While I like the idea in general, the result is a bit arbitrary. Why is it "153 people of 67 million French citizens have died in attacks on Friday"? Why not out of 508.2M people in EU? Or out of 2M people living in Paris?
Unless you calculate the micromorts for comparison between countries, limiting the area in such way doesn't make much sense. It's a single event -vs- activities which can be practiced for long amount of time. (someone with better statistics vocabulary can probably explain it nicely)
It should be based on the scope of policies. France should set their anti-terrorism policies based on the risk to France. The EU should set their anti-terrorism policies based on the risk to the EU. Paris should set their anti-terrorism policies based on the risk to Paris.
Most policies being looked at right now are France-scope.
Wouldn't the set being chosen just resulting in different probability profile, and you get to pick one depending on your personal characteristics?
Ie. 2.5 micromorts is your risk if you're a French citizen, (153 + other death from terrorism) / (7.3 billions) if you're a human, 153/2M if you're living in Paris?
Edit: change the napkin calculation for correctnesss.
Keeping in line with the other examples in the article, why not: 1 out of 1 bombing attack resulted in death? Because bombing attacks are not something you choose to do (as opposed to skydiving or riding a motorcycle). Also, the threat level is not uniform across the country. Also, there haven't been a million bombings so we're doing statistics with one sample. Also, we're also expecting the bombings to continue. There are a lot of misinterpretations and oversimplifications here.
I find it highly irrelevant, as a person working in a large town, frequently being in highly populated areas, in a country that's possibly a target for ISIS to compare myself with the average person living in a different country. It's almost like assuming that smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of dying from lung cancer, and then using the entire population of the world as reference to prove that smoking is actually pretty healthy.
To be perfectly honest, I'm a little amazed that in the past fourteen years, there have been so very few terrorist attacks on US soil.
Any group of suicidal, minimally-trained jackasses with a couple thousand dollars, access to Craigslist or an Uncle Henry's, and the ability to go to a WalMart, could obtain enough weaponry and ammunition to stage a significant attack on the scale of what happened in Paris this week.
I have to conclude that the pool of such people that would be willing to commit such acts is vanishingly small.
I have heard that one of al Qaeda’s biggest problems was attrition of “infiltrators” to the American way of life. The example I heard was truck-drivers, once they got real jobs and were welcomed into western mosques they assimilated fast. Thus the 9/11 hijackers were ordered to quarantine themselves in their hotel rooms until the actual event…
(I have no idea of the veracity of this story; it sounds a little trite, but compelling like so many trite things)
Exactly. Our infrastructure is so vulnerable, that I can think of multiple ways to disrupt daily routine and kill multiple people even without a gun, let alone suicide bombing -- dismantle/block the rails, drop an obstacle on a busy highway, poison the drinking water, cut electric wires open, sabotage industrial/power plants, set buildings on fire etc. heck, even shouting out loud "he's got a gun, run!!" in a crowded space could result in multiple injuries/deaths.
If there were so many determined terrorists on our soil as various governments and agencies want us to believe, they would cause a significant damage, not just stage occasional attacks that are statistically insignificant. The smallest dog barks the loudest.
It is also possible that the United States' security agencies are simply better than the vast majority of us are aware of. Or some combination of both.
Interesting. While skimming over the Wiki for micromorts it's reported [1] that Ecstasy has a rating of 0.5 micromorts per tablet. Which I kind of already suspected, given how widely it's consumed versus the rarely occurring yet widely reported deaths that result from its use.
For perspective you get 1 micromort from traveling 17 miles (27 km) by foot. I've walked 8.91 miles (14.34 km) today, which comparatively would be as dangerous as taking an ecstasy pill...well probably not as it would scale differently. I wouldn't be surprised if simply attending a dance-party/rave would have a micromort rating of ~0.5, regardless of substances ingested.
These generalizations are not helpful actually. If you walk a deserted road every day it would not matter how many miles you walk every day, you should only get 0 micromort, which is not the same as walking just right next to a highway.
>> After all the goal of shootings and explosions is not to physically destroy citizens, it is to scare them. So when people are not afraid, terrorists do not reach their goals. And if you succumb to fear, terrorists win.
Reminds me of Japanese people's reaction to the ISIS threat, they mocked them on twitter with memes[1]. Also they denied request of religious food for exchange students[2]. Any religion is not superior than others, so there will be legal or philosophical standings for them to be treated special.
As the husband of someone who is afraid of these sorts of things, I can tell you that this line of argument would be entirely ineffective. What would be effective? I don't know and I wish I did.
