4 ms·

Here's the options: - You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular se

by mlyle 4mo ago

Here's the options: - You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case. - You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off. - You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.

godelski 4mo ago
Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities - 0.001% - 99.998% - 0.001% If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative. I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics). I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...
- mlyle 4mo ago
  Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action. I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out. I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
  - godelski 4mo ago
    We're not just talking things labeled "bomb" here. TFA has a very different example that's not so easily arguable as that.
- srean 4mo ago
  What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened. I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is. Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did. The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
  - godelski 4mo ago
    > What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened. Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics. > Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things. Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
    - srean 4mo ago
      I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do. I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity. Coming back to this case. Say this was an operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family. I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. The 911 first responders were and they weren't even in a position to prevent it. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision. Do not forget that this https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj (Jon Stewart to the Congress for first responders) is the society we live in.
- brigandish 4mo ago
  Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect. For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt. Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.
  - godelski 4mo ago
    What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today? Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money
    - brigandish 4mo ago
      I encourage you to look in to how risk is calculated. There are several ways, and all of them - excepting layman's attempts and Claude Haiku responses - are on a spectrum, not a binary. They do not resemble what you have provided.
  - danaris 4mo ago
    As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk. That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training. And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.
    - brigandish 4mo ago
lallysingh 4mo ago
This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.

by mlyle 4mo ago

godelski 4mo ago

Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities - 0.001% - 99.998% - 0.001% If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative. I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics). I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...

mlyle 4mo ago
Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action. I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out. I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
- godelski 4mo ago
  We're not just talking things labeled "bomb" here. TFA has a very different example that's not so easily arguable as that.
srean 4mo ago
What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened. I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is. Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did. The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
- godelski 4mo ago
  > What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened. Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics. > Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things. Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
  - srean 4mo ago
    I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do. I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity. Coming back to this case. Say this was an operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family. I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. The 911 first responders were and they weren't even in a position to prevent it. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision. Do not forget that this https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?si=lOWfqPEPCxTGu_Vj (Jon Stewart to the Congress for first responders) is the society we live in.
brigandish 4mo ago
Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect. For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt. Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.
- godelski 4mo ago
  What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today? Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money
  - brigandish 4mo ago
    I encourage you to look in to how risk is calculated. There are several ways, and all of them - excepting layman's attempts and Claude Haiku responses - are on a spectrum, not a binary. They do not resemble what you have provided.
- danaris 4mo ago
  As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk. That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training. And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.
  - brigandish 4mo ago

lallysingh 4mo ago

This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.