Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Furniture as by Terrorism (2012)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
""" (Heuristic: go to Pinker). He promotes there a WSJ article to the effect that "Terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders"; the article was written by a war correspondant, Ted Koppel and is very similar to his Angels thesis.
Now let's try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.
A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy. They are subjected to strong bounds, etc. It is "impossible" to have, say, >1% of a country's population dying from falls from ladders the same year. The chances are less than 1 in several trillion trillion trillion years. Hence a journalistic statement about risk converges to the scientific statement.
B- Terrorism is fat tailed. Your estimation from past data has monstrous errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One biological event can decimate the population.
May be "reasonable" to claim that terrorism is overhyped, that our liberty is more valuable, etc. I believe so. But the comparison here is a fallacy and sloppy thinking is dangerous. (Worse, Koppel compares terrorism today to terrorism 100 years ago when a terrorist could inflict very limited harm.)
"""
Another such case is Nuclear Weapons, Millions of dollars are spent on controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons, even when no one died last year because of them. However this does not implies that we should abandon strict controls, since the risk characteristics are completely different.
But within matter of few hours the rate of american killed by terrorists went from same as those killed by furniture to few thousand times. The central argument is that a comparison with death by furniture is irrelevant, since the risk profiles are significantly different. Finally one cannot minimize risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons in isolation from agents such as rogue states and terrorists.
We can come up with ways for terrorists to kill thousands of people, and people did come up with such ways before 9/11. I see no way, short of first taking over an entire country, that terrorists can kill millions.
If you think otherwise, then describe it, don't just appeal to ignorance. The "we don't know, so we should assume the worst" argument can be used to support literally anything.
Volume 119 >> Issue 22 : Tuesday, April 27, 1999
Not at all. This scenario was well documented by the responsible government agencies before it happened.
It happened to me: one moment I was sitting at the table in my IKEA chair, perhaps leaning forward to browse HN, and the next I was on the floor with (the mirror revealed) a deep 20-inch gash across my upper back, and a lighter slash behind my knees/legs.
Obviously the chair broke, but I still haven't figured out how it cut me so severely. A few inches higher and it would have been my neck.
Natsu probably meant that the litigious implications of this finding will be adverse and widespread, but largely monetary, none of which will really address the real problem.
Unless, of course, this sort of thing could bring about the equivalent of "1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act" which was largely due to the activism and efforts of Ralph Nader.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#Automobile_safety_a...
(Don't be so quick to downvote.)
None of those options are easy and I've never seen a real proposal to seriously attempt 1. Other than statistics, how would you go about it?
http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want. (...)
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.
And giving up your freedoms "because of the terrorism" is the worst thing imaginable.
The problem is how to somehow transmit said wisdom into the brains of those 99.9% of the population who do not read HN or Bruce Schneier or otherwise think deeply on these matters.
So what, do we place limits on reporting?
And controlling the press by "placing limits" is the opposite of democratic. If anything, most of the press is even now too limited in their approach, effectively supporting the interest groups who benefit from having "terror threat."
The effect of the press is best measured not by what reporters are allowed to do, but by what people actually end up watching. More freedom of the press is not going to eliminate the if it bleeds it leads philosophy. In fact, if we assume that cable news and newspapers have gotten shriller to deal with competition from the internet, it might do the opposite.
There is a reason this comic exists[0] [0]http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3081#comic
Dying from too many cheeseburgers is totally unsexy, and as a bonus implies that there may be consequences to doing what we want all the time. Booooooriiiing.
While their superficial mission is to "eliminate" terrorism. The incentives are quite the opposite. 1) Will not happen from above. There won't be a White House policy to as a war on Fear of Terrorism. It will have to come from the citizens.
The Bush White House spent five years practically emotionally torturing America with its color codes and terrorist threat propaganda to justify a massive expansion of the military industrial complex.
I think the terror happened without the government, they just milked it to increase budgets, get new powers, and invade Iraq.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/constitutional-expert...
And for some more numbers that we should talk to our family and friends about:
> You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
taken from: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...
Conclusion: Terrorism is actually not a problem, but they want us to believe that.
EDIT: Seriously, just this 1 thought would warrant HUGE articles in papers like the New York Times. Obviously, this will never happen.
At some point media organizations found that people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soro... - Concludes there is a psychophysiological evidence that negative news is more arousing.
I suppose it follows that media concerning terrorism is probably more arousing than people being crushed by couches, and makes much better TV. And our perception of our reality is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to.
A great example of this would be the coverage of the fertilizer plant that blew up in Texas verses the Boston marathon bombings. These happened within days of each other. Which one did you hear about more? Which one killed more people?
In your example, high speed rail launch is hardly breaking news. People are likely to be receiving updates on that rail through mass media since long before its construction even started. Train wreck, though, is a very unexpected event. A black swan.
Media does look for interesting stories (understandably), and it's been noticed that such stories tend to have certain qualities, like:
Freshness
Significance
Proximity (geographical or otherwise)
Famous people involved
Human interest (appeal to emotion)
High speed rail launch is probably less ‘news’, as already mentioned (people knew it's being built). Perceived significance is less—long term convenience is hard to judge, and people have been living without it for ages anyway.
So I personally don't find it very surprising that ‘good’ stories tend to be less interesting than ‘bad’ ones, and I don't think it's because we, cruel creatures, love watching blood and suffering so much.
(I'm yet to read the paper you linked to, though.)
Edit: clarity, wording.
If you likewise point out that psychoactive drug usage has remained flat since the 50's, they say, "See, no increase! The War on Drugs is working!"
The real problem is that legislators aren't bound by silly things like logic, or the scientific method, or burden of proof.
The problem here is that the mainstream media loves terror -- as long as they're the ones inflicting terror on the rest of us. Each year there's the predictable stories about killer bees, shark attacks, and all kinds of statistically unlikely events, all played off as being of dire import to the average consumer. We love using irrational fear to politically control people. It's as common as rain in the modern world. It's just when outsiders do it for their own purposes without regard to life or property that we run into all kinds of problems.
Sadly, still won't stop people from saying you have no right to privacy or due process or whatever sick agenda they're pushing at the moment.
Let's just switch to a sane foreign policy and be done with "terrorism". At least mid- and long-term, that's the only thing that will stop the recruiting of new "terrorists".
There are far better arguments out there. So lets not use the ones that the supporters may be able to use against us.
I regularly post articles related to such stuff -- a quick glance at my history should suffice. "Terrorism is a threat to the world" is what we all think but this is approaching this from a logical, statistical point of view, which is how it should be. If you are the kind that subscribes to Fox News and refuses to open your mind (my ad hominem attack to you), then you can just ignore this article and we can all happily move on.