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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

#71

There's some rationality to people's fear for terrorism. The impact of a terrorist attack is probably exponentially distributed, like an earthquake attack. Saying no one has died in earthquakes in SF in the last 10 years is not relevant. Or pandemics – people are afraid of the next Ebola for the right reasons. The 1918 influenza killed 20-50M people.

That was after the World War and resulting starvation though.

Re: The psychology of why we're irrationally more scared of terrorism than guns

#72
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single building wouldn't impact tens of thousands before discovering the attack. Even attacking a single large building is a complex task, unlikely to succeed. Large networks are easier to detect via our mass surveillance technologies. That's why most of the attacks we see these days are from small groups acting quickly. My point was your scale was way off about what's realistic to be afraid of. It's easily 100 tim…

> A single building wouldn't impact tens of thousands before discovering the attack. Tens of thousands can work on a single small building. Heck, tens of thousands can eat at single McDonalds per day, where one might e.g. infect it's storage. And why think it would be discovered quickly? An attack, eg. some virus or poison could be selected that takes a day or more to manifest any symptoms. > they'd likely be coordin…

>Tens of thousands can work on a single small building

Ooops, meant "on a single building" here, like a hotel, hospital, etc, not "small building".

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