're far from perfect, but we don't have the specific class of injustices, at a high enough level, to produce the simmering grudges that cause such a thing to happen. Most of our terrorists are lone nutcases.

Relatedly, Americans and Northern Europeans tend to be culturally individualistic, so the people who would be domestic terrorists tend toward spree violence with either no political mission, or one that is not charismatic enough to post a threat of recurrence. For example, as horrible as Breivik's attack in Oslo was, it didn't motivate a wave of similar attacks. He had a political agenda, but not a coherent one that many people would follow.

TL;DR: Terrorism has many forms, and some pose high rates of recurrence, but foreign terrorism tends to occur in one-off attacks and the U.S. does not presently have the conditions (or, at least, does not seem to have them) that would cause recurring domestic terrorism.

Examples? You mean like 9/11?

For true believers like yourself, what would the "end game" look like? What would have to happen before we can stop thinking about this bullshit and consider terrorism a thing of the past? Is that something that could ever happen or will there always be "bad guys" that require us to bomb weddings, assassinate american citizens and so on?

Bingo. We supposedly have "security guards" and "security checks" around everything important, but they don't really do much (in the literal sense that they don't actually check much). Besides, is it that much better if someone detonates themselves at the gate to a street party or shopping mall with a crowd around than if they get inside? What if it's a particularly active street party whose attending crowd has exceeded the gates and there are sellers of food and souvenirs outside getting mobbed, too (like the one for Independence Day I attended last night)? Anyone can just walk in and blow everything up.

Any large, open concentration of humanity is a target. The Israeli solution to this is closed borders and a really fucking harsh military policy. Contrary to popular belief, America does have its own response: very low population density to reduce the value of any one target.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.ht...

So "purchasing safety" was "not joining armed forces that fight criminals and enemies". This was before the revolution, and what Americans call "the frontier" was in Pennsylvania.

However, I would just offer a quick point of advice. Don't spend keystrokes saying you might be down-voted for something. It's actually bolder to just say what you're going to say. When you reference downvoting, you stigmatize it and influence people not to do so. I would rather know if people are going to have a downvote reaction to my comment than shame them into not downvoting me. I've had the exact same tendency to observe "well I might get downvoted for this," but I think it's a tendency that should be resisted.

Probably the most difficult parts of this will be to define who is responsible and what exactly constitutes as justice.

For this and other reasons, I think electoral politics is one of the least effective places to put energy, in working for change.

If anyone's going to end up sacking and pillaging America it'll be American corporate greed and not extremists. Now there's some barbarian hordes you should be watching out for.

I'm not sure why Germans would be bombing Boston because of the Romans. You aren't really thinking this through. The Romans don't even have an empire anymore.