You often hear that it’s irrational to worry about terrorism, let alone to legislate about it. Terrorism is spectacular and primed to offend our sense of group solidarity, so our monkey-brains attend to it out of all proportion to its severity. If you consulted the actuarial tables, you’d be much more worried about car crashes. No one’s that worried about car crashes, so we shouldn’t get too worked up about terrorism either.
But does this prove too much?
Suppose that terrorism is less of a problem than car crashes, which themselves are not a pressing national concern. Then it seems that we should be able to tolerate a roughly similar number of deaths from terrorism as from car crashes without getting bent out of shape about it. Car crashes kill about thirty thousand people a year in the US, so we should be able to take about ten 9/11′s a year without really minding all that much.
Can that be quite right?
Ten 9/11′s a year would present an annual per capita risk of about 10^-4. What does that mean in context? In the worst year of the Second Intifadah, civilian deaths in Israel stood slightly lower, at about 8 * 10^-5 per capita. During World War II, civilian deaths in Great Britain were somewhere around 2*10^-4. So ten 9/11′s a year would put us somewhere between the worst year on record for a country whose culture has, let’s say, come to be defined by a sense of national existential risk, and a country that had to be propagandized out of surrendering by its own government.
So if you begin from the premise that deaths from car crashes, pools and ladders are interchangeable with deaths from terrorism, then you can arrive at the conclusion that a 9/11 every month would be within normal operating parameters. But if that strikes you as a reductio, then perhaps we should revisit the assumption that deaths from terrorism are just like accident deaths in every relevant respect.
Isn’t it just the unfamiliarity? When car crash deaths began occurring they were taken extremely seriously
i actually do pretty firmly believe that the world (where it applies, the US at least) would be better off with much less cars (and much more trains, say). is this an uncommon opinion?
(it’s really convenient that aspirin became a poster child for “safe, commonly used medication” despite having such a crazy array of potential deadly side effects. It means that whenever you want to push a new drug, you can say it has “fewer side effects than aspirin” and be pretty sure that you’re right)
[x]
I’d consider it very preferable if terrorism was treated just like all other murders. Norway basically did it when they had their own per capita equivalent of 9/11 and simply arrested and sentenced the person responsible. If the US had concluded that the murder statistics of 2001 looked kind of bad and there were a bunch of extraordinarily serious criminals on the loose, but not freaked the fuck out, the world would be in a way better shape today.
And car crashes need to be taken way more seriously while airplane security is overblown, coal power gets away with being utterly irresponsible while the slightest whiff of radiation makes people freak out about nuclear plants etc.
2 weeks ago · tagged #death cw · 96 notes · source: lambdaphagy · .permalink
invertedporcupine reblogged this from mugasofer and added:I agree with most of this, but “Norway basically did it when they had their own per capita equivalent of 9/11 and simply...
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fnord888 reblogged this from lambdaphagy and added:I normally hate the screenshot thing, but I can’t resist here. When did you elide a factor of two? Maybe in the very...
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kirbymatkatamiba reblogged this from lambdaphagy and added:I misunderstood the fifth paragraph of your original post. I thought the point of that paragraph was “30,000 deaths per...
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placid-platypus reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:Might be better to say “WWII wasn’t nearly as bad for Britain as I thought it was.” Also to be fair this doesn’t include...
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lambdaphagy reblogged this from fnord888 and added:What? What factor of two did I elide? That’s what I said at the beginning– 10^-4 for car crashes vs. 2*10^-4 for British...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from michaelblume and added:I’d consider it very preferable if terrorism was treated just like all other murders. Norway basically did it when they...
youzicha reblogged this from lambdaphagy and added:I guess part of the disconnect between us is that we treat the traffic accident comparison as inviting manipulation of...
samueldays reblogged this from lambdaphagy and added:I think an important difference here is that terrorism can (threaten to) scale relative to one’s response. If there’s a...
jadagul said: I think the argument that we shouldn’t respond is an attack on those further problems you mention. If the problem of terrorism is that it creates stresses and problematic secondary responses disproportionate to the amount of primary harm, trying to reduce the secondary damage seems like a facially reasonable response if you can swing it.
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I honestly think we don’t take deaths from car crashes and burning fossil fuels nearly seriously enough, and I do NOT...
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bendini1 reblogged this from lambdaphagy and added:I can’t find the source right now but people have waay more tolerance to risk when they are in control of it themselves,...
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blueshiftinvariant reblogged this from michaelblume and added:ehh I think the hysteria around terrorism has a lot to do with the idea it’s increasing; I have no idea what the change...
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