I would like to present a very good counter argument put forth by Taleb on his Facebook page:<p>"""
(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.<p>Now let's try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>"""<p>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.
Don't underestimate the threat from furniture.<p>It happened to me: one moment I was sitting at the table in my IKEA chair, perhaps leaning forward to browse HN, and the next I was on the floor with (the mirror revealed) a deep 20-inch gash across my upper back, and a lighter slash behind my knees/legs.<p>Obviously the chair broke, but I still haven't figured out how it cut me so severely. A few inches higher and it would have been my neck.
But terrorism induces terror and people don't want to live in terror. So either 1) we need to make a serious attempt to cause people not to care about it and acknowledge its a tiny risk 2) we need to stop terrorists or 3) we need to make people feel like we achieved 2.<p>None of those options are easy and I've never seen a real proposal to seriously attempt 1. Other than statistics, how would you go about it?
The threat from terror has no relation whatsoever to the amount dead, rather, it is a traumatic enemy invasion of the supposedly protected national space , it instills a feeling of terror, which might even topple the government should it be deemed too weak to respond adequately (which is the real incentive for it to overreact). Even if the towers had fallen 12 years ago without anyone getting hurt, we'd still require a Snowden today.
Always keep in mind that the government's cheapest manipulation strategy is fear (it always works):<p><a href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/constitutional-expert-government-was-trying-to-create-an-atmosphere-of-fear-in-which-the-american-people-would-give-them-more-power%E2%80%9D.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/constitutional-expert...</a><p>And for some more numbers that we should talk to our family and friends about:<p>> You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack<p>taken from: <a href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...</a><p>Conclusion: Terrorism is actually not a problem, but they want us to believe that.
It is interesting to consider the media bias towards 'bad' news. For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative. Whether it's terrorism, kidnapping, ponzi schemes, car crashes, you name it, but why do some negative stories run more than others?<p>At some point media organizations found that people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.<p><a href="http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soroka_epop2010.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soro...</a> - Concludes there is a psychophysiological evidence that negative news is more arousing.<p>I suppose it follows that media concerning terrorism is probably more arousing than people being crushed by couches, and makes much better TV. And our perception of our reality is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to.<p>A great example of this would be the coverage of the fertilizer plant that blew up in Texas verses the Boston marathon bombings. These happened within days of each other. Which one did you hear about more? Which one killed more people?
To which the government responds, "See, the War on Terror is working!"<p>If you likewise point out that psychoactive drug usage has remained flat since the 50's, they say, "See, no increase! The War on Drugs is working!"<p>The real problem is that legislators aren't bound by silly things like logic, or the scientific method, or burden of proof.
Terrorism is about terror, not dead bodies. It doesn't matter how many people are killed by what. Statistics do not matter. All that matters is that small numbers of people can create terror in large numbers of people and cause them to act in a certain way politically.<p>The problem here is that the mainstream media loves terror -- as long as they're the ones inflicting terror on the rest of us. Each year there's the predictable stories about killer bees, shark attacks, and all kinds of statistically unlikely events, all played off as being of dire import to the average consumer. We love using irrational fear to politically control people. It's as common as rain in the modern world. It's just when outsiders do it for their own purposes without regard to life or property that we run into all kinds of problems.
> Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Furniture as by Terrorism<p>Sadly, still won't stop people from saying you have no right to privacy or due process or whatever sick agenda they're pushing at the moment.
Oh please. Terrorism is a threat to the world. Coptic churches being burned everyday in egypt: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve_DlPG4YQM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve_DlPG4YQM</a>. Muslim script kiddies are spamming ycombinator.