Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Furniture as by Terrorism (2012)

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/americans-are-as-likely-to-be-killed-by-their-own-furniture-as-by-terrorism/258156/

by thex86 • 13 years ago

80 40 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

anologwintermut4• 13 years ago

But terrorism induces terror and people don't want to live in terror. So either 1) we need to make a serious attempt to cause people not to care about it and acknowledge its a tiny risk 2) we need to stop terrorists or 3) we need to make people feel like we achieved 2.

None of those options are easy and I've never seen a real proposal to seriously attempt 1. Other than statistics, how would you go about it?

acqq2• 13 years ago

Refuse to be Terrorized (Bruce Schneier, 2006)

http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want. (...)

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

And giving up your freedoms "because of the terrorism" is the worst thing imaginable.

venus• 13 years ago

I think all of us here at HN can agree with the wisdom of Mr Schneier's words.

The problem is how to somehow transmit said wisdom into the brains of those 99.9% of the population who do not read HN or Bruce Schneier or otherwise think deeply on these matters.

anologwintermut4• 13 years ago

Although some politicians generate terrorism fears for political advantages, the media report it for ratings. Think about all the "innocent white girl kidnapped" headlines. The media reports what people will tune in to and people will definitely tune in for that.

So what, do we place limits on reporting?

badman_ting• 13 years ago

I don't think it's that. People like to think that they are special, because there is a certain pain in acknowledging that one's whole existence is unimportant and mundane. So we imagine some bad guy is out there trying to blow us up.

Dying from too many cheeseburgers is totally unsexy, and as a bonus implies that there may be consequences to doing what we want all the time. Booooooriiiing.

ferdo2• 13 years ago

Most of the "terror" I've seen in the US in the past 12 years comes from the government and the media scaring the hell out of people.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

Terrorism is an industry with thousands and thousands of people (TSA employees, military industrial contractors, drone pilots, policy makers) that get paid as long as there is terrorism.

While their superficial mission is to "eliminate" terrorism. The incentives are quite the opposite. 1) Will not happen from above. There won't be a White House policy to as a war on Fear of Terrorism. It will have to come from the citizens.

adventured• 13 years ago

I'd start with focusing on electing a government that doesn't abuse its citizens psychologically in the name of spending hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary security theater.

The Bush White House spent five years practically emotionally torturing America with its color codes and terrorist threat propaganda to justify a massive expansion of the military industrial complex.

anologwintermut4• 13 years ago

The Bush administration did those things. But I remember idiots on 9/12 in bum fuck, Nebraska, going "if it could happen in NYC, it could happen here." People were genuinely scared.

I think the terror happened without the government, they just milked it to increase budgets, get new powers, and invade Iraq.

JanezStupar2• 13 years ago

One could argue that this is due to the effectiveness of surveillance state.

northwest4• 13 years ago

But one should not. "Terrorism", for the tiny, tiny little bit that happens in our country, was not here before.

Let's just switch to a sane foreign policy and be done with "terrorism". At least mid- and long-term, that's the only thing that will stop the recruiting of new "terrorists".

JanezStupar2• 13 years ago

All I am arguing is that using probablities as counter argument to war on terrorism is not really smart.

There are far better arguments out there. So lets not use the ones that the supporters may be able to use against us.

rob05c• 13 years ago

To which the government responds, "See, the War on Terror is working!"

If you likewise point out that psychoactive drug usage has remained flat since the 50's, they say, "See, no increase! The War on Drugs is working!"

The real problem is that legislators aren't bound by silly things like logic, or the scientific method, or burden of proof.

bcx• 13 years ago

It is interesting to consider the media bias towards 'bad' news. For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative. Whether it's terrorism, kidnapping, ponzi schemes, car crashes, you name it, but why do some negative stories run more than others?

At some point media organizations found that people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.

http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soro... - Concludes there is a psychophysiological evidence that negative news is more arousing.

I suppose it follows that media concerning terrorism is probably more arousing than people being crushed by couches, and makes much better TV. And our perception of our reality is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to.

A great example of this would be the coverage of the fertilizer plant that blew up in Texas verses the Boston marathon bombings. These happened within days of each other. Which one did you hear about more? Which one killed more people?

goblin89• 13 years ago

For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative … people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.

In your example, high speed rail launch is hardly breaking news. People are likely to be receiving updates on that rail through mass media since long before its construction even started. Train wreck, though, is a very unexpected event. A black swan.

Media does look for interesting stories (understandably), and it's been noticed that such stories tend to have certain qualities, like:

    Freshness
    Significance
    Proximity (geographical or otherwise)
    Famous people involved
    Human interest (appeal to emotion)

Train wreck is going to score high by all of these, expect possibly the famous people one. It may involve people we know, it engages our self-preservation instinct, it may directly affect our actions (e.g., stop using trains).

High speed rail launch is probably less ‘news’, as already mentioned (people knew it's being built). Perceived significance is less—long term convenience is hard to judge, and people have been living without it for ages anyway.

So I personally don't find it very surprising that ‘good’ stories tend to be less interesting than ‘bad’ ones, and I don't think it's because we, cruel creatures, love watching blood and suffering so much.

(I'm yet to read the paper you linked to, though.)

Edit: clarity, wording.

northwest4• 13 years ago

Always keep in mind that the government's cheapest manipulation strategy is fear (it always works):

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/constitutional-expert...

And for some more numbers that we should talk to our family and friends about:

You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack

taken from: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...

