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>Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause.

I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.

It is important to recognize the order of magnitude of the probability of the risk. At CERN they don't publicize that there is a long-tail risk of causing the destruction of the world because the probability, though non-zero, is exceedingly tiny (and people freak out, unable to think about tiny probabilities.)

>terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.

I believe terrorism generally creates more terrorism, so the limit you suggest would be amplified by the ability of terrorists to create more terrorists. However, I would interested in seeing some hard stats on this.

I guess the relevant end-state here is civil war. For which the historical upper bounds are pretty high indeed, like 50%. (Unless you've defined terrorism so narrowly that it only counts if it's directly ordered from a different continent, or something.)

> I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.

The limit is not “natural”. The limit is at least partially because we are excessively vigilant about terrorism, and put measures, effective and ineffective, in place to anticipate and prevent terrorism. The far reaching and extensive nature of those measures is a result of the same risk calculus that I describe here, and is a manifestation of the same phenomenon that the research linked here found.

If a terrorist acquires a nuclear weapon and detonates it in NYC, what happens to the death rate? The point about tail risk is that probabilities that seem rare, aren't as rare and defined as you'd hope.

See: Black Swan/Antifragile

About 1.2 million americans die from heart disease or cancer each year.

There are about 8.6 million people living in NYC.

NYC would have to be nuked and fully repopulated about once every 7 years to match the death rates of heart disease and cancer.

Over a ten year period, terrorism still wouldn't justify it's ~35% share of the press stories. As it is that rare.

If terrorist detonates a nuke, then it's around a million by some estimates [1], so even then there is a relatively low ceiling.

But creating and operating a bomb requires expertise, that all terrorist lack.

[1]http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/what-a-nuclear-attack...

A gun style nuclear bomb isn't that complicated. If terrorists were able to get enriched uranium, then they could probably make one. If there were no counter-terrorism efforts at all, then there is a reasonable chance that they would be able to get enriched uranium.

I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks.

Also the limited number of willing terrorist attackers.

The problem with terrorism is that if left unrestrained, they may accomplish their political goals. Those goals are generally to let them have free reign in the region they're in.

For example, ISIS was busy setting up their caliphate, and if we had not defeated them militarily, they'd have their own little hellhole nation to run.

The amount of death such regimes can inflict on their own people is pretty significant.

It doesn't even require death squads or anything like that; I was at one of Sadam's palaces and remarked to an Iraqi that the pools were empty. Well, it turns out, once Sadam fell, the water was redirected back to the local tribes.

Because to punish recalcitrant tribes, Sadam would just cut off their water.

(None of this means major powers necessarily ought to be getting involved in all these areas; the point is that terrorists aren't just killing people for kicks, they have a reason for the things they do and there are consequences when they're successful.)

>The lack of deaths is not a function of desire on the part of terrorists to cause death, but just their ability to do so.

I don't necessarily agree. Terrorists are people with a point to make who view violence as the preferable way to make it (usually out of desperation).

Numbers are pretty much never the point (any more than companies set out to kill as many people as possible with pollutants). The symbol is what's important. The world trade center. Mosques. Gay bars. All representative of what the attacker views as a corrupting influence on society in their own worldview.

I also suspect that if it was less widely disseminated a different strategy would be used, i.e. just actually going for military or government infrastructure rather than trying to sway public opinion. Terrorism is a political act,it is all about sending a message.

To add another point, not only does this Steven-Pinkerism or whatever name this ideology deserves ignore tail risk, it also fails to analyse things from any point of view that isn't ten mile birds-eye utilitarianism.

The primary motivation behind terrorism, is as the name suggests, not material violence but psychological damage and attack on the nerve centers and political systems and ideologies of targets. The physical violence is only secondary and a tool. So to evaluate terrorism in terms of body count, and not generated fear, is quite myopic.

It also of course ignores that systems aren't uniform and can take blows at any point with equal consequence. Terrorism at a political focal point of 10k people can collapse a nation state a thousand times as large, ask Franz Ferdinand and Europe. The effects aren't linear.

It's quite frightening to see how shallow and superficial the analysis of people has become who are apparently in charge of our institutions, because this thinking is extremely prevalent.

This is a really interesting point. It reminds me of the story of the American soldier meeting a former Vietcong many years after the Vietnam war. The American said, "Every time we met you guys in the field we beat you. You never won a battle." The Vietcong replied, "That is true. It is also irrelevant." Vietnam was a great example of how misleading measures and statistics could be.

This article was about causes of death. They perfectly reproduced the causes of death versus the reports.

The interpretation that we should not discuss certain causes of death as much was only added in this thread. The only implication discussed in the article seemed to be "Perhaps we should provide more context".

I would say that people dying from outlier events is newsworthy because they are outliers, not that we should cover events in the proportion of their occurance in real life. That'd be awfully dull.

> if we took no measures to prevent any of them then chances are most of them would increase by very small amounts; maybe doubling for the most dramatic cases.

If by behavior we can reduce heart disease and cancer by half, that extends far more lives than eliminating terrorism, homicide and suicide entirely. Even the tail risk of terrorism is on the order of 10^4/year, while heart disease plus cancer is 10^6. So adjusting for tail risk, the focus of coverage on violence remains disproportionate.

There's a more substantial tail risk in global warming, nuclear war, infectious disease or SMOD. If the coverage of those was proportional to their tail risk they would crowd out most other news.

We can delay heart disease, cancer, and strokes, but not prevent the deaths. Those 1e6 numbers aren’t moving very far.

I assume you’re calculating the tail risk of terrorism based on backtesting, and ignoring the fact that preventing terrorism is a disproportionately high priority of the governments of the world. The extent and scope of measures taken cannot be ignored when talking about the impact.

Yes global warming has tail risk; it doesn’t show up in this analysis because it isn’t causing deaths, but I think the level of coverage is pretty high considering the low death toll.

Similarly nuclear war - especially during the Cold War, thermonuclear weapons had killed fewer people than falling pianos, yet for some reason was very high on people’s mind.

I posted this sentiment in another thread and got a huge amount of down votes. The counter point, at least to nuclear, is that we did have a severe nuclear incident @ Chernobyl and Fukushima and neither amounted to millions of deaths.

Paging @nntaleb.