5 ms·

In the case of Paris it's not just about the losses. It's at least partially about trust, meaning, can we trust millions of people who are profoundly like us to

In the case of Paris it's not just about the losses. It's at least partially about trust, meaning, can we trust millions of people who are profoundly like us to integrate smoothly or are we instigating risks of further attacks as a result. I don't particularly like it when terrorist attacks are contextualized in terms of deaths that are not political in nature at all. Everything you mentioned are close to being "random processes" in the statistical sense. Terrorist attacks may be somewhat chaotic in distribution (a brief arxiv.org search shows researchers trying to prove otherwise); but terrorists are adversarial, people who actively want to see you dead. On the other hand, tuberculosis, malnutrition and alcohol could only be construed as adversarial in a weak sense at best. A much more non-intentional perspective is better suited for the latter than the former.

shoo 11y ago
Fair comment. Can you go into more detail regarding why this classification matters? I note you've refrained from taking a position regarding climate change - fair enough, it is a gnarly subject. I don't think that it neatly falls into an adversarial or "random process" classification. I think it is reasonable to regard the consequences of climate change as both intentional, and highly political, with large doses of randomness and uncertainty. Here's a perhaps terrible analogy: for whatever reason, suppose people are willing to pay money to watch me shoot a gun into the air. Perhaps they find it entertaining. Occasionally bullets might fall in an unlucky place and kill someone or damage property. I certainly don't intend anyone or anything in particular any harm, but hey, I've got to earn some money to pay the bills.
- bordercases 11y ago
  Don't read too much into me not saying "climate change is X". I refrained because it involves human agency, but I wouldn't call it truly adversarial either. Let's add "intentional" to the mix. ISIS/Da'esh is an organization that has intentions to kill people, and is essentially a singleton in that regard even if it influences people to kill in packs of autonomous cells ("autonomous" used loosely, they're on the Internet and talk to each other). Climate change, on the other hand, doesn't really have a central bureau that seeks to engineer more climate change. At best it's a nasty side-effect that some large organizations might chose to ignore, but they don't explicitly optimize for it and it's obvious it's not large organizations doing most of the damage. It's like a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, which once again you can construe as adversarial – I wouldn't. But if you continue to, I would implore you to consider that the attacks are adversarial-intentional while climate-change is adversarial-incidental. Terrorism isn't a tragedy-of-the-commons, it's a design. I think the classification matters because it alerts us to some facts that I'm afraid we might underrate: like the notion that the people Actually Believe This Stuff as the simplest explanation, rather than convoluting it with some hammy sociological explanation, or even a statistical one. Because I think that they Actually Believe This Stuff I continue to think that they are ideologically incompatible with the West and should be isolated rather than risk being welcoming to them (by accident). The deaths of the Parisians should, if not be avenged, then be taken seriously as a failure of our ability to protect ourselves from our enemies.
  - shoo 11y ago
    Genuinely - thank you for your careful reply, it is appreciated. I don't think I believe that climate change is adversarial, and I really get the tragedy-of-the-commons aspect. Perhaps "knowing criminal negligence" is a better fit than "adversarial". That said, perhaps from the perspective of victims/friends/families of terrorism/climate change/etc, I suspect that it may not make all that much difference if they were the victims of some adversarial action, or the victims of the predictable yet semi-randomised results of negligence. I get your point about a failure of our ability to protect ourselves. I think the lesson here is not to try to completely protect ourselves (by yielding to increasingly oppressive government surveillance), as complete protection is not possible. It is particularly hard to defend oneself against, while preserving some pretence of civilisation/democracy/rule of law, against people who are willing to die in order to kill you. I think the real lesson here is to understand that we, and our society, and our civilisation, are all mortal, and will die some day, perhaps sooner than we think, and there is nothing we can do about it. We are not in control. This lesson is perhaps a hard one to internalise. I am not sure I internalise it. There's some more words by someone more eloquent than I here: [1] [1] - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how...
    - bordercases 11y ago
      I just want to thank you as well for your willingness to engage with me, especially with how delicate the subject matter is. It gives me hope for the state of modern political discourse. You've presented an interesting distillation, that's for sure (on your recommendation I shall read the article). It's worth noting that there are probably multiple lessons to this experience or event and the relevance will change from person to person, but in a way that's nitpicking. My response to the notion of looking at these risks with fatalistic acceptance, is that we shouldn't completely evaluate the impact of things like malnutrition, disease, violence, {climate change side-effects} in terms of death. Death is a nice common impact measure, same as money, which is why they're so popular as they make the incomparable, comparable. But they should be seen as approximate representations of what we value, rather than what we value. Even if there isn't a whole lot we can do to gain knowledge of when people are attacked or when they die, there are still values beyond death/money for which these events have meaning. Something could be done for those shared values even if it can't be done for ourselves. I agree with what you're saying RE: surveillance. Two things: (1) I don't think we quite know the extent for which our military agencies are preventing harm, only the extent to which they haven't. There could be a "Red Queen" effect where less surveillance is a net loss but more surveillance does nothing, or is also a net loss. Just a thought, and I wouldn't be surprised. (2) ISIS is using our compassion and our values against us: they say as much in their magazine.[0][1] If we don't do the same to them then the fight will keep being asymmetric, but I don't have any answers that aren't probably wrong in some way. Already I've been drawing conclusions that I thought were correct, but they were expecting and wanted. Russia is the only country with the balls to fight a ground war but NATO is not on best terms with them, either, among other things. (An aside: While Silicon Valley's techno-optimism is perhaps one of the most productive, proactive and pragmatic stances one can take to the world's flaws and inefficiencies, I try to remember that it's probably an exception rather than the rule. SV exists in a bubble of its own and is ultimately dependent on much else being stable.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579975 [1] https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/islamic-states-goal-eliminating-the-grayzone-of-coexistence-between-muslims-and-the-west/ https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/islamic-states-goal-elim...

