Everyone here is trying to tackled the stats of gun deaths, but I'm really floored by a survey that shows Americans are more afraid of losing guns than loved ones.
The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
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Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#42Leave it to HN to completely ignore the point of the article and nitpick statistics. Guns kill more people than terrorism, period. Regardless of the actual numbers, the article's point still stands.
> Guns kill more people than terrorism, period.
People with guns kill more people than terrorism. Guns aren't sentient (yet). Guns are inanimate tools; it's a people problem, not a tool problem. Just as you wouldn't say that cars kill people and try to ban cars when it's actually irresponsible drivers (drunk, inattentive, etc) that cause the accident, you can't blame an inanimate object for what its user does with it. Shifting the blame is a political maneuver as old as mankind.
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#43I think the real issue here is that perceptions of many of these risks is as much a matter of tribal identity as anything else. For example, liking guns is a tribal value of "team red" - therefore viewing it as dangerous is as much an attack on "our team" as it is a rational assessment.
This behavior is hardly limited to "team red". Tolerance of gay sex is a tribal value of "team blue". Yet it turns out M2M gay sex is between 15x and 200x as dangerous as gun ownership. How many people are remotely aware of this?
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/are_gays_or_guns_mor...
People suck at risk assessment in general. Apart from scoring cheap points for our team, why focus on terrorism and guns specifically?
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#44> jihadists killed 94 people inside the United States between 2005 and 2015. During that same time period, 301,797 people in the US were shot dead > Americans are more afraid of terrorism than they are of guns, despite the fact that guns are 3,210 times more likely to kill them Er, that's not really how probability works. Sure, it makes some sense but as was pointed out, most of those people shot themselves. Since I…
The latest statistics that I can find on the CDC's website (final data for 2014) shows that the number of homicide deaths in the US for that year was 10,945, which far outstrips terrorism deaths. Since I don't intend on shooting myself, the probability of me being shot is immediately a fraction of the number quoted in the article. While I did not review the data for 2005-2013 and 2015, if the trends are similar in th…
I think his point is that both risks are tiny for most people. As an "average" American, I have basically 0 fear of being murdered or being in a terrorist attack. The average commenter here is probably significantly more at risk of dying in a car accident.
One thing to note about terrorist attacks, is they follow a power law. The vast majority of terrorist attacks are complete failures that cause barely any casualties. But the most successful ones kill thousands. It's quite possible an unusually successful terrorist attack could kill tens of millions, which would vastly overwhelm homicide statistics. E.g. if a terrorist organization obtained weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately that has lowish probability, but perhaps not low enough to make the risk greater than homicide.
Say there is a 1% chance every decade of a terrorist attack that kills 15 million people, the annual expected death toll is about 15,000, which is greater than the annual homicide deaths.
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#45Everyone here is trying to tackled the stats of gun deaths, but I'm really floored by a survey that shows Americans are more afraid of losing guns than loved ones.
[deleted]
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#46Leave it to HN to completely ignore the point of the article and nitpick statistics. Guns kill more people than terrorism, period. Regardless of the actual numbers, the article's point still stands.
Please don't generalize HN like this, particularly as you choose to participate in the community. If you have specific criticisms, please address them civilly.
I'm not generalizing, the proof is right in this thread, the top comments are all focusing on the specific numbers and completely missing the point. And that is a specific criticism.
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're wrong about point 4. Could you outline such a plan? As a counter-example: CIA trained operatives with decades of experience and a 20+ person team launching a coordinated attack could only kill 3,000 -- and that was only because of underlying weaknesses in our security policy. The 9/11 attacks were so easy to counter, they didn't even work through one full morning. (By which I mean, 25% of the planes we…
> I think you're wrong about point 4. Could you outline such a plan? As a counter-example: CIA trained operatives with decades of experience and a 20+ person team launching a coordinated attack could only kill 3,000 -- and that was only because of underlying weaknesses in our security policy. The attack you mention was mostly meant to be symbolic and grandiose: not to do the most damage numbers-wise. From bombing a s…
Not one of the things you mention is easy to accomplish at the scale it kills tens of thousands.
The sheer volume and complexity of distribution of explosives or gas needed, or the rarity and oversight of biological agents necessary renders those attacks anything but simple.
You're talking dozens of people coordinating against hardened and watched targets with either a substantial planning period or access to high volumes of controlled substances.
Nothing at all about a few pissed off or crazy people or easy.
