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Fluctuations in silver prices can predict the probability of terrorist attacks?
- ninetax 7y agoFull paper here: https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5fDSNfK https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5f...
- thedudeabides5 7y ago"This page isn't working" Anyone else have a link to the paper/data?
- ivanech 7y agohttps://www.dropbox.com/s/8x66xc3wcvfns4a/Limodio_TerrorFinancing.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8x66xc3wcvfns4a/Limodio_TerrorFina...
- panpanna 7y agoThis seems extremely far-fetched, see for example comment on Twitter pointing out some flaws. Reminds me of that company that revived millions of dollars for their software for finding hidden messages on the internet and somehow predicting terror attacks.
- lonelappde 7y agoNo one sells silver in this story. It's a benchmark currency used to set the tax baseline. The main flaw is that the graph doesn't show a correlation of fluctuations, it just shows two high-variance metrics increasing over time. > https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations > 2.5 million terrorist chat board messages from the dark web Now that's fascinating.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- panpanna 7y agoSorry, removed that part before I saw your comment :( I agree with your comment.
- nobrains 7y ago612 grams of silver is $342 today. Those who have life-savings of $342 in bank or more, get auto-taxed. At this level, we are talking about the un-banked mostly, so they don't have accounts in the first place. In other words, nearly all bank accounts get auto-taxed, so silver price fluctuations do not really affect this. Second, try to calculate the silver price fluctuations, and calculate the ACTUAL dollar amount that becomes disposable to spend. Its peanuts. Finally, this category of people do not give charity. They take charity.
- chetan_p 7y agoj
- kasey_junk 7y agoThe paper is not arguing that the people that go from zero tax to some tax are driving the charitable giving tax. It’s arguing about the people in higher income brackets & it shows pretty robustly that charitable giving is linked to the price of silver.
- nobrains 7y agoHe talks about "nisaab" which is the minimum amount you must own before you are auto-taxed, and that amount, based on today's rate is $342. See tweet 3 of 9: https://twitter.com/benmarrow/status/1180140774127742979?s=20 https://twitter.com/benmarrow/status/1180140774127742979?s=2...
- kasey_junk 7y agoAnd here is the actual author describing the link https://twitter.com/nicolalimodio/status/1181581317596745728?s=21 https://twitter.com/nicolalimodio/status/1181581317596745728... You could also read the paper. The part linking silver prices to charitable giving is straightforward.
- gravitas 7y ago> 612 grams of silver is $342 today Subtle, but this is spot price - typically the price negotiated by large institutions based on large transfers. Individuals in the $300 range of silver buying pay premiums on top of that which scales down with size; a single gram bar has a higher premium and costs a lot more than a single 10 ozt bar with a lower premium. This can be observed at any precious metals trading platform, whether it's corporate sited like APMEX or community sites like reddit or dedicated forums; it would be highly inefficient to buy gram bars to fund anything - but people with $300 in life savings probably can't afford more than 1 ozt at a time. Silver spot price is pretty volatile as well, the trade tariff war has driven it up $2 or more in the last year.
- locust101 7y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they talked to absolutely no one local (Pakistani or Muslim) before they published this. The threshold before people pay zakat is like $300 so fluctuations in silver price has very low effect. Do you think someone with $300 in savings is giving donations? Government only deducts the zakat from the checking account. I am from Pakistan and very few people(basically salaried employees for corps/govt which is a very small portion of population) have bank accounts and the main use is to just withdraw the salary immediately every month. People who are on the threshold of $300 lifetime savings have almost negligible chance of owning a bank account.So I am going to call BS on this paper. There are so many problems with the data in this paper that I can't even. Also quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada. They are using metrics for terrorist attacks in Pakistan (most of which used to happen indiscriminately in public places in metros where most people with bank accounts live). Do you really think that people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks against themselves?
- ohazi 7y ago> quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada The more commonly accepted fact is that Muslim terrorist organizations have laundered most of their money through Muslim charities (or at least have done so in the past). As you state, this doesn't necessarily imply the opposite: that most Muslim charities fund terrorism. But it doesn't not say that either. In any case, this seems more like a lapse in logic to me than overt racism.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoSo you claim that saying "there is no evidence for this, but I believe most Muslim charities fund terrorism" is just a simple logical error?
- cwmma 7y agohe is saying that 'most terrorist money comes from charities' does not imply 'most charity money goes to terrorists'
- umeshunni 7y agoReminds me of these charts: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- peignoir 7y agoDamn you beat me at it :) makes you think about what unsupervised AI training can lead to... imagine not having insurance because you bought some Nutella on amazon during a full moon or any other crazy scenario
- imtringued 7y agohttps://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- harsh3090416 7y agoNot anymore. They now know that you know.
- kasey_junk 7y agoI suspect that this was meant as a low value comment but it’s pretty important here that the paper is decidedly not saying that the people giving to charitable organizations are intentionally funding terrorist attacks.
