[ExI] Probability of being affected by terrorism

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Fri Jan 14 16:41:47 UTC 2011


On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 11:53 PM,   Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

snip

> Actually, let's play around a bit with our assumptions and see what
> happens. I think we have a pretty good model of terrorism being power
> law distributed with exponent -2.5.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/21465

"The New Mexico pair found that the probability of an event with a
severity of x or higher was proportional to x-α, where the scaling
parameter α has a value close to two (see figure). Moreover, they
showed that the distributions did not fit other "heavy-tailed"
distributions like a log-normal curve. According to Clauset and Young,
the results show that extreme events like September 11 are not
"outliers" but part of the overall pattern of terrorist attacks that
is "scale invariant".

"Unfortunately, the implications of the scale invariance are almost
all negative," Clauset and Young told PhysicsWeb. "For example,
because the scaling parameter is less than two, the size of the
largest terrorist attack to date will only grow with time. If we
assume that the scaling relationship and the frequency of events do
not change in the future, we can expect to see another attack at least
as severe as September 11 within the next seven years." Clauset and
Young also suggest that the behaviour they observe is an extension of
the still unexplained scale invariance between the frequency and
intensity of wars. "

Another example of power law is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_outage#Self-organized_criticality

The amount of effect a terrorist
> action has depends on 1) where it happens, 2) how big it is, 3) how
> outrageous it is. Who can name this week's terrorist actions without
> googling? They all happened in the usual far-away countries we tend to
> skim over in our news reading, and they happened to people we do not
> know. Conversely, 911 was an unusually big terrorist event - it is an
> outlier in the data, and the effect was of course amplified by happening
> in a major developed country and in an outrageous fashion (not all
> tragedies are equal).

I suppose the case can be made that 911 affected everyone in the
world.  Historically it might be seen as starting the end of the US as
the top world power, though other things might be seen as more
important.

Another factor is that some of these events, particularly 911 are one
time events.  Having done so once makes it nearly impossible to do it
again.  Though the governmental response has been of very questionable
effect, airline passengers are never going to let this happen again.
In fact, only 3 of the first 4 worked because the passengers in the
4th plane rose up against the hijackers when they found out the fate
of the other 3 planes.

snip (analysis of events)

It perhaps worth thinking about what form the next event on this scale
or larger might take.  We have already had chemical in the Sarin gas
attack, and diversion of aircraft.  Biological and nuclear are left.

The FDA is currently upset that the unlicensed Botox coming into the
country is the real stuff.  So there are people (probably in India)
who know how to grow Clostridium botulinum.  Enough to us as an
aerosol for a large gathering would be possible, but rather expensive.
 Smallpox or monkey pox incorporating interleukin II is possible.  The
Russians are reported to have 20 tons of smallpox left over from the
cold war, but it's really unlikely they would hand some out.

Nuclear weapons may be a lot simpler to build than people think.  For
example, the use of LEDs is not yet appreciated.  Likewise given a
neutron source,  the production of super high grade plutonium 239 from
DU may be possible.  But if I had to guess, I would say the most
likely source of a terrorist nuke going off in a city would be from
Pakistan's weapons being used as terror weapons, say against a city in
India.

I suppose that some versions of the singularity could count.  Seems
very likely that would affect everyone.

Keith




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