I suspect that I'm just unusually unfazed by things and fundamentally lack the ability to understand the perspective of people for whom bombings like this cause fear. This makes me sad.
People tend to be over concerned of risks that they feel that they have no control over. This is why the very real risk of driving a car is considered acceptable, but the much lower risk from something like a random pesticide in food is seen as much worse than the risk warrants.
Someone like your wife (or husband) needs a way to feel like they are in control. This is hard to do with terrorism hence why it is effective is causing terror despite the absolute risks.
That's actually quite interesting. I've never considered the possibility of genuinely being afraid of terrorists, since it seems like such a statistical impossibility, but I suppose that's not a particularly emotional reaction. I might feel differently if I lived in a commonly targeted city or somewhere outside the US.
My SO is scared to death of sharks, alligators and snakes. Always on the lookout. Can hardly go out in the water. Talking on the phone and shuffling through papers while driving is nothing to be concerned with though.
Black swan events being unanticipated, it is futile to worry about them. It's commonly retorted that terrorist attacks should be interpreted as unique because of their intent. Yet no one actually fears the intent, only the end result (death, destruction, injury). Intent is relevant to drafting a response, but not to the public fear. Intent without resources or sophistication is also not meaningful. It is further stated that they are special because they're attacks on the social order. Yet this is a truism, because they only have such an effect if people permit themselves to make it so. More mundanely perceived events like business cycles or crime rates (many small events rather than one large event like a terrorist attack) have the same capacity for social ruin, but are not as feared even as they are significantly more protracted. It's all inexcusable bias.
The response to terrorism isn't about fear. It's about justice. These assholes are trying to drag us all back to 700 AD and reestablish the Caliphate, and they struck at a bastion of western liberalism to that end. You can't appreciate the human reaction to that by short sightedly looking at the risk of dying in a car accident.
The other day I read that someone has been purchasing bomb grade uranium from a source (or a chain of people) who have been traced back to a Russian General in charge of a nuclear weapons facility. I think I might have heard about it first via HN, but not entirely sure now. Anyway, it terrifies me to remember that there are people in the world who have known nothing of life's bright side and who were most likely psychologically damaged as kids living in the constant war zone of the middle east. Those who rise above it are usually brilliant people regardless of occupation and those who succumb to the darkness are the ones I worry about... They could feel a darkness so vast and so abysmal that the idea of stabbing the beast where it hurts (killing the civilians of nations that are partly responsible for what happened to them) is the only relief they have in a life where they've gotten no relief; only absolute terror and infinite trauma.
What could we do to identify such people and help change the course of human history?
I don't think I'm going to die in a terrorist attack, and yet, I'm outraged and offended by acts of terrorism. I want them prevented and I want terrorists thwarted and destroyed. I don't think most people's opposition to terrorism and will to defeat it comes from a personal fear of becoming a victim.
Admonitions to shrug your shoulders at terrorism because car accidents kill more people always ring hollow with me.
What is terrorism? If two sides are fighting each other and one side has smart bombs and drones and the other side doesn't, clearly the choice for the weaker side is to give up or to find tactics that work to break its enemy's will.
The word terrorism is a propaganda word intended to make the audience pass moral judgment on the act and ignore the larger issue of why the conflict exists in the first place.
I too find acts of violence upsetting, but it's dangerous to buy into the propaganda around the word terrorism, since it's used to justify abandoning diplomacy and dehumanizing the enemy.
Opposition to terrorism is pretty broad. Insistence that we bomb entire countries or bar refugees because some of them might be terrorists seems fear-relate.
I refuse to give up freedoms or deny those freedoms to innocent people out of fear of terrorists. That's not "shrugging my shoulders". That's not succumbing to the terror that is so obviously the tool of terrorism.
On the other hand, with our population of 7.3 billion, it's kind of amazing that we don't see more terrorism. Personally, it kind of makes me feel good about Humans, given all the negatives that I usually hear about them.
To me, the problem with terrorism (aside from the terrorists) is that there are people willing to jump in immediately with political (or financial) agendas. Within hours, I'd already seen comments on FB about how fewer people would have died if France had a 2nd amendment. And, over the past few days, I've seen so much pro-police-state propaganda in the US media that it frankly scares me to death.
No - we really don't need more 'surveillance' or more build-ups in 'defense spending'.
Call me 'crazy', but I really think we should be spending the trillions and trillions of dollars (which would otherwise go into the pockets of the propagandists) on our generation's geniuses to enable them to create the technologies that makes disease, poverty, and inequality obsolete.
Absolutely. I don't worry about being a victim of terrorism. And I don't care if car accidents kill more people--the number of deaths isn't the point. The point is that there are people fighting to drag the world back into the 7th century, and they must be stopped on all fronts.
