[bjoyx]

> Terrorism is closer to the threat posed by crush deaths from vending machines

This is a fallacy. In the case of terrorism "past performance is not an indicator of future results".

An attack with e.g. a biological weapon could cause, on a single day, 1000x the cumulative number of deaths we had over the past decade.

There is no possibility of the number of crush deaths from vending machines rising like that.

[duskwuff]

> An attack with e.g. a biological weapon could cause, on a single day, 1000x the cumulative number of deaths we had over the past decade.

Perhaps. But it's virtually a certainty that opioid overdoses will kill tens of thousands of people in the US this year. (The most reliable recent figure I can find was ~30k in 2015.) Meanwhile, a terrorist attack in the US that kills hundreds of people -- let alone tens of thousands -- is a relatively low-probability event...

[averagewall]

You'd need quite a lot of biological weapons. 1000 x 100 terrorism deaths is still on the order of magnitude of the number of road deaths in 10 years. So a 100,000 people killing bomb in the US every few decades isn't really that bad.

[exclusiv]

You have to acknowledge that someone abusing opiods doesn't infringe on another's freedom but a terrorist attack does.

Not saying we shouldn't do anything about this drug epidemic but your comparison is fundamentally unsound.

[duskwuff]

That seems like a veiled sort of victim-blaming to me. The entire premise that "someone abusing opioids doesn't infringe on another's freedom" ignores the role of the medical system (and of the drug companies named in this lawsuit!) in leading patients into opiate addiction through poorly handled pain management.

Moreover, addiction is fundamentally a disease which acts upon the sufferer's ability to make free, rational decisions. In a very real sense, the addiction itself is "infringing on the freedom" of the addict, even if it hasn't killed them yet.

[exclusiv]

Unless you are injected against your will or force fed then you still had the freedom to not take it in the first place. Everyone knows how addicting these things are. There are alternative pain relieving options available too. Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.

[scottlamb]

> Everyone knows how addicting these things are.

No, the point of the lawsuit is that they don't (or didn't). The article makes that clear through quotes such as: "We believe that the evidence will show that these pharmaceutical companies purposely misled doctors about the dangers connected with pain meds that they produced."

> Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.

Public smoking is a focus of conversation today, but the analogous 1990s big tobacco lawsuits centered on the medical costs of treating smokers. See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

[exclusiv]

The lawsuit might contend people don't know they are addicting but that's not reality.

[justinjlynn]

You make a good point. Surely there's a way statistics account for this "damage potential". How do statistics treat things like nuclear incidents, etc?

[ComputerGuru]

They're called "black swan events."

Apart from writing difference of books and publishing hundreds of papers on the subject (see Nassim Talib), the tl;dr is economists and sociologists still really have no way of truly accounting for them besides being cognizant of their existence.

[Banthum]

Good to reference Black Swan, but Taleb would call these events gray swans, not black swans.

A true black swan is something that's basically inconceivable before it occurs. It is outside the mental model used to evaluate outcome probabilities. Black swan events include things like:

---Your enemy in a war invents the nuclear bomb and drops it on your cities (this happened to Japan in 1945)

---You are a turkey. The farmer comes, as he does every day. Instead of feeding you, he slaughters you (something which you've got no experience or conception of).

---It's 1994 and you own Blockbuster Video, a solid earning company. Then someone invents the Internet...

Biological warfare attacks are quite well-known as a concept, making them gray swans. Also in the gray swan category are asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, etc etc.

I try to spread this distinction because if we start calling gray swans black swans, that will hide from us the most important part of Taleb's argument, which is that true black swans are the most important events. The idea of the black swan is hard to keep in your mind (how do you keep in mind the inconceivable?) so it's very easy for a pretender concept to sneak in and steal the label.

[ComputerGuru]

Thank you for the correction. I truly appreciate the importance of this distinction.

[gjjrfcbugxbhf]

In that case the cause of the credit crunch that the 2007 financial crisis was a grey swan. The risk models on subprimereal estate were clearly being interrupted incorrectly...

Good to know!

[anovikov]

Nukes have also been a very well-known concept, then have been theoretically invented in 1939 and by 1941, it was well-proven that one can be made. If anything in nukes was a black swan event it was the isotope mix of reactor-produced plutonium which made detonation of plutonium bomb without a fizzle incredibly difficult - something which no one had an idea before it happened and it almost doomed the project - in 1941, making the bomb looked a lot easier than it proved to be.

It was also well-known that U.S. is the world leading scientific and industrial power, that it absorbed huge number of well-educated Jews fleeing Nazis, and it was least affected by ongoing WWII of all major powers.

So if anyone was to make a bomb it was U.S., every rational actor should have expected it to happen. Only 'if' was timing.

[nostrademons]

I think the big black-swan event with nukes was dropping one on a city. It's a pretty big mental leap from "Yes, nuclear fission is possible" to "Our enemies have achieved it in practice, turned it into a weapon, and are about to drop it on one of our cities." Even among the top physicists working on the Manhattan project, it was uncertain if detonating the bomb would ignite the whole atmosphere and kill off all life on earth.

Wormholes, for example, have been theorized for decades. Nevertheless, "The earth is about to fall into a wormhole and end up in another dimension" would probably fall into the category of black-swan events.

