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We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend

We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. Not that I'm advocating for lower speed limits, just that there is a contradiction here. I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.

lonelyPM 5y ago
Well said... I feel like someone out there has developed a dashboard like this.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  We are pretty good at death counts, it's easy. All the data is there. Tied to anonymised health condition as aggregates. The problem is how do we even start to evaluate the cost of prevention. Measures? We have equipment and labour costs, that's easy to measure but the data is not made available. But then what is the opportunity cost on those who are inflicted the measures. A person goes on holiday and can perhaps browse a book while queuing for an hour to go through the security checks, a business traveller is simply standing there, unable to even make a phone call due to lack of privacy. Also, if we spend 1 trillion usd on say the prevention of terrorism, and we "only" suffered 20 death in the United States during that period, it doesn't mean halving the expense would only double the death toll. We put measures and have no tool to measure their effect, high number of variables, and each of their weight evolve dynamically. I think we better spend time educating the media industry to somewhat control the increasing rate of fear inducing columns published each second. And if they don't learn, regulate them since we are already regulating countless industries for that matter.
  - landemva 5y ago
    Strong door to flight deck, and policy change to keep door closed and locked, eliminated hijacking risk. Everything else is an expensive show which air travellers apparently enjoy. They keep paying for it.
    - hirako2000 5y ago
      They don't enjoy it. It's mandated, and the cost isn't itemised on the ticket fare. If each and every traveller knew the cost of airport security measures put on them, more would complain, the most drastic airports may start to be avoided on principle. But we aren't in a capitalist regime where transparency and obligation to inform accurately is enforced. It's authoritarian capitalism. Pay up, or find yourself excluded from the show.
      - landemva 5y ago
        Good points on tax transparency. Add-ons are itemized on air tickets in USA, though things like airport remodeling costs are opaque. Expensive 'raise arms under arrest' full body scanners aren't advertised as opt-in by TSA, but they are voluntary. I always go through standard metal detector only. Maybe the masses don't care enough about cost/ benefit and allow career beauracrats to run wild designing 'security'. Did you know the food store workers near the gates walk around TSA screening at most airports? Crazy.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
People are just fine at evaluating risk. It's just that the prioritization of the population is different than the prioritization of HN/Reddit/whatever. "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true. People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.
- edanm 5y ago
  > "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true. That is absolutely not true, at least not in the way anyone means. Humans are "terrible" at remembering numbers. The average-ability human has average ability, obviously, that is tautological. But as a whole, humans are not good at remembering numbers. A reasonable question is, what does "good" even mean? Well that depends on context. We are worse at remember numbers than computers are. We are worse at remember numbers than the same human, but with pen and paper. We are worse than some animals. Obviously, there is no objective "good" or "bad". We are better than some animals, etc. But when someone says that humans are terrible at evaluating risk, they usually imply that we are bad at it as compared to risk evaluation done with real calculations, and that is internally consistent. And that is something that IS somewhat objective, and most humans fail as compared to this objective standard (e.g., lots of contradictions in risk decisions).
  - xeromal 5y ago
    I think you missed the point of the post you're replying to. >People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.
    - edanm 5y ago
      No, I was replying to the specific sentence I quoted. I actually agree with the spirit of the post, it's just that one thing that bothered me.
elnino74 5y ago
Not sure how you make such a dashboard when the expensive prevention measures affect the number of deaths. I think you are looking for number of deaths if the prevention measures weren't in place, but i'm not sure how you could arrive to that number accurately.
tintor 5y ago
Tracking how many people die from different causes is easy. Difficulty is tracking how many lives were saved with specific preventive measure.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
barathr 5y ago
This was studied before, and the results are amazing -- it's 266th ranked in terms of disability adjusted life years: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11127-018-0590-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11127-018-0590-... > If terrorism were a disease, injury, or mental disorder, its DALY would rank in the bottom decile of the 291 diseases and injuries included in the Global Burden of Disease (Murray et al. 2012). Specifically, in Table 7 it is shown that terrorism would rank 266th, i.e., in the bottom 9%. Relative to the diseases that plague mankind, terrorism has limited consequences.
- q1w2 5y ago
  Death is not the only societal cost, and the study above only looked at first-order numbers of deaths. Additionally, it's difficult to measure the cost of in-action when responding to an erratic phenomenon like terrorism.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Actually we are but actuaries aren't, maybe politicians should start using some actuarial expertise rather than jumping from one supposed crisis to the next to get votes. People, especially mobs, are ruled far more by fear than by facts.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I get $100 from my health insurer for getting flu shots, I imagine similar incentives are coming for covid vaccines. 2021 premiums were set before vaccines came out, so maybe they have had time to price it in by now.
