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I would like to present a very good counter argument put forth by Taleb on his Facebook page: """ (Heuristic: go to Pinker). He promotes there a WSJ article to
by akshayub 13y ago
I would like to present a very good counter argument put forth by Taleb on his Facebook page:
"""
(Heuristic: go to Pinker). He promotes there a WSJ article to the effect that "Terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders"; the article was written by a war correspondant, Ted Koppel and is very similar to his Angels thesis.
Now let's try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.
A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy. They are subjected to strong bounds, etc. It is "impossible" to have, say, >1% of a country's population dying from falls from ladders the same year. The chances are less than 1 in several trillion trillion trillion years. Hence a journalistic statement about risk converges to the scientific statement.
B- Terrorism is fat tailed. Your estimation from past data has monstrous errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One biological event can decimate the population.
May be "reasonable" to claim that terrorism is overhyped, that our liberty is more valuable, etc. I believe so. But the comparison here is a fallacy and sloppy thinking is dangerous. (Worse, Koppel compares terrorism today to terrorism 100 years ago when a terrorist could inflict very limited harm.)
"""
Another such case is Nuclear Weapons, Millions of dollars are spent on controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons, even when no one died last year because of them. However this does not implies that we should abandon strict controls, since the risk characteristics are completely different.
- mikeash 13y agoUnlike nuclear weapons, I see no reason to think terrorism can ever kill any significant portion of the country's population. Ideas of terror attacks involving nuclear weapons or pandemics seem to be complete fantasy as best I can tell.
- akshayub 13y agoWell 9/11 would have seemed a perfect fantasy on 9/10/2001. But within matter of few hours the rate of american killed by terrorists went from same as those killed by furniture to few thousand times. The central argument is that a comparison with death by furniture is irrelevant, since the risk profiles are significantly different. Finally one cannot minimize risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons in isolation from agents such as rogue states and terrorists.
- mikeash 13y ago9/11 only seemed like a perfect fantasy to people who weren't paying attention. There was plenty of precedent, for the general idea of crashing airplanes into things on purpose to destroy them (kamikazes), the specific idea of hijacking a commercial airliner to crash it into a national landmark (Air France 8969, and in fiction, Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor among others), and the specific idea of killing thousands of people by destroying the World Trade Center (1993 bombing). We can come up with ways for terrorists to kill thousands of people, and people did come up with such ways before 9/11. I see no way, short of first taking over an entire country, that terrorists can kill millions. If you think otherwise, then describe it, don't just appeal to ignorance. The "we don't know, so we should assume the worst" argument can be used to support literally anything.
- jlgreco 13y ago"The two students who killed 13 people at Columbine High School wanted to kill at least 500 others, attack nearby homes and then hijack a plane and crash it into New York City, investigators said." Volume 119 >> Issue 22 : Tuesday, April 27, 1999 http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N22/littleton.22w.html http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N22/littleton.22w.html
- northwest 13y ago> Well 9/11 would have seemed a perfect fantasy on 9/10/2001. Not at all. This scenario was well documented by the responsible government agencies before it happened.