[extropy-chat] Bart Kosko in Los Angeles Times Op-Ed

[natashavita at earthlink.net]

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COMMENTARY
Terror Threat May Be Mostly a Big Bluff

The facts point to overestimation by a frightened U.S.

By Bart Kosko

Bart Kosko teaches probability and statistics at USC, where he is a
professor of electrical engineering. He is author of "Heaven in a Chip"
(Random House, 2000).

September 13, 2004

Just what is the evidence for this alleged terrorist threat that now
dominates foreign affairs and the presidential election? The third
anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York's World
Trade Center has come and gone without any terrorist attacks in the U.S. No
terrorists attacked the Olympics in Greece, as so many feared. Nor did they
attack the Republican convention in New York. And the big statistical
picture of terrorism has changed little in years.

Deaths because of terrorism worldwide have increased a bit lately
(especially after the school attack in Russia), but the number still
remains on the order of about a thousand deaths a year, according to the
State Department — a small fraction of the 15,000 or so murders each year
in the United States, or the 40,000 who die in car accidents.

The Bush administration and many others interpret these facts as proof that
the government is winning its "war on terror" (even though Osama bin Laden
still roams free and threatens from afar). 

And they may be right. It's conceivable that there would have been some
attacks by now if not for the government's stepped-up security at home and
its vigorous anti-terrorism efforts abroad. We don't know. We do know that
studies of our statistical competency show both that we systematically
overestimate the probability of vivid, high-profile threats such as shark
bites and terrorist bombings and that we poorly estimate the probability of
less glamorous dangers like highway fatalities. The comparative absence of
terrorism could just as easily (and I believe, more reasonably) support the
very different conclusion that we have overestimated — grossly
overestimated — the terrorist threat. We may be "winning" a war against
terrorism simply because there are few terrorists out there posing a
serious threat to the U.S. We may have traded substantial civil liberties
and international goodwill in the last three years for a lot more security
than we need.

Answering these questions involves a subtle type of formal reasoning called
negative evidence: Sometimes a search that finds nothing is evidence that
there is nothing. Suppose you shop in a store and then can't find your car
keys. How much of the store must you search before you conclude the keys
are not there? The negative evidence for this conclusion grows as the
search widens and finds nothing.

The strength of the negative evidence depends on the size and complexity of
the search area. For instance, we have good negative evidence that there is
no Loch Ness monster because no sonar sweep of the Scottish lake has found
such a creature. We have less good negative evidence that there is no
Bigfoot because we have not fully searched the larger and more complex area
of pine forests in Northern California. And we have no good negative
evidence at all that we are alone in the cosmos because we have just
started to search the vast heavens for signs of structured energy.

The war in Iraq gives a telling example of negative evidence. The coalition
forces still cannot find the alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction. The weapons may be there, but the negative evidence that they
are not grows stronger each day as a wider search finds nothing. 

The Bush administration has said, in effect, that it is better to be safe
than sorry, not just with regard to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but
with terrorist threats at home. The trouble is that all bureaucracies have
a well-known incentive to over-rely on being safe than sorry. No one wants
to risk approving a new drug or airplane design that has even a slight
chance of killing someone, even if the drug can save lives or the design
can greatly increase flight efficiency.

A related problem is that terrorists have an incentive to exaggerate their
strength in order to frighten their opponents and to attract recruits and
donations. The result is an inadvertent global equilibrium where
governments play it safe by overestimating the terrorist threat, while the
terrorists oblige by overestimating their power. A tight presidential race
only heightens these perverse incentives all around. 

The bottom line is this: There will always be terrorists and legitimate
efforts to catch and kill them. But meanwhile, the bigger statistical
threat comes from the driver next to you who is talking on the cellphone.



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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times 



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