corey_moncure 5y ago
The CDC collects these statistics. You would find, for instance, that more black people die each year from falling out of bed than they do at the hands of cops while unarmed (Unironically, provably true; look it up before you downvote... ideally no innocent person would die during police interactions). Clearly, whatever motivates policy and politics has no resemblance to a proportional risk-based assessment.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  There is no purpose in comparing those two things as one is self inflicted whereas the other is involves a second party’s actions.
  - earthscienceman 5y ago
    The other problem overlooked in this analogy is that the killings are the most extreme symptom of a tyrannical police force that terrorizes (black) American citizens at an incredibly high rate, from harassment to physical abuse. Protests against the police are using killings as an example of the problem, not the complete summary. And, to be clear, the police treat white Americans very poorly as well. It's just that they somehow manage to treat black Americans even worse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cammikebrown 5y ago
  I went ahead and looked it up. According to google, in the US 650 die falling out of bed per year[1], while about 1000 are killed by police, about 20-25% of those police victims being black (while the US black population is around 14%).[2] Falling deaths are quite common among the elderly. Police shootings, not so much. https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
  - hunterb123 5y ago
umvi 5y ago
> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties. The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives. For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there's a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides.
- th0ma5 5y ago
  Yes police shoot and kill more people that mass shootings. But also covid has killed more police than people have.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided? For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats. "While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."
  - Sevii 5y ago
    Sure but then politics becomes about controlling what's on those tests.
    - seph-reed 5y ago
nmca 5y ago
I think Taleb has a point on this topic - the concern is about a forecasted growth rate, not about the current rate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM
- everlost 5y ago
  By that logic, shouldn't the concerns stop when the growth rate drops?
pacman2 5y ago
20 years after 9/11, BinLaden still takes money out of your pocket (Airport security, air marshals etc.).
- danans 5y ago
  20 years later, the commodity that both financed and motivated 9/11 style terrorism and religious radicalization in the middle east and beyond - petroleum - still does that. It's also the same industry that provides a lot of revenue for the international arms industry. But we didn't really want to stomach the lifestyle changes that shifting off of petroleum as a fuel would require, so instead we went decided to bomb societies out of supporting terrorism and into democracy. Even if one doesn't believe climate change is real, that's a pretty good reason to avoid burning petroleum to move around by driving EVs and taking public transit.
  - landemva 5y ago
    USA had become net energy exporter, until January 2021 administration change. We didn't need OPEC. This year we choose to need OPEC.
serjester 5y ago
Those are risks that are stable from year to year. Deaths from terrorism, COVID and small wars are defined by power laws where they can quickly spiral out of control. You could argue people intuitively understand this and overreact in an attempt to get them under "control". If traffics deaths varied by many magnitudes year to year you'd likely see a similar over reactions. I'm not saying I agree with this approach but it's not as simple as people make it out to be.
babyshake 5y ago
I've definitely considered this regarding COVID. It seems commonplace where I live that many people feel it is irresponsible to not wear a mask when doing something like hiking on an almost empty nature trail, but will drive recklessly on the highway without a second thought.
heavyset_go 5y ago
In my opinion, this is just statistics worship, and is not unlike a form of utilitarianism. Murder rates are low, but we spend an incredible amount of resources preventing, investigating, prosecuting, imprisoning and executing murderers, even those who have murdered just one person. While I have significant grievances with the US justice and prison system, I'm okay with expending disproportionate resources to ensure that people don't take others' lives just because they want to or feel entitled to.
mherdeg 5y ago
My gut feeling is that if you look at these data they'll tell you "most people should focus on eating well and getting good amounts of exercise." They might also tell you "kids should learn water safety skills and comply with car seat safety rules scrupulously". It's hazy now but I remember doing some back-of-the-envelope math in April 2020 to compare risk of death via SARS-CoV-2 infection vs. other causes. I think what I remember seeing was that if you're age 80+ getting COVID is similar to driving 10 million road miles in the US (NHTSA: 1.5 deaths per 100 million road miles; COVID: 15% mortality for infection in ages 80+). I think I remember being totally unable to evaluate the risk to a kid but maybe COVID infection is similar to driving 3000 road miles? (per upper bound at https://fullfact.org/health/bbc-children-covid-risk/ https://fullfact.org/health/bbc-children-covid-risk/). This mostly told me that driving was very risky. Problems with comparing road miles to disease infection: (1) being infected also means you're infectious; dying in a car crash doesn't spread exponentially to others (2) I do not know how to reason about the long-term side effects of COVID on quality adjusted life years > I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism. I do a qualitative analysis of this every couple of years: should I bike to work? (1) Cardiovascular fitness improves from exercise (2) You might get hit by a car and die (worrying about this adds stress even if you don't experience it).
