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If you're going to go by Taleb's logic, your point-of-view is directly contradicted in his later book, 'Anti-fragile'.

With every occurrence of a black swan event, you are made more resilient in preventing an event of a similar kind. So, now that we know that 9/11 can happen, we're now more mentally prepared than ever to prevent something like it if it happens again. Case in point, pilots now carry weapons and are much more likely to thwart attempts of hijacking. Passengers will also react more violently and vigorously now towards any sign of threat. Note that we actually have a few precedents since 9/11 in which hijacking of airplanes were thwarted in this manner.

How does Anti-fragile contradict lightcatcher's point-of-view? I understood him to say, simply, that terrorist attacks are from Extremistan, while car accidents are from Mediocristan, thus they aren't comparable phenomena.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons it's extremely unlikely to happen again with an event with >5k deaths in a single day.

And even if that does happen, so what? Even if an attack happens that dwarfs 9/11, it'll still be insignificant compared to the country as a whole, and not justify anything near the amount of money spent to fight it.

Barring the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major US city, there's just nothing that terrorists can do that would really count for much, as long as we can avoid a massive overreaction.

As I've said before, I don't get this idea that we should strive to act like that darkly funny scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, wherein the patrons and staff at a bombed restaurant attempt to continue dining as if nothing has happened.

Let's suppose that some terrorist group became skilled enough to bomb a major sporting event or other large concentration of people every six months or so. Not big bombs, mind you, just enough to kill a few dozen or a hundred people each.

By the strategy seemingly being argued for here, a "resilient" or "rational" America would just let the existing police do their work as best they can, maybe with some not-too-expensive Federal assistance, and simply accept the added risk of dying at major events, which, after all, is not that much more significant than the risk of dying in a car accident on the way.

Obviously, that is not the response we'd expect, and it's not because Americans are irrational or fearful. It's because this prioritization-by-mortality-rate policy logic is faulty. It matters that there's an agency behind these deaths. One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.

Well, we have historical examples of both approaches.

The British provide the stereotypical example of my suggestion. The famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" slogan, of course, comes from their experience during the Blitz. (And yes, I realize it was never published in that time, but it still typifies the response.) The Blitz killed 40,000 civilians, but people did basically go on with their lives and let the government handle things, because that was the best way to do it. Freaking out wasn't going to help the war effort.

The British provide another example of the approach with The Troubles. Not so much in Ireland, really, but I think the response to the attacks in Great Britain qualify.

The British approach seems to work well. The American approach got us mired in two unwinnable wars, sank the country deep into debt, and wrecked the economy. I know which one I prefer.

I don't get the analogy with the Blitz. At the time the entire British Empire, military and civilians all, was mobilized to stop the guys who were dropping the bombs. The resources and powers we're devoting to the "War on Terror" are a mere fraction in relative terms to those resources and powers at the disposal of Winston Churchill.

Well, we could spend hours arguing over the Blitz, or we could concentrate on the other analogy I made which you presumably did get....

Why would we need to spend hours arguing? Your analogy makes no sense at all there. Nobody is arguing that Americans aren't sufficiently panicky. It's an argument about the resources, powers and attention that should be devoted to fighting terrorism relative to its death count. The Blitz utterly fails as an example of a response proportional to a death count. The ongoing response was massive relative to the "mere" tens of thousands killed.

As to "The Troubles": Are you arguing that the British government gave it proportional attention and resources for number of people killed? I don't believe the death count was ever that high, but it was a hugely important issue for both the Irish and the British, again, for a variety of reasons that go well beyond the death count. Which, of course, is my point.

I don't know if they gave The Troubles proportional attention, but it was at least a lot more proportional than the American response to 9/11, and turned out way better.

The troubles escalated until government ministers were being killed, and two different prime ministers narrowly missed being assassinated. Ultimately the UK capitulated and the terrorist leaders ended up as cabinet ministers in the new Irish government.

Are you really suggesting letting the terrorists win?

If "letting the terrorists win" means getting out of mideast hellholes, ceasing to assassinate civilians with drones, and stopping the continual interference in various places they consider holy, then yes, I'm absolutely suggesting that.

We need to let go of the idea that it's us or them, and that either we win and they lose, or they win and we lose.

Wouldn't an outcome analogous to the modern-day UK and Ireland be great? People getting along well, no violence, reasonably stable governments? I don't see why you paint this as a bad outcome.

I totally agree that US foreign policy is terrible and should change.

However if that happened as a result of terrorism rather than politics then we would just have an escalation of terrorism anyone who was unhappy with the US (legitimately or not) started to use the now proven strategy. The 'police state' tactics we see now are nothing compared to what we'd see then.

You seem to be advocating terrorism instead of campaigning for justice.

"You seem to be advocating terrorism instead of campaigning for justice."

Thank you for the reminder that debating these topics on HN is pointless because everybody's a complete nut.

In the Irish case, terrorists achieved their stated objectives by using terrorism. You said that was a good outcome. I don't see how that isn't advocating terrorism.