Conclusion: Terrorism is actually not a problem, but they want us to believe that.

ferdo2• 13 years ago

By your link, we're also 8 times more likely to get killed by a government employee than by a terrorist.

northwest4• 13 years ago

So, by government logic, we'd have to start a War on Government Employee-ism...

EDIT: Seriously, just this 1 thought would warrant HUGE articles in papers like the New York Times. Obviously, this will never happen.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Don't underestimate the threat from furniture.

It happened to me: one moment I was sitting at the table in my IKEA chair, perhaps leaning forward to browse HN, and the next I was on the floor with (the mirror revealed) a deep 20-inch gash across my upper back, and a lighter slash behind my knees/legs.

Obviously the chair broke, but I still haven't figured out how it cut me so severely. A few inches higher and it would have been my neck.

fixxer• 13 years ago

IKEA is prone to spontaneous attacks. I had a dresser collapse on my foot once. They lull you into a false sense of security with their meatballs.

Natsu• 13 years ago

Sadly, the result of this news is likely to be a new multi-billion dollar War on Furniture.

wozniacki• 13 years ago

Sadly, the result of this news is likely to be a new multi-billion dollar War on Furniture.

Natsu probably meant that the litigious implications of this finding will be adverse and widespread, but largely monetary, none of which will really address the real problem.

Unless, of course, this sort of thing could bring about the equivalent of "1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act" which was largely due to the activism and efforts of Ralph Nader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#Automobile_safety_a...

(Don't be so quick to downvote.)

autodidakto• 13 years ago

Upvote or the furniture wins.

Zoomla• 13 years ago

You need to follow the assembly instructions . . .

akshayub2• 13 years ago

I would like to present a very good counter argument put forth by Taleb on his Facebook page:

""" (Heuristic: go to Pinker). He promotes there a WSJ article to the effect that "Terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders"; the article was written by a war correspondant, Ted Koppel and is very similar to his Angels thesis.

Now let's try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.

A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy. They are subjected to strong bounds, etc. It is "impossible" to have, say, >1% of a country's population dying from falls from ladders the same year. The chances are less than 1 in several trillion trillion trillion years. Hence a journalistic statement about risk converges to the scientific statement.

B- Terrorism is fat tailed. Your estimation from past data has monstrous errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One biological event can decimate the population.

May be "reasonable" to claim that terrorism is overhyped, that our liberty is more valuable, etc. I believe so. But the comparison here is a fallacy and sloppy thinking is dangerous. (Worse, Koppel compares terrorism today to terrorism 100 years ago when a terrorist could inflict very limited harm.)

"""

Another such case is Nuclear Weapons, Millions of dollars are spent on controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons, even when no one died last year because of them. However this does not implies that we should abandon strict controls, since the risk characteristics are completely different.

mikeash3• 13 years ago

Unlike nuclear weapons, I see no reason to think terrorism can ever kill any significant portion of the country's population. Ideas of terror attacks involving nuclear weapons or pandemics seem to be complete fantasy as best I can tell.

akshayub2• 13 years ago

Well 9/11 would have seemed a perfect fantasy on 9/10/2001.

But within matter of few hours the rate of american killed by terrorists went from same as those killed by furniture to few thousand times. The central argument is that a comparison with death by furniture is irrelevant, since the risk profiles are significantly different. Finally one cannot minimize risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons in isolation from agents such as rogue states and terrorists.

jswift• 13 years ago

It's about the upside. Risk of death by terrorism has a much higher chance of increasing.

The_D• 13 years ago

Oh please. Terrorism is a threat to the world. Coptic churches being burned everyday in egypt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve_DlPG4YQM. Muslim script kiddies are spamming ycombinator.

thex86• 13 years ago

I am not a Muslim if this is what you were hinting at and I don't see how being one matters in this case. Also, I don't see how ad hominem attacks are a good way of carrying out a discussion.

I regularly post articles related to such stuff -- a quick glance at my history should suffice. "Terrorism is a threat to the world" is what we all think but this is approaching this from a logical, statistical point of view, which is how it should be. If you are the kind that subscribes to Fox News and refuses to open your mind (my ad hominem attack to you), then you can just ignore this article and we can all happily move on.

Symmetry• 13 years ago

Violence by the majority population of a state against a minority might be "terrorism", but it's very different from small groups of extremists trying to terrorize people by setting off the occasional bomb.

mikeash3• 13 years ago

Most of us don't live in Egypt, and for those who do, the lessons to be learned from this "terrorism" are quite different.

nsns• 13 years ago

The threat from terror has no relation whatsoever to the amount dead, rather, it is a traumatic enemy invasion of the supposedly protected national space , it instills a feeling of terror, which might even topple the government should it be deemed too weak to respond adequately (which is the real incentive for it to overreact). Even if the towers had fallen 12 years ago without anyone getting hurt, we'd still require a Snowden today.

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

Terrorism is about terror, not dead bodies. It doesn't matter how many people are killed by what. Statistics do not matter. All that matters is that small numbers of people can create terror in large numbers of people and cause them to act in a certain way politically.

The problem here is that the mainstream media loves terror -- as long as they're the ones inflicting terror on the rest of us. Each year there's the predictable stories about killer bees, shark attacks, and all kinds of statistically unlikely events, all played off as being of dire import to the average consumer. We love using irrational fear to politically control people. It's as common as rain in the modern world. It's just when outsiders do it for their own purposes without regard to life or property that we run into all kinds of problems.

brymaster• 13 years ago

Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Furniture as by Terrorism

Sadly, still won't stop people from saying you have no right to privacy or due process or whatever sick agenda they're pushing at the moment.

Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Furniture as by Terrorism (2012)

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