jlg23 5y ago
We could just start with people dying from starvation or wars globally. My guts tell me, if we can reduce this number, we will reduce the number of terrorist attacks as well.
Alupis 5y ago
> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths The "preventing a single death is worth it" crowd has unfortunately been running the show since 9/11. This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.
- gorwell 5y ago
  It's bizarrely myopic. It not only ignores any cost benefit analysis, but also larger preventable causes of death and poor health outcomes. Obesity being the proverbial elephant in the room.
- poetaster 5y ago
  Exactly. I really gotta stoo typing now....
- sellyme 5y ago
  > This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way. The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count, and is #24 out of 223 per capita with just a smidge under 2,000 deaths per million people. If you think that's "stop[ping] all deaths no matter the cost" I'd love to hear what you think of my state of 1.8 million people with a grand total of 4 deaths.
  - Alupis 5y ago
    > The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count. The US is the 3rd largest country by population - and the two largest countries either A) Have no feasible way to count accurately or B) Deliberately don't report accurately. > I'd love to hear what you think of my state You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails. Los Angeles bulldozed sand into skateboard parks[1] because kids were playing... despite all data at the time (and since then) has showed children are not at severe risk at all. It went well into the "prevent any death, no matter the cost" territory for most of the past year. Shutdown all the schools - force kids to stay at home in isolation - drive up teen suicide rates... but it doesn't matter because they weren't COVID deaths and the goal was to prevent all COVID deaths. We ignored all consequences of the policies we enacted - because the goal became zero COVID deaths. Goodhart's Law[2] might come into play here. Self driving cars is another prime example. Spending billions and billions of dollars, countless man hours of research and engineering, selling a promise and vision - negligently killing people along the way - all so we can have some future where nobody dies from a vehicle? That's just not reality. The reality is people will just die from coding errors instead - but it's the pursuit of "zero lives lost" that drives that industry and fantasy right now. [1] https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-sand-from-iconic-venice-beach-skate-park-despite-stay-at-home-orders/ https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
DSingularity 5y ago
Queue the “only so few die because we spend so much” response.
moogly 5y ago
Whilst I think airport security is indeed just security theater, roll my eyes every time I have to take my shoes off at an airport, and I disagree with some of the claims in this article that these things work and have kept us safe, I'm not sure that's a great idea. I can only speak for myself, but I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives. Going down that route gives us such wonderful things like corporations preferring to pay out damages instead of making product recalls (c.f. the Ford Pinto case). It gets quite cynical. But I guess in the minority here. All my "tech bros" think like that too. It's all about cold, hard statistics. There is something to be said about "Vision Zero[1]" type projects, but as it stands I don't think the TSA is currently engaging in a deliberate such project. [1]: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Vision_zero https://wikiless.org/wiki/Vision_zero
- Metacelsus 5y ago
  >I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives What about when you measure the costs as lives vs. lives? E.g. spending X dollars on airport security saves Y lives, but spent on highway safety saves Z lives.
  - moogly 5y ago
    As someone else wrote in this thread, there's absolutely no way to know how many were saved from potential harm, so that's a useless contradistinction.
- GhostVII 5y ago
  I think doing some kind of cost benefit would be preferable to just spending money on what types of death people are most afraid of, which is basically what we are doing now. I'm not saying that we need to do super intense cost benefit on every way of preventing death. But if we are spending far more to prevent a particular type of death than another just because of public sentiment I think that is a problem we should fix. And doing that kind of analysis can actually save far more lives by using resources more efficiently. Orders of magnitude more people die from obesity than terrorism, yet we don't spend orders of magnitude more money on promoting healthy lifestyles. Or to pick a slightly absurd example, if we replaced security screening with cancer screening it could be far more effective in preventing people from dying in ways that aren't their "fault" (false positives aside).
_h_a_n_o_ 5y ago
There's a fine but substantial difference: Terrorism is murder. Comparing murder to accidences or to fate in case of deathly diseases is inappropriate.
andrewfong 5y ago
We sort of have this in the concept of a micromort: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
While true, I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the war on terror and its intrusions in our domestic lives have to do with risk assessment? Don't think I have to say it out loud but it's about literal trillions of dollars that have flowed to MIC, expanded bureaucracy, surveillance, gov contractors, natural resource industries, foreign allies, and a whole lot more that could be noted.
apples_oranges 5y ago
This is actually a logical fallacy. Heart disease, accidents etc: They happen. Terrorism: Someone wants them to happen. Big difference, think about it.
MrCybertooth 5y ago
