I would like to add to Scott's point that terrorism involving commercial
flights is a low probability but high impact event by pointing out that
a better measure of the effect of terrorism is how many people have
died from all identified instances of terrorism. As Nate Silver (see
his picture in the dictionary under "nerd") points out, there has only
been six incidents with commercial airlines. If this were the only
empirical indicator of the effects of terrorism, then one might feel
safe to ignore terrorism but that would be a foolish thing to do.
Nate Silver is just doing number crunching because certain numbers
are available to crunch. He doesn't go deeper and ask why is that
number so low given the great impact that terrorism involving commercial
airlnes has on society. The number is not small because it is a naturally
low number but because huge resources have been used to keep
that number low. The real question is what are the "best practices"
to keep the number of terrorists events low while putting the least
amount of restrictions on what people can do when flying.
Other better questions for Nate to ask is "what would be the naturally
occurring rate of terrorism involving commercial airliners be if there
were no processes in place to prevent it?" Or "how long would it
take for commercial airlines to be reduced to only a few flights a
day because the probability of being involved in a terrorist event
would cause people to use other means of transportation?" But
this requires more than number crunching, it requires understanding
the role of terrorism, how to use it effectively against a population,
and how people respond to terrorist threats. I don't think Nate
thinks at that level.
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:30:41 -0800, Scott O Lilienfeld wrote:
All true, and I don't dispute the statistics. But there's a good reason to be
(much) more concerned about terrorist attacks than lightning: lightning doesn't
learn from experience. Were terrorists able to find a dependable way of
bringing explosive devices on board planes with low risk of detection, all it
would take is one or at most two downed commercial planes to paralyze
(temporarily, one would hope) the airplane industry, national and international
travel, and much of the world economy.
Again, I don't dispute that the absolute risks are at present extremely
low. I just wouldn't want us to leap to the unjustified conclusion that the
amount of worry we should devote to such incidents should be much less than to
lightning strikes, as the issues involved here are markedly different.
....Scott
________________________________
From: Paul Brandon [paul.bran...@mnsu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 1:19 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: Re: [tips] Stats on airplane terrorism
Not to mention the risks of being killed by an infected cheeseburger.
We cheerfully tolerate many higher but less dramatic risks than 'terrorism'.
On Dec 29, 2009, at 12:03 AM, Christopher D. Green wrote:
Here are some statistics on the probability of being the (attempted) victim of
terrorism on a commercial flight that may make for interesting discussion in
your courses:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html
Here's the best bit: "the odds of being on given departure which is the subject
of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By
contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in
500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less
likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by
lightning."
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