The risk of riding a motocycle can be estimated from a large sample. The risk of a terror attack in Paris can not. Friday's attach is 2.5 micromorts, but how do you know there is not another larger scale attach in the works? That is what worries, scares most people, until these attack become normal and people get used to it, like those live in Jerusalem.
It's pretty easy to look back over my entire lifetime and observe that terrorism is not new, not getting worse, and not a significant risk. None of that has changed as of this past Friday; this is just... a thing that happens every now and then, noisy and easy to show on the news, but not actually accomplishing much. Terrorists are weak; they depend on our {chickenshit|warmonger} governments to do their dirty work. I am not afraid of terrorists.
Everyday passing by is a sample day that you can use to estimate the risks. Even if you argue that terrorism is a relatively new risk in the past few decades and start your sampling from September 2001, we still have more than a decade of sample days to estimate the risk. That's a huge sample.
There might not be enough sample to know how many people would be harmed during a terrorist attack. But there is definitely enough information to estimate the risk of an attack itself.
By the reasoning of the article, we should just shrug off murders because people are far more likely to die in a car accident. That is of course ridiculous. Terrorism is an attack on the social order. That precious stability that makes progress and liberal society possible.
No, by the reasoning of the article you should not respond to murder by starting to fear being murdered, as the odds of being murdered are quite small.
This is stupid, Black Swan event can't be dealt with classic probabilities. Terrorism doesn't follow a normal distribution, more like a Dirac distribution.
The simple averaging you used, I can use it to, but I am not only French, I am also living in Paris. Last year there have been 39 deaths from car accidents, 101 from homicides, and more than 147 from terrorist relative death an counting every few months in Paris.
I can also look at my age, and that I go to concert often then my micromort explode to the roof now.
You seems like the old ladys in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil.
The problem is terrorism isn’t like car accidents. In another thread somebody commented that more people die on the roads in a single day then died in the terrorist attacks in France. Sure. But the volatility in car accident statistics is tiny while the possible volatility in terrorist attacks is huge. One well executed attack could kill hundreds of thousands or possibly millions if nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons are used. Car accidents are a bell curve, while terrorism is the long tail. And while I’m not really afraid of a terrorist attack, underestimating or dismissing a large group of people trying to actively kill you is naive.
"There's a related term, microlife, for things that reduce your lifespan. A microlife is 30 minutes off your life expectancy. So smoking two cigarettes has a cost of one microlife."
Doesn't this, if effective, encourage terrorists to up their game as well till enough micromorts register on our radars?
Terrorists can skew things: they have raised the chance of death in an attack when you are participating in things they don't approve of (death to all the party goers.) This must be seen as an attack on society, rather than individuals.
These are great! Can't believe that I didn't know about them before - I've been looking for simple metrics that compare the impact of things on mortality.
It's interesting that running one marathon per year is almost equivalent to being murdered in England.
For the longest time, there has been Kashmir-related terrorism all over India, sponsored by Pakistan (which received "aid" in the form of money and arms from the US for decades prior to 9/11).
[+] [-] viraptor|10 years ago|reply
Unless you calculate the micromorts for comparison between countries, limiting the area in such way doesn't make much sense. It's a single event -vs- activities which can be practiced for long amount of time. (someone with better statistics vocabulary can probably explain it nicely)
[+] [-] lkbm|10 years ago|reply
Most policies being looked at right now are France-scope.
[+] [-] NhanH|10 years ago|reply
Ie. 2.5 micromorts is your risk if you're a French citizen, (153 + other death from terrorism) / (7.3 billions) if you're a human, 153/2M if you're living in Paris?
Edit: change the napkin calculation for correctnesss.
[+] [-] rootlocus|10 years ago|reply
Keeping in line with the other examples in the article, why not: 1 out of 1 bombing attack resulted in death? Because bombing attacks are not something you choose to do (as opposed to skydiving or riding a motorcycle). Also, the threat level is not uniform across the country. Also, there haven't been a million bombings so we're doing statistics with one sample. Also, we're also expecting the bombings to continue. There are a lot of misinterpretations and oversimplifications here.
I find it highly irrelevant, as a person working in a large town, frequently being in highly populated areas, in a country that's possibly a target for ISIS to compare myself with the average person living in a different country. It's almost like assuming that smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of dying from lung cancer, and then using the entire population of the world as reference to prove that smoking is actually pretty healthy.
[+] [-] douche|10 years ago|reply
Any group of suicidal, minimally-trained jackasses with a couple thousand dollars, access to Craigslist or an Uncle Henry's, and the ability to go to a WalMart, could obtain enough weaponry and ammunition to stage a significant attack on the scale of what happened in Paris this week.