shoo 11y ago

Fair comment. Can you go into more detail regarding why this classification matters? I note you've refrained from taking a position regarding climate change - fair enough, it is a gnarly subject. I don't think that it neatly falls into an adversarial or "random process" classification. I think it is reasonable to regard the consequences of climate change as both intentional, and highly political, with large doses of randomness and uncertainty. Here's a perhaps terrible analogy: for whatever reason, suppose people are willing to pay money to watch me shoot a gun into the air. Perhaps they find it entertaining. Occasionally bullets might fall in an unlucky place and kill someone or damage property. I certainly don't intend anyone or anything in particular any harm, but hey, I've got to earn some money to pay the bills.

bordercases 11y ago
Don't read too much into me not saying "climate change is X". I refrained because it involves human agency, but I wouldn't call it truly adversarial either. Let's add "intentional" to the mix. ISIS/Da'esh is an organization that has intentions to kill people, and is essentially a singleton in that regard even if it influences people to kill in packs of autonomous cells ("autonomous" used loosely, they're on the Internet and talk to each other). Climate change, on the other hand, doesn't really have a central bureau that seeks to engineer more climate change. At best it's a nasty side-effect that some large organizations might chose to ignore, but they don't explicitly optimize for it and it's obvious it's not large organizations doing most of the damage. It's like a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, which once again you can construe as adversarial – I wouldn't. But if you continue to, I would implore you to consider that the attacks are adversarial-intentional while climate-change is adversarial-incidental. Terrorism isn't a tragedy-of-the-commons, it's a design. I think the classification matters because it alerts us to some facts that I'm afraid we might underrate: like the notion that the people Actually Believe This Stuff as the simplest explanation, rather than convoluting it with some hammy sociological explanation, or even a statistical one. Because I think that they Actually Believe This Stuff I continue to think that they are ideologically incompatible with the West and should be isolated rather than risk being welcoming to them (by accident). The deaths of the Parisians should, if not be avenged, then be taken seriously as a failure of our ability to protect ourselves from our enemies.
- shoo 11y ago
  Genuinely - thank you for your careful reply, it is appreciated. I don't think I believe that climate change is adversarial, and I really get the tragedy-of-the-commons aspect. Perhaps "knowing criminal negligence" is a better fit than "adversarial". That said, perhaps from the perspective of victims/friends/families of terrorism/climate change/etc, I suspect that it may not make all that much difference if they were the victims of some adversarial action, or the victims of the predictable yet semi-randomised results of negligence. I get your point about a failure of our ability to protect ourselves. I think the lesson here is not to try to completely protect ourselves (by yielding to increasingly oppressive government surveillance), as complete protection is not possible. It is particularly hard to defend oneself against, while preserving some pretence of civilisation/democracy/rule of law, against people who are willing to die in order to kill you. I think the real lesson here is to understand that we, and our society, and our civilisation, are all mortal, and will die some day, perhaps sooner than we think, and there is nothing we can do about it. We are not in control. This lesson is perhaps a hard one to internalise. I am not sure I internalise it. There's some more words by someone more eloquent than I here: [1] [1] - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how...
  - bordercases 11y ago
    I just want to thank you as well for your willingness to engage with me, especially with how delicate the subject matter is. It gives me hope for the state of modern political discourse. You've presented an interesting distillation, that's for sure (on your recommendation I shall read the article). It's worth noting that there are probably multiple lessons to this experience or event and the relevance will change from person to person, but in a way that's nitpicking. My response to the notion of looking at these risks with fatalistic acceptance, is that we shouldn't completely evaluate the impact of things like malnutrition, disease, violence, {climate change side-effects} in terms of death. Death is a nice common impact measure, same as money, which is why they're so popular as they make the incomparable, comparable. But they should be seen as approximate representations of what we value, rather than what we value. Even if there isn't a whole lot we can do to gain knowledge of when people are attacked or when they die, there are still values beyond death/money for which these events have meaning. Something could be done for those shared values even if it can't be done for ourselves. I agree with what you're saying RE: surveillance. Two things: (1) I don't think we quite know the extent for which our military agencies are preventing harm, only the extent to which they haven't. There could be a "Red Queen" effect where less surveillance is a net loss but more surveillance does nothing, or is also a net loss. Just a thought, and I wouldn't be surprised. (2) ISIS is using our compassion and our values against us: they say as much in their magazine.[0][1] If we don't do the same to them then the fight will keep being asymmetric, but I don't have any answers that aren't probably wrong in some way. Already I've been drawing conclusions that I thought were correct, but they were expecting and wanted. Russia is the only country with the balls to fight a ground war but NATO is not on best terms with them, either, among other things. (An aside: While Silicon Valley's techno-optimism is perhaps one of the most productive, proactive and pragmatic stances one can take to the world's flaws and inefficiencies, I try to remember that it's probably an exception rather than the rule. SV exists in a bubble of its own and is ultimately dependent on much else being stable.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579975 [1] https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/islamic-states-goal-eliminating-the-grayzone-of-coexistence-between-muslims-and-the-west/ https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/islamic-states-goal-elim...