[bluejekyll]

> it was uncertain if detonating the bomb would ignite the whole atmosphere and kill off all life on earth.

This was known before it was dropped on a city. The Trinity test happened about three weeks prior to dropping the first bomb on Japan. The second bomb was dropped with full knowledge of the potential casualties after the devastation of the first.

We Americans always justify these bombs, but really, there is no justification.

[aidenn0]

It really wasn't a black swan though because bombings of industrial cities were well established at that point; it is even possible that the bombing of Tokyo killed as many as the two atomic bombs combined (estimates of deaths for each have very broad ranges).

Earlier than that on the European front, there was Dresden, which killed about a third of as many that as the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Really, once the US established control of the air, they were capable of wiping out Japan's cities with conventional weapons.

[exelius]

I actually took an entire class in business school about this exact topic -- "Catastrophic Risk Analysis". Great class, the teacher was a former astronaut (among many other things).

And you're right, you basically can't predict things like this -- but a great many catastrophic risks that can be prevented are ignored because the event seems much less likely than it is due to the scale of the impact being so large as to be unimaginable by many. Climate change is a chief example; but there are plenty others throughout history in business, warfare, and science.

[idiotdummy]

>no way of truly accounting

No way to predict, sure. But if my memory serves me correctly, the entire theme of Taleb's Black Swan was about accounting for such events. For example, financial hedging; you won't know what event might manifest itself and cause a huge financial disruption (the cause), but you can anticipate "it" happening, in some form, and preparing for it by buying long shot hedges (accounting for the effect).

[microcolonel]

My understanding is that you multiply the cost by the probability, or use a power of the cost (since the impact of a huge liability or disabling disaster is usually more than the accounted-for direct damage).

[nostrademons]

Problem is that it's virtually impossible to estimate the probability of a black-swan event, since, by definition, they are events that have never happened before and nobody has foreseen them possibly happening. A priori, your probability is zero, and yet they happen anyway.

We can be fairly certain that something unexpected will happen in the future, but predicting what that something is or with what likelihood it will occur is still the domain of fortune-tellers.

[devoply]

Do we do that for various financial endeavors and shut them down due to the economic risk posed? Cost of 9/11 was rather large, but it was not that large simply due to terrorism, it was that large due to the failure of various measures meant to prevent it... all aligning into a perfect storm.

[jquery]

And therein lies the problem. How do you calculate the probability in the first place? For some things (asteroids) this is possible, for others (catastrophic rapid climate change or terrorism) we don't have the predictive tools.

[dredmorbius]

Poorly.

Large-scale, high-consequence, strongly systemic or correlated events are difficult to model and describe.

Death-by-asteroid is one of the more interesting cases. That would be a bad day for you (or your descendants), but also, quite likely, many others, when it happens. The days aren't frequent, but they're big.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/13/de...

More generally, there's a lot summary statistics don't tell you.

https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats

[55555]

I'm not entirely sure, but models typically don't. Nassim Taleb wrote a book called Black Swans about these types of events.

[ComputerGuru]

A black hole swallowing our planet whole would have an even larger death toll, I think.

The point is that past performance gives a baseline that can used to judge both possibility and probability of such outcomes.

[devoply]

I think the OP means black swans happen. And so terrorism should be considered a black swan sort of risk. But if we're doing that then shut down all the various financial institutions that may cause such risk as they have been shown to do more than once in the past. However, thus far the black swan risk from terrorism seems to be a few thousand people in the time frame of around two to three decades... globally. The cost seems to be in the trillions but that has little to do with the terrorists, and much to do with the management of the response to terror... and also management of the risk posed by it.

[jquery]

Globally? No, that's a very USA-centric view. Terrorism has killed hundreds of people globally this month alone. It has destabilized (if not outright destroyed) many countries over the past 2-3 decades.

[vkou]

Terrorism has not destroyed countries across the past 2-3 decades.

Civil wars did. Many of them have either been started by, or fueled by American foreign policy.

So, yes, your country being destabilized by a civil war is a real threat if you live in the global south. In America? It's not going to happen because of a few mouthbreathers decided to cook some bathtub C4.

[xyzzyz]

Globally speaking, USA imperialism is bigger threat than the terrorism with regards to the body count metric.

[devoply]

Yeah it has killed hundreds this month mostly again due to mismanagement of response to terror and management of the prep for terror. It's a significantly different thing to compare terrorism in 3rd world countries who are routinely targets of both non-State and State sponsored terror because lack of control mechanisms and terror in developed countries or countries with stable governance systems.

[base698]

Fat vs thin tails. Namsayin?

[MrFantastic]

Why is a hypothetical massive terrorist attack more scary than hypothetically polluting all fresh water than humans need to live?

[chongli]

There is no possibility of the number of crush deaths from vending machines rising like that.

Not unless some terrorist rogue scientist invents nano machines that turn everything into vending machines. Some bizarre gray goo scenario.

[jquery]

This is a good point. The annual stats for terrorism looked very different in 2001 vs 2000. And the nature of terrorism presents an unknown level of threat that could make the events of 2001 look like a firecracker in comparison. Your biological weapon example is excellent, there are those who have the will and only lack the way to make it happen today.