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're wrong about point 4. Could you outline such a plan? As a counter-example: CIA trained operatives with decades of experience and a 20+ person team launching a coordinated attack could only kill 3,000 -- and that was only because of underlying weaknesses in our security policy. The 9/11 attacks were so easy to counter, they didn't even work through one full morning. (By which I mean, 25% of the planes we…
> I think you're wrong about point 4. Could you outline such a plan? As a counter-example: CIA trained operatives with decades of experience and a 20+ person team launching a coordinated attack could only kill 3,000 -- and that was only because of underlying weaknesses in our security policy. The attack you mention was mostly meant to be symbolic and grandiose: not to do the most damage numbers-wise. From bombing a s…
In the one example we have of it, a Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway at rush hour killed 12 people and seriously injured 50 more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
Guns and bombs are actually far more effective. Skimming the list of terrorist attacks in 2016, the most deadly seem to be bombs and teams of gunmen (mostly in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Nigeria).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#49Leave it to HN to completely ignore the point of the article and nitpick statistics. Guns kill more people than terrorism, period. Regardless of the actual numbers, the article's point still stands.
> Guns kill more people than terrorism, period. People with guns kill more people than terrorism. Guns aren't sentient (yet). Guns are inanimate tools; it's a people problem, not a tool problem. Just as you wouldn't say that cars kill people and try to ban cars when it's actually irresponsible drivers (drunk, inattentive, etc) that cause the accident, you can't blame an inanimate object for what its user does with it…
You're only proving my point by nitpicking further. Pedantry isn't a virtue, especially in assuming I'm so stupid as to anthropomorphize a piece of metal or trying to utilize a political maneuver. Focus on the article instead of nitpicking.
Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns
#50A great example how, based on your readings of the data, you can lie or present any case with statistics... First of all, among the gun deaths there are people that shot themselves, and also people shot in gang shootings and such (where, if you're not in a gang you're not that affected). So the number is somewhat inflated (of course still bigger than terrorism). Second, people fear going into violent neighborhoods wi…
Fourth, terrorism can also bring much more horrible outcomes than the regular gun death, even more than a mass shooting. Some crazies can kill literally tens of thousands via some (not that elaborate) plan. And while it might not always be possible to predict or prevent such a thing, one can still fear it (and fear to further stir the conditions that might make it happen). I've only done the lazy thing of looking at…
>I've only done the lazy thing of looking at Wikipedia, but it appears that the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 is the only event carried out by non state actors in recent history that killed more than 1000 people.
That doesn't offer much guarantees though. Before that one, the ceiling was much lower for attacks in the US (or even elsewhere), but it suddenly got to 3000 at one go.
Here's a kind of disaster that can be caused by an attack (it was caused by corporate greed at the time), and which claimed thousands of lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Note that, as the article says: "Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) contends water entered the tank through an act of sabotage" -- even if its BS, as I believe it is, it could just as well have happened under an attack to such a facility.
But on the general issue of the past as a predictor, let me use Scott Adams' words, which can be fitting:
I keep seeing tweets and articles saying the odds of an immigrant killing a citizen of the United States are approximately zero. Obviously those calculations assume that our past experiences do a good job of predicting what happens next. And this is good news. Really, really, good news.
It’s good news because I used to be afraid of lots of stuff that never happened in the past. For example, I have never died from a nuclear attack, but now I understand that risk to be zero. We can dismantle our nuclear deterrents and relax. If a nuclear bomb hasn’t killed me in the past, I can safely conclude that it will never kill me in the future. I feel sorry for all of you science-deniers who think otherwise.
I built a complicated prediction model to prove my point. The model only has one variable – the number of times I have died in nuclear blasts in the past. That number equals the number of times I will die in nuclear blasts in the future. Skeptics might doubt the credibility of my prediction model, but I would argue that it fits the past quite well. And that means it predicts the future too, unless you are ignorant of science and whatnot.
More good news: Climate change is not a risk in the future. Man-made warming has never destroyed civilization in the past, so that means there is no chance it will happen in the future. That’s how the past works; it tells you what happens in the future. And boy is that handy. Before I learned that secret I was just guessing.
We all learned as kids that history repeats itself. You know it is true because you heard it when you were young and stupid, and it stuck in your head. That’s proof right there. And it fits your observations too. For example, look how many times the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. They must have done it thousands of times by now, just like they did the first time. You might think the airplane would stay invented. But that’s not how the past works, you ignoramus. The past repeats. Those brothers just keep inventing that airplane, over and over. Even after they died, which obviously they did not see coming because they had not died in the past.