I have to conclude that the pool of such people that would be willing to commit such acts is vanishingly small.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|10 years ago|reply
(I have no idea of the veracity of this story; it sounds a little trite, but compelling like so many trite things)
[+] [-] kbart|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouric|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootlocus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icanhackit|10 years ago|reply
For perspective you get 1 micromort from traveling 17 miles (27 km) by foot. I've walked 8.91 miles (14.34 km) today, which comparatively would be as dangerous as taking an ecstasy pill...well probably not as it would scale differently. I wouldn't be surprised if simply attending a dance-party/rave would have a micromort rating of ~0.5, regardless of substances ingested.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Additional
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
Context is everything.
[+] [-] methou|10 years ago|reply
Reminds me of Japanese people's reaction to the ISIS threat, they mocked them on twitter with memes[1]. Also they denied request of religious food for exchange students[2]. Any religion is not superior than others, so there will be legal or philosophical standings for them to be treated special.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/japanese-twitte...
[2] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] grogenaut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply
My uni here in osaka has kosher options in all cantinas.
[+] [-] J_Darnley|10 years ago|reply
Ha ha ha. The absolute best way to deal with any threat.
[+] [-] afarrell|10 years ago|reply
I suspect that I'm just unusually unfazed by things and fundamentally lack the ability to understand the perspective of people for whom bombings like this cause fear. This makes me sad.
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
Someone like your wife (or husband) needs a way to feel like they are in control. This is hard to do with terrorism hence why it is effective is causing terror despite the absolute risks.
[+] [-] etrautmann|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jqm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idibidiart|10 years ago|reply
What could we do to identify such people and help change the course of human history?
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nsxwolf|10 years ago|reply
Admonitions to shrug your shoulders at terrorism because car accidents kill more people always ring hollow with me.
[+] [-] grandalf|10 years ago|reply
The word terrorism is a propaganda word intended to make the audience pass moral judgment on the act and ignore the larger issue of why the conflict exists in the first place.
I too find acts of violence upsetting, but it's dangerous to buy into the propaganda around the word terrorism, since it's used to justify abandoning diplomacy and dehumanizing the enemy.
[+] [-] lkbm|10 years ago|reply
I refuse to give up freedoms or deny those freedoms to innocent people out of fear of terrorists. That's not "shrugging my shoulders". That's not succumbing to the terror that is so obviously the tool of terrorism.
[+] [-] ap22213|10 years ago|reply
To me, the problem with terrorism (aside from the terrorists) is that there are people willing to jump in immediately with political (or financial) agendas. Within hours, I'd already seen comments on FB about how fewer people would have died if France had a 2nd amendment. And, over the past few days, I've seen so much pro-police-state propaganda in the US media that it frankly scares me to death.
No - we really don't need more 'surveillance' or more build-ups in 'defense spending'.
Call me 'crazy', but I really think we should be spending the trillions and trillions of dollars (which would otherwise go into the pockets of the propagandists) on our generation's geniuses to enable them to create the technologies that makes disease, poverty, and inequality obsolete.
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] privacy101|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackaflocka|10 years ago|reply
But at least Donald Trump is going to ensure that we get all the Iraqi oil. /sarcasm
[+] [-] haomself|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marssaxman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NhanH|10 years ago|reply
There might not be enough sample to know how many people would be harmed during a terrorist attack. But there is definitely enough information to estimate the risk of an attack itself.
[+] [-] giaour|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gesman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saulrh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Confusion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hokkos|10 years ago|reply
The simple averaging you used, I can use it to, but I am not only French, I am also living in Paris. Last year there have been 39 deaths from car accidents, 101 from homicides, and more than 147 from terrorist relative death an counting every few months in Paris.
I can also look at my age, and that I go to concert often then my micromort explode to the roof now.
You seems like the old ladys in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4KFNhxibec
[+] [-] poof131|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ooOOoo|10 years ago|reply
"There's a related term, microlife, for things that reduce your lifespan. A microlife is 30 minutes off your life expectancy. So smoking two cigarettes has a cost of one microlife."
[+] [-] arithma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flubert|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umpqua_Community_College_shoot...
https://www.google.com/#q=population+of+the+united+states
[+] [-] ap22213|10 years ago|reply
It's interesting that running one marathon per year is almost equivalent to being murdered in England.
[+] [-] hackaflocka|10 years ago|reply
So, yes, terrorism is indeed very, very bad.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gtirloni|10 years ago|reply
Perspective is everything. Good approach :)