Count of total death is just a 'metric' and something that can be 'optimised' and done 'cost benefit analysis' upon, unless it is your child or family member who is the casualty. I would like to understand how okay anybody would be when told that their daughter died because the government felt it was a waste of money to prevent it.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  This is the core of my problem with utilitarian metrics like this, as they rely on quantifying the unquantifiable. What is truly scary about it, though, are the people who are certain they can quantify those things, and convince others of it, too.
- kobasa 5y ago
  Big difference between labeling it a "waste of money" to having to prioritize whilst being constrained to a limited budget. I mean there's no words that will console a parent that lost their daughter anyways, not really a metric that should determine policy.
- GhostVII 5y ago
  But we make those choices every single day, gathering data about it doesn't change that fact. Most people who die in a car crashes would have been saved if we made the speed limit 25mph and enforced it with speed cameras, but that would be inconvenient for everyone else. There are plenty of very rare diseases that kill people each year, we don't spend as much money on them because it isn't worth it to just save a few lives each year relative to what we could be spending it on. Many flu deaths could be prevented each year if we just closed down every nonessential business during flu season, but we are OK with some people dying so we can gather socially, even if we don't have to. I think doing cost benefit analysis for deaths and lost years of life would be great, and would allow us to make more logical decisions. Of course no one wants their child or family member to die, but the reality is that if you want to setup society to just stop deaths at all cost, you are going to have a pretty miserable population. And if you don't do any cost benefit, you will actually be allowing more people to die by spending money in places where it isn't the most effective.
andrewfong 5y ago
There's a dynamic aspect to this that's difficult to capture in terms of straight up mortality risk. For starters, we're more interested in the marginal average reduction of mortality per dollar invested rather than point in time risk. Like, the risk of flying on airplanes is fairly low relative to driving. But that's, in part, because we've already invested a huge amount into making air travel safe. It might not make sense to funnel future dollars into making air travel safe as opposed to cars. But if we were to lower that investment going forward, mortality would presumably go up. Because people aren't that irrational: Zooming through the air a mile in the sky, absent safety precautions, really is inherently less safe than driving on the ground. That's extra true for something like security, where you're dealing with responsive opponents. The odds of a plane blowing up in a terrorist attack are low, but if the bad guys had a 100% successful method for blowing up a plane, they'd probably take it and the odds would go up. Plus the odds also vary quite a bit based on the denominator too. For instance, the odds of death by flying are lower over the last X years. But if you were looking only at mortality risk from flying on the 737 Max in 2019, maybe that's different. And then there's the non-mortality cost. Eating healthier food would reduce mortality quite a bit. But people like eating unhealthy things -- at some point, the extra life gained isn't worth it. None of this is to say that the current degree of security theatre is worth it. Only that relative mortality is probably insufficient a measure.
shoulderfake 5y ago
High speed limits are killing people? Are you ok man? Look at germany and their death tolls on highways compared to america.
- GhostVII 5y ago
  Of course high speed limits aren't the only factor in traffic deaths. But if we set every speed limit to 25mph and enforced it, I'm pretty confident we would see a significant drop. Obviously we shouldn't do that, but the point is that we are allowing some people to die so we can get places faster.
teawrecks 5y ago
This is close. A comparison of causes of death vs how much time the news spends focusing on each one: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
poetaster 5y ago
Does coke want kid's to become obese?
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  No, they just want repeat customers.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Exactly. An entire 9-11 load of deaths in car accidents occurs EVERY MONTH ever since. The disproportionate response shows up the fraud of the War on Terror, Patriot Act and things like TSA SOPs at airports. You can compare it to any other cause of death or even merely injury.
yhoneycomb 5y ago
> I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism. Or you would encourage the already-sedentary people to go out even less.
nullc 5y ago
While I agree with your conclusion, the metric you suggest isn't a good one. As a silly hypothetical: Imagine that terrorism was really popular but completely thwarted by taking your shoes off at airports. Because its well known that the shoes always come off, the terrorists don't even try. And as a result your dashboard would show lots of money being spent removing shoes but no terrorism. Yet (in this silly example) if the shoe removal spending stopped people would be blowing up left in right, so it's actually a good investment. Successful measures tend to erase their own effect, especially when applied to intelligent systems. If you allow observations vs cost to be your guide you risk cutting spending on highly effective measures and preserving spending on measures that do not work (which leave lots of observations around)! This is one of the reasons that randomized controlled trials are so much better than basic observational science.
woko 5y ago
> while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. The French government tried to tackle this issue. This lead to months of yellow-vest protests, close to a revolution at times. Some dude forced the door of a ministry with a bulldozer. Others set fire to a prefecture. Death threats everywhere. Small Guillotines were built. Etc. The protests were sill rocking after a year, and were put to a temporary stop due to COVID lock-down. tl;dr: nobody would dare decrease the speed limits again.
chenning 5y ago
It's about preventing deaths and making people feel safe traveling.

