[locust101]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they talked to absolutely no one local (Pakistani or Muslim) before they published this. The threshold before people pay zakat is like $300 so fluctuations in silver price has very low effect. Do you think someone with $300 in savings is giving donations?

Government only deducts the zakat from the checking account. I am from Pakistan and very few people(basically salaried employees for corps/govt which is a very small portion of population) have bank accounts and the main use is to just withdraw the salary immediately every month. People who are on the threshold of $300 lifetime savings have almost negligible chance of owning a bank account.So I am going to call BS on this paper. There are so many problems with the data in this paper that I can't even. Also quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada. They are using metrics for terrorist attacks in Pakistan (most of which used to happen indiscriminately in public places in metros where most people with bank accounts live). Do you really think that people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks against themselves?

[hogFeast]

There is a cottage industry within academia for this kind of sophistry around terrorism.

I studied IR at a uni with a fairly good research reputation, one of the hot projects (funded to the tune of 7 figures) at the time (some time ago now) was the physical identification of terrorists i.e. by various body measurements...I am 100% serious. And this guy was not an idiot, in the conventional sense at least, PHd in Biology from Oxbridge, "genius", who (at the time) was talked about in breathless tones of wonder by the science departments (and ridiculed everywhere else).

Every few years a scientist will say: "Terrorism isn't solved...but I have a formula"...stop, we know why terrorism occurs but it isn't as simple as your calculus homework.

And I agree, it is totally unfounded to suggest that charities are funding terrorism (or that people who would give to charities and somehow be unaware of that fact, if it was the case).

[im3w1l]

I think it may be possible to get some signal from body measurements. Skin color, sex organs, teeth health (wealth proxy), scars/injuries (been in fights before?), maybe you could find some marker of chronic stress.

But yeah it's going to be pretty poor and not really actionable.

[hogFeast]

The "primary" indicator was length of ring finger relative to index finger, as in - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/talk-hand-scientists... - at the time, this was considered cutting edge...I understand it has been mostly discredited now.

You have also misunderstood slightly. It wasn't stuff like scars, or things correlated to wealth (or race...much good that would do in Northern Ireland or the Basque...I take it you don't know much about terrorism). It was purely body measurements iirc.

[tomatotomato37]

>Skin color

I see we are playing with fire today

[im3w1l]

I mean, he is predicting whether someone is a terrorist... based on physical measurements. It's pretty much the definition of prejudice. What could he otherwise be doing?

[panpanna]

I always thought all Pakistani peoples dark.

Then last week I realized two of my "Easter Europen" coworkers were in fact from Pakistan.

[close04]

> but I have a formula

https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations (or https://tylervigen.com/old-version.html ).

[hyperman1]

These are great. Imagine the kind of laws politicians would make up based on these facts.

Start by regulating the maximum length of spelling bee words, then let every japanese car be audited for motorcycle homicidal AI. And do something for the honey bee.

[jfk13]

> the physical identification of terrorists i.e. by various body measurements

The guy was disciple of Cesare Lombroso, I guess? Ah well... that should put a swift end to the "good research reputation" of that institution.

[ohazi]

> quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada

The more commonly accepted fact is that Muslim terrorist organizations have laundered most of their money through Muslim charities (or at least have done so in the past).

As you state, this doesn't necessarily imply the opposite: that most Muslim charities fund terrorism. But it doesn't not say that either. In any case, this seems more like a lapse in logic to me than overt racism.

[SiempreViernes]

So you claim that saying "there is no evidence for this, but I believe most Muslim charities fund terrorism" is just a simple logical error?

[cwmma]

he is saying that 'most terrorist money comes from charities' does not imply 'most charity money goes to terrorists'

[zaphirplane]

I appreciate you are pointing out the logical fallacy. Thou I’ll point out that their money is laundered through is different from their money comes from.

[cwmma]

yeah I debated trying to bring that up, but felt it would make the point a little more complex and he's still wrong even if the money wasn't laundered

[ohazi]

"Most X's are also Y's" does not imply "Most Y's are also X's." We would need additional information about the X and Y populations to make this stronger claim.

However, making this claim incorrectly is one of the more common logical fallacies. Given that, it seems more appropriate to attribute the error to logical fallacy than to specific racist intent, again, unless we have more information about the authors with which to make this stronger claim.

[mc32]

>Do you really think that people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks against themselves?

That’s not necessarily contradictory. A different example is drug related gang violence. Money from drugs can be traced and consequential and resulting in gang violence, but obviously a given gangster isn’t going to fund a shootout targeting her or him, but obviously other targets, but in the end in aggregate can result in violence for all gangsters (and many bystanders).

[kasey_junk]

The paper pretty robustly shows charitable giving is correlated with the price of silver.

That intuitively doesn’t contradict the idea that most people don’t change their giving based on the price of silver. If only the rich do they can still move the needle.