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godelski • yesterday at 11:05 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities

  - 0.001%
  - 99.998%
  - 0.001%
If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.

I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).

I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...

Replies

srean • today at 4:14 AM

What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.

I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.

Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.

The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.

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mlyle • today at 2:44 AM

Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.

I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.

I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.

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