lonelyPM 5y ago

Well said... I feel like someone out there has developed a dashboard like this.

hirako2000 5y ago
We are pretty good at death counts, it's easy. All the data is there. Tied to anonymised health condition as aggregates. The problem is how do we even start to evaluate the cost of prevention. Measures? We have equipment and labour costs, that's easy to measure but the data is not made available. But then what is the opportunity cost on those who are inflicted the measures. A person goes on holiday and can perhaps browse a book while queuing for an hour to go through the security checks, a business traveller is simply standing there, unable to even make a phone call due to lack of privacy. Also, if we spend 1 trillion usd on say the prevention of terrorism, and we "only" suffered 20 death in the United States during that period, it doesn't mean halving the expense would only double the death toll. We put measures and have no tool to measure their effect, high number of variables, and each of their weight evolve dynamically. I think we better spend time educating the media industry to somewhat control the increasing rate of fear inducing columns published each second. And if they don't learn, regulate them since we are already regulating countless industries for that matter.
- landemva 5y ago
  Strong door to flight deck, and policy change to keep door closed and locked, eliminated hijacking risk. Everything else is an expensive show which air travellers apparently enjoy. They keep paying for it.
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    They don't enjoy it. It's mandated, and the cost isn't itemised on the ticket fare. If each and every traveller knew the cost of airport security measures put on them, more would complain, the most drastic airports may start to be avoided on principle. But we aren't in a capitalist regime where transparency and obligation to inform accurately is enforced. It's authoritarian capitalism. Pay up, or find yourself excluded from the show.
    - landemva 5y ago
      Good points on tax transparency. Add-ons are itemized on air tickets in USA, though things like airport remodeling costs are opaque. Expensive 'raise arms under arrest' full body scanners aren't advertised as opt-in by TSA, but they are voluntary. I always go through standard metal detector only. Maybe the masses don't care enough about cost/ benefit and allow career beauracrats to run wild designing 'security'. Did you know the food store workers near the gates walk around TSA screening at most airports? Crazy.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

People are just fine at evaluating risk. It's just that the prioritization of the population is different than the prioritization of HN/Reddit/whatever. "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true. People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.

edanm 5y ago
> "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true. That is absolutely not true, at least not in the way anyone means. Humans are "terrible" at remembering numbers. The average-ability human has average ability, obviously, that is tautological. But as a whole, humans are not good at remembering numbers. A reasonable question is, what does "good" even mean? Well that depends on context. We are worse at remember numbers than computers are. We are worse at remember numbers than the same human, but with pen and paper. We are worse than some animals. Obviously, there is no objective "good" or "bad". We are better than some animals, etc. But when someone says that humans are terrible at evaluating risk, they usually imply that we are bad at it as compared to risk evaluation done with real calculations, and that is internally consistent. And that is something that IS somewhat objective, and most humans fail as compared to this objective standard (e.g., lots of contradictions in risk decisions).
- xeromal 5y ago
  I think you missed the point of the post you're replying to. >People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.
  - edanm 5y ago
    No, I was replying to the specific sentence I quoted. I actually agree with the spirit of the post, it's just that one thing that bothered me.

elnino74 5y ago

Not sure how you make such a dashboard when the expensive prevention measures affect the number of deaths. I think you are looking for number of deaths if the prevention measures weren't in place, but i'm not sure how you could arrive to that number accurately.

tintor 5y ago

Tracking how many people die from different causes is easy. Difficulty is tracking how many lives were saved with specific preventive measure.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

barathr 5y ago

This was studied before, and the results are amazing -- it's 266th ranked in terms of disability adjusted life years: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11127-018-0590-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11127-018-0590-... > If terrorism were a disease, injury, or mental disorder, its DALY would rank in the bottom decile of the 291 diseases and injuries included in the Global Burden of Disease (Murray et al. 2012). Specifically, in Table 7 it is shown that terrorism would rank 266th, i.e., in the bottom 9%. Relative to the diseases that plague mankind, terrorism has limited consequences.

q1w2 5y ago
Death is not the only societal cost, and the study above only looked at first-order numbers of deaths. Additionally, it's difficult to measure the cost of in-action when responding to an erratic phenomenon like terrorism.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Actually we are but actuaries aren't, maybe politicians should start using some actuarial expertise rather than jumping from one supposed crisis to the next to get votes. People, especially mobs, are ruled far more by fear than by facts.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I get $100 from my health insurer for getting flu shots, I imagine similar incentives are coming for covid vaccines. 2021 premiums were set before vaccines came out, so maybe they have had time to price it in by now.

