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

[Richard Loosemore]

Keith Henson wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 5:00 AM,   Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> 
> snip
> 
>> However, the tiny value of pC makes this a very minor worry. I would be
>> more worried about catching some illness from the crowd or getting hurt
>> in traffic getting to it.
> 
> As usual, airtight reasoning from Anders.

Uh, not so fast.

The computations were *too* airtight, since they involved only the 
(tractable) computations about the probability of being directly hurt.

Terrorism (or feral actions, if you will) are often not designed to 
target the individuals they hurt directly, but to target the perceptions 
of the majority of society.

That is a very different thing.  A suitably planned series of terrorist 
attacks that (speaking probabilistically) would be very unlikely to 
affect anyone on this list, could nevertheless trigger a sequence of 
events in which, say, the United States reacted spasmodically and 
allowed the installation of an extreme right-wing government led by 
President Glenn Beck and Vice President Pat Robertson, which then 
decided to pre-emptively nuke Iran, which responded by unleashing one 
nuke at Israel and (who would have guessed they had one experimental 
ICBM, that in its first test would manage to limp its way around the 
globe?) that made it to the US and destroyed a large city.

(And if anyone feels inclined to scoff at that scenario, don't forget 
that the attacks that occurred a little less than 10 years ago had the 
effect of changing U.S. perceptions enough to start two overseas wars.)

So, please redo the calculations and include the probability of "side 
effects" such as these, which utterly dwarf the direct effects.

(Hint:  correct answer is that the probabilities cannot be computed in 
any meaningful way).



Richard Loosemore