[ExI] Probability of being affected by terrorism [WAS Re: Mass transit]

[Anders Sandberg]

I have put up my calculations now at
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2011/01/_how_dangerous_is_it_to_be_in_a_crowd.html

A fun finding is that indeed, elevators are more dangerous than large 
crowds. Terrorism makes super-large crowds more dangerous, but the 
effect is minor (since terrorism is usually a minor cause of death). 
Incidentally, I noticed that school shootings seem to have a power law 
distribution with exponent about -2.


Adrian Tymes wrote:
> This is known, of course. The problem is, how do we prevent most people
> from getting into hysterics over terrorists, or from taking action
> with long term
> consequences before the hysteria subsides?
>   

How do we make people and political systems from overreacting to strong 
signals, deliberately intended to cause overreaction?

One clear approach is that a diverse system is harder to game than a 
simple or homogeneous one: it is harder to tune the signal.

Similarly adding a bit of slowness to the system makes it less likely to 
overreact - but a problem is that many societies react to this *useful* 
aspect by trying to reduce the lag, making themselves more sensitive. 
The corrective processes on the other hand retain their normal slow 
timescale, making the system on average more biased.


> Drugs have been developed to combat this in biological immune systems.  Is
> there an equivalent for societal ones?
>   

The drugs are applied by an external body that is aware of the problem 
of the immune system. For a society this would be some extra body that 
has the right to inhibit or block decisions in quite core functions, yet 
is insulated from them and whose duty is to maintain the integrity of 
the system. Maybe a constitutional court?

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University