corey_moncure 5y ago

The CDC collects these statistics. You would find, for instance, that more black people die each year from falling out of bed than they do at the hands of cops while unarmed (Unironically, provably true; look it up before you downvote... ideally no innocent person would die during police interactions). Clearly, whatever motivates policy and politics has no resemblance to a proportional risk-based assessment.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
There is no purpose in comparing those two things as one is self inflicted whereas the other is involves a second party’s actions.
- earthscienceman 5y ago
  The other problem overlooked in this analogy is that the killings are the most extreme symptom of a tyrannical police force that terrorizes (black) American citizens at an incredibly high rate, from harassment to physical abuse. Protests against the police are using killings as an example of the problem, not the complete summary. And, to be clear, the police treat white Americans very poorly as well. It's just that they somehow manage to treat black Americans even worse.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cammikebrown 5y ago
I went ahead and looked it up. According to google, in the US 650 die falling out of bed per year[1], while about 1000 are killed by police, about 20-25% of those police victims being black (while the US black population is around 14%).[2] Falling deaths are quite common among the elderly. Police shootings, not so much. https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
- hunterb123 5y ago

umvi 5y ago

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties. The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives. For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there's a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides.

th0ma5 5y ago
Yes police shoot and kill more people that mass shootings. But also covid has killed more police than people have.
seph-reed 5y ago
What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided? For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats. "While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."
- Sevii 5y ago
  Sure but then politics becomes about controlling what's on those tests.
  - seph-reed 5y ago

nmca 5y ago

I think Taleb has a point on this topic - the concern is about a forecasted growth rate, not about the current rate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM

everlost 5y ago
By that logic, shouldn't the concerns stop when the growth rate drops?

pacman2 5y ago

20 years after 9/11, BinLaden still takes money out of your pocket (Airport security, air marshals etc.).

danans 5y ago
20 years later, the commodity that both financed and motivated 9/11 style terrorism and religious radicalization in the middle east and beyond - petroleum - still does that. It's also the same industry that provides a lot of revenue for the international arms industry. But we didn't really want to stomach the lifestyle changes that shifting off of petroleum as a fuel would require, so instead we went decided to bomb societies out of supporting terrorism and into democracy. Even if one doesn't believe climate change is real, that's a pretty good reason to avoid burning petroleum to move around by driving EVs and taking public transit.
- landemva 5y ago
  USA had become net energy exporter, until January 2021 administration change. We didn't need OPEC. This year we choose to need OPEC.

serjester 5y ago

Those are risks that are stable from year to year. Deaths from terrorism, COVID and small wars are defined by power laws where they can quickly spiral out of control. You could argue people intuitively understand this and overreact in an attempt to get them under "control". If traffics deaths varied by many magnitudes year to year you'd likely see a similar over reactions. I'm not saying I agree with this approach but it's not as simple as people make it out to be.

babyshake 5y ago

I've definitely considered this regarding COVID. It seems commonplace where I live that many people feel it is irresponsible to not wear a mask when doing something like hiking on an almost empty nature trail, but will drive recklessly on the highway without a second thought.

heavyset_go 5y ago

In my opinion, this is just statistics worship, and is not unlike a form of utilitarianism. Murder rates are low, but we spend an incredible amount of resources preventing, investigating, prosecuting, imprisoning and executing murderers, even those who have murdered just one person. While I have significant grievances with the US justice and prison system, I'm okay with expending disproportionate resources to ensure that people don't take others' lives just because they want to or feel entitled to.

mherdeg 5y ago

My gut feeling is that if you look at these data they'll tell you "most people should focus on eating well and getting good amounts of exercise." They might also tell you "kids should learn water safety skills and comply with car seat safety rules scrupulously". It's hazy now but I remember doing some back-of-the-envelope math in April 2020 to compare risk of death via SARS-CoV-2 infection vs. other causes. I think what I remember seeing was that if you're age 80+ getting COVID is similar to driving 10 million road miles in the US (NHTSA: 1.5 deaths per 100 million road miles; COVID: 15% mortality for infection in ages 80+). I think I remember being totally unable to evaluate the risk to a kid but maybe COVID infection is similar to driving 3000 road miles? (per upper bound at https://fullfact.org/health/bbc-children-covid-risk/ https://fullfact.org/health/bbc-children-covid-risk/). This mostly told me that driving was very risky. Problems with comparing road miles to disease infection: (1) being infected also means you're infectious; dying in a car crash doesn't spread exponentially to others (2) I do not know how to reason about the long-term side effects of COVID on quality adjusted life years > I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism. I do a qualitative analysis of this every couple of years: should I bike to work? (1) Cardiovascular fitness improves from exercise (2) You might get hit by a car and die (worrying about this adds stress even if you don't experience it).

jlg23 5y ago

We could just start with people dying from starvation or wars globally. My guts tell me, if we can reduce this number, we will reduce the number of terrorist attacks as well.

