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I tried to roughly estimate the risk. There are 18,000 theaters that could be targets. Let's say there are 10 showings over the opening weekend that might be b

I tried to roughly estimate the risk. There are 18,000 theaters that could be targets. Let's say there are 10 showings over the opening weekend that might be bombed, so if you attend, there's a 1 in 180,000 chance you'll be in the bombed theater (assuming there's only one bombing). Let's say there's a 5% chance it's a real threat (personally I'd estimate around 1%, but let's use 5% to be conservative). That gives a 1 in 3.6 million chance of being in the bombed theater. Compare to car accidents. There are 1.27 fatalities per 100 million miles traveled in the USA. If the movie theater is five miles away, that gives you a 1 in 7.9 million chance of dying in a car accident on the way to or from the movie. If we stop calculating there, it looks like you'd be roughly twice as likely to be in the bombed theater than to die in a car accident on the way to the theater. (Note that this is the chance of being in the bombed theater, not of dying in the bombing. Presumably, most people in the theater would survive.) To me, that seems like an acceptably negligible risk. More detailed calculations could include the chance of dying conditional on being in the bombed theater, and could include the chance of more than one theater being bombed, and adjust for the chance of the bomber being foiled or the bomb not working, and could adjust for which theater you're seeing it in (theaters in major cities are more likely targets than small towns).

anigbrowl 12y ago
Yawn...this sort of statistical analysis misses the point and demonstrates a rank ignorance of human psychology. Run the same statistical analysis on the possibility of getting killed at a school in Pakistan and then tell me how the Taliban killing ~130 children and some teachers is just a statistical outlier that people whouldn't pay any attention to. I mention it because that incident wasn't expected either, but it's an excellent demonstration of how much havoc a few bad actors can wreak. given the huge number of movie theaters and the impossibility of predicting which ones might be targeted, nobody wants to be left holding the bag in the unlikely-but-nonetheless-possible scenario of a mini-massacre. On the scale of things you would be willing to assume risk for, a tasteless comedy ranks pretty low.
- michaelkeenan 12y ago
  > tell me how the Taliban killing ~130 children and some teachers is just a statistical outlier that people whouldn't pay any attention to. My comment didn't mention people not paying attention to a bombing. My comment was about estimating the risk of dying in a bombing, not about people's reactions to it. > Yawn... There are more civil ways to express that.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Comments like this about the remoteness of the risk always carry the implicit argument that one should not pay attention to it because of the low probability. It's certainly irrational to think there's a high probability of it happening to you, but it's eminently rational for stakeholders like movie theater operators to minimize the risk - after all, to the extent that customers consider the showing of the picture to be a risk factor, they're going to stay away from the entire theater even if it is showing other pictures they might want to see. There are more civil ways to express that. There are more civil ways to discuss risk than making statistical straw man arguments too.
    - alexqgb 12y ago
      Actually, he was replying to a comment that centered on the specific threat level that a particular individual thought he may be facing, so a calculation like this is exactly on point.
      - anigbrowl 12y ago
        Well, that's true. All the same, I think it's a hopelessly facile analysis - the assumption that a bombing is the only possible risk scenario, for example - that's not really responsive to the underlying issue.
rjvir 12y ago
Fair enough. From the average moviegoers standpoint, it's probably not too risky to watch the movie on opening day. That being said, I disagree with the 5% chance that the threat actually gets carried through. It is not overwhelmingly difficult to carry through this type of threat, since North Korea has a large budget and theaters don't have security. And from Sony's perspective, it doesn't matter if 6 people dying in Tennessee (random example) is only a small percentage of their overall viewers - it's human lives on their hands in a scenario that could have been easily avoided.
paublyrne 12y ago
That 5% figure is arbitrary though. If the threat is a real one, and the intention is carry out a terrorist attack, you could assume that it will happen because the people behind it mean business. If it is bluff, then there is no risk at all. Certainly I agree risks like this are not worth worrying about, life is full of risks.

anigbrowl 12y ago

Yawn...this sort of statistical analysis misses the point and demonstrates a rank ignorance of human psychology. Run the same statistical analysis on the possibility of getting killed at a school in Pakistan and then tell me how the Taliban killing ~130 children and some teachers is just a statistical outlier that people whouldn't pay any attention to. I mention it because that incident wasn't expected either, but it's an excellent demonstration of how much havoc a few bad actors can wreak. given the huge number of movie theaters and the impossibility of predicting which ones might be targeted, nobody wants to be left holding the bag in the unlikely-but-nonetheless-possible scenario of a mini-massacre. On the scale of things you would be willing to assume risk for, a tasteless comedy ranks pretty low.

michaelkeenan 12y ago
> tell me how the Taliban killing ~130 children and some teachers is just a statistical outlier that people whouldn't pay any attention to. My comment didn't mention people not paying attention to a bombing. My comment was about estimating the risk of dying in a bombing, not about people's reactions to it. > Yawn... There are more civil ways to express that.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Comments like this about the remoteness of the risk always carry the implicit argument that one should not pay attention to it because of the low probability. It's certainly irrational to think there's a high probability of it happening to you, but it's eminently rational for stakeholders like movie theater operators to minimize the risk - after all, to the extent that customers consider the showing of the picture to be a risk factor, they're going to stay away from the entire theater even if it is showing other pictures they might want to see. There are more civil ways to express that. There are more civil ways to discuss risk than making statistical straw man arguments too.
  - alexqgb 12y ago
    Actually, he was replying to a comment that centered on the specific threat level that a particular individual thought he may be facing, so a calculation like this is exactly on point.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      Well, that's true. All the same, I think it's a hopelessly facile analysis - the assumption that a bombing is the only possible risk scenario, for example - that's not really responsive to the underlying issue.

rjvir 12y ago

Fair enough. From the average moviegoers standpoint, it's probably not too risky to watch the movie on opening day. That being said, I disagree with the 5% chance that the threat actually gets carried through. It is not overwhelmingly difficult to carry through this type of threat, since North Korea has a large budget and theaters don't have security. And from Sony's perspective, it doesn't matter if 6 people dying in Tennessee (random example) is only a small percentage of their overall viewers - it's human lives on their hands in a scenario that could have been easily avoided.

paublyrne 12y ago

That 5% figure is arbitrary though. If the threat is a real one, and the intention is carry out a terrorist attack, you could assume that it will happen because the people behind it mean business. If it is bluff, then there is no risk at all. Certainly I agree risks like this are not worth worrying about, life is full of risks.