If you don't understand that the ends don't justify the means, then I really don't know what to say.

> If "letting the terrorists win" means getting out of mideast hellholes, ceasing to assassinate civilians with drones, and stopping the continual interference in various places they consider holy, then yes, I'm absolutely suggesting that.

Sounds like ends (violence stopping) justifying the means (letting the terrorists win) to me.

You have that completely backwards. The means is what you do, and the ends is what happens after. The means here would be ceasing to kill and oppress. That is justified all by itself.

If you like, but it's not simply a choice between what you do (ends) or how you do it (means), it's both how and what that matter.

Right but you are justifying the terrorist means (killing civilians randomly) based on their ends (inducing political chance).

No I am not. I'm getting righteously tired of this ridiculous conversational tactic, in which the other guy takes what I say, then speeds about six thousand light years in a random direction using a warp drive built on speculation and assumptions, then attacks whatever random space junk he finds there.

If you think I said it, then go find it and quote it for me.

You: "Wouldn't an outcome analogous to the modern-day UK and Ireland be great? People getting along well, no violence, reasonably stable governments? I don't see why you paint this as a bad outcome."

That outcome also included dead British cabinet ministers, civilians and infrastructure and decades of fear and hatred.

I just said that it's a good outcome. Which it is. At no point did I say that this good outcome justifies the decades of violence that preceded it.

You said it in support of the UK's approach to terrorism. Which was to capitulate to the terrorists.

And?

I'm pretty sure his point is as follows:

  good means, good ends - no need for justification
   bad means, good ends - the ends justify the means
  good means,  bad ends - the means justify the ends
   bad means,  bad ends - no possibility of justification

UK terrorism is bad means. UK political change is good ends. If the ends didn't justify the means, they wouldn't be good ends. Any statement that the means were bad but the ends were good is justification; otherwise, your opinion would be that because the means were bad, the ends were necessarily bad too, even though they would otherwise appear to be good.

I think I see the disconnect now. The assumption is being made that the British method for fighting terrorism that I'm advocating results in more or worse attacks than the American method. Therefore by advocating the British method, I'm implicitly advocating for more or worse terrorist attacks, and then justifying it by saying that the outcome is better.

The disconnect is that I don't accept this assumption. I see no evidence that the US method fights terrorism better. In fact, it appears to result in far more and worse attacks than the British method.

Therefore, I am advocating for something that I believe will mitigate terrorism as it happens, and produce a better outcome. Thus falling squarely in the "no need for justification" line of your summary.

The Irish terrorists didn't cease their attacks because of the British method of fighting them. They succeeded in bombing mainland Britain 14 times, and they caused more than 50,000 casualties including 3,500 deaths. London rail stations to this day have no trash cans because the IRA repeatedly left bombs in them.

They stopped their attacks when their demands were met.

I fail to see what you are advocating other than giving in to terrorism.

And what if I am advocating giving in to terrorism? That does not justify terrorism, as you seem to have said.

Sure, the Irish didn't cease their attacks because of how the British fought them. Likewise, various anti-American terrorists haven't ceased their attacks because of how the US fights them.

If you consider terrorism to be a valid means of advancing a political agenda, then you are justifying it.

Your proposal implies that killing civilians should earn you a seat at the negotiating table.

It makes the most sense to consider the IRA and the UK as two separate groups. The IRA getting their demands met justifies terrorism for them; bad means, good ends. The UK getting peace justifies capitulating to the IRA for them; bad means, good ends. Why is capitulation bad means? The same reason that giving in to any bully is bad - you lose, the bully gets power, and it sets a precedent.

That said, the UK government certainly did a lot to piss off the Irish and it's not clearly the case that in the events leading up to the conflict all of the UK's actions were great and the Irish's were horrible.

So, again, you're assuming that the UK approach (or outcome) causes more terrorism, while the US approach causes less. And again, I disagree.

Giving in to terrorism does not end terrorism, it only ends the violent expression of it. If you do this, you end up living in fear (i.e. terror) that if you do not continue to do what the terrorists want, there will be more violence.

Anyone who cooperates with an abusive power does so because they have been sufficiently terrorized by that power and they don't want to risk further abuse. That kind of cooperation is not a good outcome; it's only the acceptance of coercion, because the alternative is worse.

So, let's deliberately choose the worse outcome because... nope, I don't get it.

That's not my point. My point is that the lesser of two evils is still evil. If I rob you at gunpoint and you give me your wallet and I spare your life, it's still a bad outcome, it just isn't as bad as it could be.

Why is that an interesting point? There isn't necessarily a non-evil way to proceed, just worse and less-worse ways. I never said this was all roses and wine.

> I just said that it's a good outcome. Which it is.

I was only arguing with this.

> There isn't necessarily a non-evil way to proceed, just worse and less-worse ways. I never said this was all roses and wine.

This is all I mean by bad means, bad ends. This mindset opens up the discussion to debating the pros and cons of different approaches. Anyway, take care.