- codazoda 7y agoFluctuations in stork births can predict human births. Sidebar: Did you know that's why storks carry babies in cartoons? "Correlation is not causation."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 7y ago> Fluctuations in silver prices can predict the probability of terrorist attacks They are not even mapping to actual terrorist attacks And given you'll have a unknown lead time before the money allegedly arrives and is actioned by terrorists, you can shift the data a bit. A cynic would also say they can play with their model of the probability of terrorist acts to fit the data.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoSo, Silver Causes Terrorism?
- lolc 7y agoThe paper suggests that cheaper silver causes more terrorism, yes. Hilarious how people try to explain spurious correlations with a far-fetched chain of causation.
- MR4D 7y agoCorrelation is not causality! Also,... Over-fitting data. My god these things drive me crazy. If it’s real, then he should be able to answer this question posted on Twitter by Gregory Allen Perry ( @gallenperry ): What is the payout on a $1000 bet that a terrorist attack in will occur in Kashmir in the month of February with no less than 20 victims killed if the price of silver drops by 5% immediately prior to Pakistani tax assessment in the year before? If he can’t answer a question at least somewhat in the same vein as that, then this is crap. If he can (within any reasonable degree of confidence), then I’m wrong.
- bnegreve 7y agoThat would be if the price of silver increases by 5% then. According to the post if the price of silver is higher, the tax threshold increases and more people have extra money to support whatever organization they want.
- tgtweak 7y agoActually no, the lower the price of silver the more people are eligible to donate since the criteria to fall in that group is lower. Despite the lower price of the silver, the "tax" is a static fiat-based % so basically more people are donating the same %. All the people that were donating 1.5% if holding a balance over $380 would still be donating it (and the same $amount) if the threshold were $360 (silver price drops), more people would be donating since now everyone between $360 and $380 would also be donating a 1.5% in addition. If the donation was in silver then it might even itself out, but you'd have to look at a distribution curve of income to know for sure.
- bnegreve 7y agoBut if I understand correctly people donate when they don't have to pay tax. From the twitter posts: > Individuals who fall just below the threshold one year due the chance price of silver suddenly avoid a 2.5% gvt tax. Those people then increase their private donations to charity (since they have more disposable income + islam calls for alms-giving). Or in clearer terms: > ↑silver price → ↑tax threshold → ↓taxes → ↑charity → ↑terrorist financing → ↑terrorist attacks!
- curiousgal 7y ago> predict the probabilities Yeah that's all I needed to read to know that this is BS. On a more serious note, if charities are indeed funding terrorism, you wouldn't have data on them. Especially in Pakistan where keeping data is something only the reputable orgs do. This "paper" is not peer-reviewed and it will never get published. Just a usual case of a smartass thinking they can justify that their correlation means something when in fact it doesn't.
- mlang23 7y agohttps://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- thaumasiotes 7y agoAs I look at the page (which I believe changes randomly), I especially appreciate the 0.81 correlation between "letters in winning word of Scripps National Spelling Bee" and "number of people killed by venomous spiders". It's a good one in two ways. First, it's nicely obvious that these things are unrelated. Second, these are two variables that fluctuate (together) over time -- a lot of the spurious correlations turn out to be two things that basically just increase or decrease more or less constantly over the period in question.
- jaclaz 7y ago>I especially appreciate the ... And you missed this > 0.99 one (a bit dated, still ...): Apple iPhone sales correlates with People who died by falling down the stairs https://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28669 https://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28669
- thaumasiotes 7y agoSure, but like all the 0.99+ correlations, that one is just two lines moving in the same direction.
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoNow I'm having fun imagining all the various hypothetical conspiracies that are causing these correlations.
- Hasz 7y agoLink to the actual paper https://t.co/s0NZ1PcpQf https://t.co/s0NZ1PcpQf Is it normal for econ papers to use the first person? Super weird to read. His Latex formatting is a mess too. Check out page 37 for a scatter plot of rock solid correlation, lol. Not going to read the full 56 page mess because that's a job for an unpaid reviewer, not an unpaid commentator. That being said, there's a shit ton of easy hidden variables here. Mountains of them. People are going to talk about spurious correlations, which is fine, but there' s a more subtle trick here, the hidden variable. Sunscreen use is correlated with an increase in shark attacks and increase in hot dog sales. Are sharks attracted to sunscreen? Is there a secret ingredient in hot suncreen that makes people eat hot dogs? I can come up with pretty good explanations, that pass a qucik sniff test, all day long. The answer is of course not. More people are simply at the beach. More people --> more collisions with sharks, more hot dogs shoved down gullets. Not familiar enough with the culture of Pakistan to point out the specific variables, but that's the guess.
- lootsauce 7y agoGot a good chuckle “that's a job for an unpaid reviewer, not an unpaid commentator.”
- kasey_junk 7y agoRight the, checks notes... University of Chicago is known for its lack of rigor in economics.
- heisenbit 7y agoCorrelation, causation. So similar, so different.
- lngnmn1 7y agoWhen phases of the moon? Probabilistic astrology is the new astrology.
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- slowhand09 7y agoRelevant: In the words of master data visualist Edward Tufte, “Correlation isn’t causation, but sure is a hint.”
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