Alupis 5y ago

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths The "preventing a single death is worth it" crowd has unfortunately been running the show since 9/11. This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.

gorwell 5y ago
It's bizarrely myopic. It not only ignores any cost benefit analysis, but also larger preventable causes of death and poor health outcomes. Obesity being the proverbial elephant in the room.
poetaster 5y ago
Exactly. I really gotta stoo typing now....
sellyme 5y ago
> This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way. The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count, and is #24 out of 223 per capita with just a smidge under 2,000 deaths per million people. If you think that's "stop[ping] all deaths no matter the cost" I'd love to hear what you think of my state of 1.8 million people with a grand total of 4 deaths.
- Alupis 5y ago
  > The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count. The US is the 3rd largest country by population - and the two largest countries either A) Have no feasible way to count accurately or B) Deliberately don't report accurately. > I'd love to hear what you think of my state You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails. Los Angeles bulldozed sand into skateboard parks[1] because kids were playing... despite all data at the time (and since then) has showed children are not at severe risk at all. It went well into the "prevent any death, no matter the cost" territory for most of the past year. Shutdown all the schools - force kids to stay at home in isolation - drive up teen suicide rates... but it doesn't matter because they weren't COVID deaths and the goal was to prevent all COVID deaths. We ignored all consequences of the policies we enacted - because the goal became zero COVID deaths. Goodhart's Law[2] might come into play here. Self driving cars is another prime example. Spending billions and billions of dollars, countless man hours of research and engineering, selling a promise and vision - negligently killing people along the way - all so we can have some future where nobody dies from a vehicle? That's just not reality. The reality is people will just die from coding errors instead - but it's the pursuit of "zero lives lost" that drives that industry and fantasy right now. [1] https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-sand-from-iconic-venice-beach-skate-park-despite-stay-at-home-orders/ https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

DSingularity 5y ago

Queue the “only so few die because we spend so much” response.

moogly 5y ago

Whilst I think airport security is indeed just security theater, roll my eyes every time I have to take my shoes off at an airport, and I disagree with some of the claims in this article that these things work and have kept us safe, I'm not sure that's a great idea. I can only speak for myself, but I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives. Going down that route gives us such wonderful things like corporations preferring to pay out damages instead of making product recalls (c.f. the Ford Pinto case). It gets quite cynical. But I guess in the minority here. All my "tech bros" think like that too. It's all about cold, hard statistics. There is something to be said about "Vision Zero[1]" type projects, but as it stands I don't think the TSA is currently engaging in a deliberate such project. [1]: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Vision_zero https://wikiless.org/wiki/Vision_zero

Metacelsus 5y ago
>I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives What about when you measure the costs as lives vs. lives? E.g. spending X dollars on airport security saves Y lives, but spent on highway safety saves Z lives.
- moogly 5y ago
  As someone else wrote in this thread, there's absolutely no way to know how many were saved from potential harm, so that's a useless contradistinction.
GhostVII 5y ago
I think doing some kind of cost benefit would be preferable to just spending money on what types of death people are most afraid of, which is basically what we are doing now. I'm not saying that we need to do super intense cost benefit on every way of preventing death. But if we are spending far more to prevent a particular type of death than another just because of public sentiment I think that is a problem we should fix. And doing that kind of analysis can actually save far more lives by using resources more efficiently. Orders of magnitude more people die from obesity than terrorism, yet we don't spend orders of magnitude more money on promoting healthy lifestyles. Or to pick a slightly absurd example, if we replaced security screening with cancer screening it could be far more effective in preventing people from dying in ways that aren't their "fault" (false positives aside).

_h_a_n_o_ 5y ago

There's a fine but substantial difference: Terrorism is murder. Comparing murder to accidences or to fate in case of deathly diseases is inappropriate.

andrewfong 5y ago

We sort of have this in the concept of a micromort: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

poorjohnmacafee 5y ago

While true, I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the war on terror and its intrusions in our domestic lives have to do with risk assessment? Don't think I have to say it out loud but it's about literal trillions of dollars that have flowed to MIC, expanded bureaucracy, surveillance, gov contractors, natural resource industries, foreign allies, and a whole lot more that could be noted.

apples_oranges 5y ago

This is actually a logical fallacy. Heart disease, accidents etc: They happen. Terrorism: Someone wants them to happen. Big difference, think about it.

