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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I don't get how referencing a singular event often is actually an issue.

the Great Depression showed us how important it is to have an insurance on personal bank accounts, to disincentive bank runs. While one might counter that there have been other economic crises and bank runs, there have also been many other terrorist attacks aimed at US interests and allies. We still cite the great depression all the time because it was kind of a big deal.

I don't want to comment on how its being used in this policy decision but acting like 9/11 isn't somehow a big deal is strange.

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> I don't get how referencing a singular event often is actually an issue.

Because it's a reactionary and not derived in principle? How exactly do you counter "I know what's best for you based on a single event"?

> I don't get how referencing a singular event often is actually an issue.

Because it's irrational and doesn't represent the real probability of an event happening again. The argument is therefore that we are shaping policy (with ramifications on economics, privacy and politics) based on poor statistical analysis. I'd recommend reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow if you're interested in understanding how irrational our minds are. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...

The difference is that the depression was a big deal on its own, while 9/11 is a big deal in a circular way: it's important largely because we consider it to be important.

The actual damage done by the attack itself was not all that significant in the grand scheme of things. Yes, it was a massive tragedy, but neither the lives lost nor the property destroyed are noticeable on a national scale.

Most of the damage by far was the reaction to the attack, not the attack itself. It was the national equivalent of an allergic reaction.

Imagine if people were in charge of your immune system and they decided that the immune system must react strongly to bee stings. In defending their policy on bee stings, they bring up the last time you got stung by a bee, when it put you in the hospital. What makes it a problem is that they put you in the hospital themselves, not the bee sting by itself. The bee sting would have hurt, but wouldn't have required medical attention if it weren't for the allergic reaction to it.

The US reaction was not smart, but in fairness 9/11 was a big deal because it forced a recalibration of the tail risk from a terrorist attack - a whole bunch of scenarios (dirty bomb, chem or bio attack) that require complex planning and resources are much easier to believe post-911.

That strikes me as more of the same overreaction. 9/11 didn't really demonstrate complex planning and resources. It took a bit of cash, not a lot, and 20 people. The scale was big, but it wasn't exactly complex. The main difficulties of the other attacks you mention are obtaining the materials and getting them into the US, and ability at neither was demonstrated by 9/11.

The mention of a dirty bomb rather reinforces my point, I think. A dirty bomb isn't much more destructive than a regular bomb. Yet, we consider it to be a vastly greater threat. Why? Because we'd vastly overreact to it. Why? Because we consider it to be a huge threat. And so on in circles.

Before 9/11 the idea that terrorists could destroy two skyscrapers by simultaneously coordinating multiple hijackings was ridiculous - a B-movie plot or paranoid fantasy. Today, not so much. What ridiculous fantasy will be true in 10 years time?

Again, none of this means that the reactions were smart - but the idea that there needs to be some reaction is not a priori stupid, and to try to characterize it as such weakens your argument (imho).

The basic scenario wasn't really outlandish. The general idea was featured in a bestselling novel about a decade prior, and an actual real-life terrorist hijacking (thwarted) that same year. And of course the concept of destroying valuable stuff by crashing airplanes into it on purpose dates back much farther.

Yes, despite all that it was unexpected. However, I have no sympathy for your "what ridiculous fantasy will be true in 10 years time?" argument. It's a complete non sequitur. There was a failure of imagination before in which terrorists were more capable than we thought, therefore we're doing the same thing now? I would argue that currently the exact opposite is happening. 9/11 seems to be the peak of their capabilities. Now, while we're imagining apocalyptic scenarios in which terrorists destroy entire cities, their actual capabilities seem to be limited to badly-constructed IEDs.

The point is that there was precedent for 9/11, even if people didn't realize it. There is no precedent for the sort of vastly worse attack you posit, nor is there any other reason to think that such a thing could be carried out in a way that makes it vastly worse than previous attacks. (The Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack does provide precedent for terrorist attacks involving chemical weapons, but it also demonstrates that such attacks aren't really all that severe. Again, they are worse because we react to them more strongly, and we react to them more strongly because they are worse.)

I'm not saying that all reaction would be stupid, only that it should be proportional. A normal human body does react to a bee sting, but it does so appropriately, by eliminating the poison and handling foreign substances. Likewise, a sane reaction to 9/11 involving tracking down those responsible and bringing them to justice would have been wise. What's stupid is not any reaction, but a massive overreaction, and then justifying the overreaction by pointing to the massive damage done, when that damage was mostly done by the overreaction.

Let me say that I think we largely agree, and that I'm deeply sympathetic to your immune system analogy. The US over-reacted, badly, and many, many innocent people were killed because of that. And arguably we are all less safe now, precisely because of that over-reaction.

I have been extremely critical of that reaction in the past, along much of the same lines you state. I haven't changed my mind on that, but I have also come to realise that it's actually really hard to calibrate risk in this situation - in the case of car accidents or lightning strikes, say, we can forecast expected outcomes very accurately, and the variance of those outcomes is relatively low. The threat model for an intelligent opponent is very different - history is a poor guide and the variance of potential outcomes is very high.

I'm sorry I quite get your analogy, you're saying the problem is that he went to the hospital?

I am not trying to justify the reaction to 9/11, but using it as a reference point seems fine, just like the berlin wall being torn down is not in itself the event that ended the cold war, but is a turning point for things.

But your point about it being self-referentially important seems pretty valid.

I'm saying that the immune system overreacted, resulting in an allergic reaction that put the person in the hospital.

Bee stings aren't all that harmful in normal people. But some people's immune systems decide to treat bee stings as if they were extremely dangerous, life-threatening events, and in those people, the reaction itself becomes an extremely dangerous, life-threatening event. If (and this is a huge if, of course) you could simply convince the immune system not to react so strongly to a bee sting, the threat would be gone. But instead, in this analogy, you have the people running the immune system arguing for a stronger reaction to bee stings, citing the terrible consequences of the last one as the reason for it.

This is really a very tidy analogy, I like it! It can even be generalized to other problems, such as crime, where the response to some threat (real or imagined) yields an outsized response that ends up making the problem itself much, much worse. The war on drugs would be the best example here.

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