Clearly you don't. Giving in to the demands of whoever bombs you is not the lesser of two evils.

By the same logic, ff terrorism under the flag of a cause is seen as an effective disincentive for policy change in a particular direction, then we would just have an escalation of false-flag terrorism sponsored by anyone who wants to avoid particular policy changes (whatever the merits) as they adopted the now-proven strategy.

Your position is no less "advocating terrorism" than the one you responded to. The only way not to encourage terrorism is to evaluate policy changes on their own merits, and not be swayed from acting on the merits of the policy changes themselves by the fact that terrorists have stated goals related to those policy changes, either as a positive or negative factor.

No, because there would be no proof that the false flag terrorism was having an effect, unlike the case where terrorism led to an obvious change in policy, as was the case in Ireland).

I agree totally that policy changes should be considered on their own merits. Therefore we should defend ourselves against terrorist attacks without regard for their stated goals.

> No, because there would be no proof that the false flag terrorism was having an effect

There are certainly ways of assessing why particularly policies are and are not chosen. The impact of "Can't do what terrorists want, so we must vote no" is no more difficult to assess than "Must do what terrorists want, so we must vote yes".

I never said anything about voting or not based on terrorist actions.

mikeash said it was ok not to defend so hard against terrorism because the outcome was good. I was refuting that.

> it's not because Americans are irrational

> One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.

A disproportionate response of the kind seen on 9/11 is mind-blowingly irrational, even if you call it pursuing "justice".

If you are so in the pursuit of "justice" you inflict a worse injury to yourself than you originally suffered, I'm not sure I can call it "rational" behavior anymore.

Especially if you're not doing it for deterrent effect.

That's not my point. I'm not interested in arguing how far the response to 9/11 was from some policy ideal. I'm trying to dispel the notion that as long as "only" a few thousand people are dying annually, then the rational response is to treat terrorism with no more seriousness than anything else that kills a few thousand people each year, such as ladders. That's an argument that people actually make here with some frequency.

> I'm not interested in arguing how far the response to 9/11 was from some policy ideal. I'm trying to dispel the notion that as long as "only" a few thousand people are dying annually, then the rational response is to treat terrorism with no more seriousness than anything else that kills a few thousand people each year, such as ladders.

My point is that treating it as any other spree or serial killing is rational - we already have mechanisms to deal with these kinds of events, including laws about the use of "weapons of mass destruction", etc.

The whole point of terrorism is to provoke a reaction outside of that normal process and get people to react to the terror... causing an allergy-style overreaction from the populace, much like we saw from 9/11 in the US.

So the rational response IS to simply go "ho-hum" and treat it as just another criminal act. Taking the cowardly path of "something scared me, spite it with full power phasers!" is what the terrorists wants, and is ultimately self-defeating.

Comparing it to more dangerous things - things that are statistically more likely to kill you - is a way to fight against our animalistic panic to smash! kill! destroy! the thing causing fear, and demonstrate that it is just fear we're responding to, rather than a rational danger.

tl;dr: Spending the privacy and civil rights we have on stopping the fear caused by terrorism is the height of cowardice and irrationality.

The comparison to motor vehicle deaths is very valuable: it's a part of how you score what's most threatening, namely, how many people is the topic killing. Another part of that scoring, is potential. Discarding the actual and only focusing on the potential, is every bit as bogus as the opposite.

Nuclear / biological / chemical attacks are the only high threat vector that terrorism presents. That should be the prime focus for anti-terrorism. The secondary focus should be terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers that can hurt people on the level of the Aurora shooting. Neither of those threats require abandoning the first and fourth amendments to deal with properly.

The odds are strongly in favor of young children, via gun accidents, continuing to kill more people every year than what terrorists do on average.

It has to be noted that 9/11 and Boston both happened solely due to extreme government incompetence. Those two supposed black swan events should have never happened. They were not black swan events, they were sheer incompetence. The government failed at its job in numerous ways in both instances, and that's the nice explanation. Their incompetence was not because they lacked information on Average Joe citizen or because they didn't have my email meta data. They demonstrate that they're wildly incompetent at even basic security in multiple high profile cases, and yet they're given even more power. It's a failed approach top to bottom.

The NSA programs are much like our big security / security theater approach, and they'll be just as useless for the exact same reasons. It's trying to thread a needle with a hammer.

Due to its nature terrorism does not scale well, it's akin to a parasite/host relationship.

It could escalate into civil war though, or even regular war between nation states (especially if one nation selects random nation states to attack as a counterstrike).

Interesting reading on the subject:

http://reliefweb.int/report/world/2012-global-terrorism-inde...

The black swan event of terrorism doesn't need to scale, it's a big one-off event carried out by a few dedicated resourceful people.

A nuclear bomb over New York city, smallpox distributed in all Western major airports, or simultaneous nerve gas attacks in a number of major cities.

Terror attacks appear to follow the power law: http://arxivblog.com/?p=1186