MrCybertooth 5y ago

Count of total death is just a 'metric' and something that can be 'optimised' and done 'cost benefit analysis' upon, unless it is your child or family member who is the casualty. I would like to understand how okay anybody would be when told that their daughter died because the government felt it was a waste of money to prevent it.

heavyset_go 5y ago
This is the core of my problem with utilitarian metrics like this, as they rely on quantifying the unquantifiable. What is truly scary about it, though, are the people who are certain they can quantify those things, and convince others of it, too.
kobasa 5y ago
Big difference between labeling it a "waste of money" to having to prioritize whilst being constrained to a limited budget. I mean there's no words that will console a parent that lost their daughter anyways, not really a metric that should determine policy.
GhostVII 5y ago
But we make those choices every single day, gathering data about it doesn't change that fact. Most people who die in a car crashes would have been saved if we made the speed limit 25mph and enforced it with speed cameras, but that would be inconvenient for everyone else. There are plenty of very rare diseases that kill people each year, we don't spend as much money on them because it isn't worth it to just save a few lives each year relative to what we could be spending it on. Many flu deaths could be prevented each year if we just closed down every nonessential business during flu season, but we are OK with some people dying so we can gather socially, even if we don't have to. I think doing cost benefit analysis for deaths and lost years of life would be great, and would allow us to make more logical decisions. Of course no one wants their child or family member to die, but the reality is that if you want to setup society to just stop deaths at all cost, you are going to have a pretty miserable population. And if you don't do any cost benefit, you will actually be allowing more people to die by spending money in places where it isn't the most effective.

andrewfong 5y ago

There's a dynamic aspect to this that's difficult to capture in terms of straight up mortality risk. For starters, we're more interested in the marginal average reduction of mortality per dollar invested rather than point in time risk. Like, the risk of flying on airplanes is fairly low relative to driving. But that's, in part, because we've already invested a huge amount into making air travel safe. It might not make sense to funnel future dollars into making air travel safe as opposed to cars. But if we were to lower that investment going forward, mortality would presumably go up. Because people aren't that irrational: Zooming through the air a mile in the sky, absent safety precautions, really is inherently less safe than driving on the ground. That's extra true for something like security, where you're dealing with responsive opponents. The odds of a plane blowing up in a terrorist attack are low, but if the bad guys had a 100% successful method for blowing up a plane, they'd probably take it and the odds would go up. Plus the odds also vary quite a bit based on the denominator too. For instance, the odds of death by flying are lower over the last X years. But if you were looking only at mortality risk from flying on the 737 Max in 2019, maybe that's different. And then there's the non-mortality cost. Eating healthier food would reduce mortality quite a bit. But people like eating unhealthy things -- at some point, the extra life gained isn't worth it. None of this is to say that the current degree of security theatre is worth it. Only that relative mortality is probably insufficient a measure.

shoulderfake 5y ago

High speed limits are killing people? Are you ok man? Look at germany and their death tolls on highways compared to america.

GhostVII 5y ago
Of course high speed limits aren't the only factor in traffic deaths. But if we set every speed limit to 25mph and enforced it, I'm pretty confident we would see a significant drop. Obviously we shouldn't do that, but the point is that we are allowing some people to die so we can get places faster.

teawrecks 5y ago

This is close. A comparison of causes of death vs how much time the news spends focusing on each one: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

poetaster 5y ago

Does coke want kid's to become obese?

BizarroLand 5y ago
No, they just want repeat customers.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Exactly. An entire 9-11 load of deaths in car accidents occurs EVERY MONTH ever since. The disproportionate response shows up the fraud of the War on Terror, Patriot Act and things like TSA SOPs at airports. You can compare it to any other cause of death or even merely injury.

yhoneycomb 5y ago

> I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism. Or you would encourage the already-sedentary people to go out even less.

nullc 5y ago

While I agree with your conclusion, the metric you suggest isn't a good one. As a silly hypothetical: Imagine that terrorism was really popular but completely thwarted by taking your shoes off at airports. Because its well known that the shoes always come off, the terrorists don't even try. And as a result your dashboard would show lots of money being spent removing shoes but no terrorism. Yet (in this silly example) if the shoe removal spending stopped people would be blowing up left in right, so it's actually a good investment. Successful measures tend to erase their own effect, especially when applied to intelligent systems. If you allow observations vs cost to be your guide you risk cutting spending on highly effective measures and preserving spending on measures that do not work (which leave lots of observations around)! This is one of the reasons that randomized controlled trials are so much better than basic observational science.

woko 5y ago

> while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. The French government tried to tackle this issue. This lead to months of yellow-vest protests, close to a revolution at times. Some dude forced the door of a ministry with a bulldozer. Others set fire to a prefecture. Death threats everywhere. Small Guillotines were built. Etc. The protests were sill rocking after a year, and were put to a temporary stop due to COVID lock-down. tl;dr: nobody would dare decrease the speed limits again.

chenning 5y ago

It's about preventing deaths and making people feel safe traveling.