In the intro article, I don’t think I really like the comparison between pandemic prevention and counterterrorism.
A couple reasons:
First, counterterrorism might be construed to include counter bio terrorism. In which case, it’s not obvious to me that pandemic prevention and counterterrorism are even exclusive.
Second, both pandemics and counterterrorism are heavy-tailed and dominated by tail events. Tail events don’t happen...until they do. To give an example, here is the same graph but for 2009-2019:
Essentially no deaths from COVID-19! Looks like it’s unimportant!
Knowing almost nothing about terrorism, I would expect that a terrorism tail event, such as the detonation of a nuclear dirty bomb, could be similar: we wouldn’t see it in the statistics until it was too late.
When we broaden the scope, we can see that many more people died in global pandemics (other than COVID, since COVID barely existed) in that time period than terrorism:
However, this is extremely influenced by another tail event: HIV/AIDS. In a world without HIV/AIDS, it would look like this:
This would imply that in some counterfactual world where nothing was different except that AIDS did not exist, I should have thought in 2019 that global pandemics were about equal to terrorism in scale. This is not a conclusion that should be drawn from the data, because for tail-dominated phenomena, you can’t just consider historical average data (certainly not from a ten year period), you have to consider black swan events: events unlike any that have ever happened.
Comparing the most recent pandemic tail event to the average statistics on terrorism doesn’t make sense: it’s comparing apples to oranges. Either compare the average statistics over a long time period or the probability and severity of possible tail events. For newly emerging threats like engineered pandemics, average statistics doesn’t even make sense at all, since we’ve never had an engineered pandemic.
I missed that part of footnote 3, it does seem to address a lot of what I said. I appreciate your response.
I do think the vast majority of people will not read footnote 3, so it’s important for the main body of the text (and the visuals) to give the right impression. This means comparing averages to averages, or possible tail events to possible tail events. It sounds like this is your plan now, and if so that’s great!
Good post, though I should point out that HIV entered the human population independently at least twice (HIV-1 and HIV-2), so your counterfactual world missing HIV might not be as likely as one might otherwise think.
(There are also counterfactual worlds where SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV or similar took off as well with an even higher death count.)
The fact that this same statistical manoeuvre could be used to downplay nuclear war, vaccines for diseases like polio, climate change or AI risk, should also be particularly worrying.
Another angle is that the number of deaths is directly influenced by the amount of funding- the article says that “the scale of this issue differs greatly from pandemics”, but it could plausibly be the case that terrorism isn’t an inherently less significant/ deadly issue, but counterterrorism funding works extremely well- that’s why deaths are so low.
This is great!
In the intro article, I don’t think I really like the comparison between pandemic prevention and counterterrorism.
A couple reasons:
First, counterterrorism might be construed to include counter bio terrorism. In which case, it’s not obvious to me that pandemic prevention and counterterrorism are even exclusive.
Second, both pandemics and counterterrorism are heavy-tailed and dominated by tail events. Tail events don’t happen...until they do. To give an example, here is the same graph but for 2009-2019:
Essentially no deaths from COVID-19! Looks like it’s unimportant!
Knowing almost nothing about terrorism, I would expect that a terrorism tail event, such as the detonation of a nuclear dirty bomb, could be similar: we wouldn’t see it in the statistics until it was too late.
When we broaden the scope, we can see that many more people died in global pandemics (other than COVID, since COVID barely existed) in that time period than terrorism:
However, this is extremely influenced by another tail event: HIV/AIDS. In a world without HIV/AIDS, it would look like this:
This would imply that in some counterfactual world where nothing was different except that AIDS did not exist, I should have thought in 2019 that global pandemics were about equal to terrorism in scale. This is not a conclusion that should be drawn from the data, because for tail-dominated phenomena, you can’t just consider historical average data (certainly not from a ten year period), you have to consider black swan events: events unlike any that have ever happened.
Comparing the most recent pandemic tail event to the average statistics on terrorism doesn’t make sense: it’s comparing apples to oranges. Either compare the average statistics over a long time period or the probability and severity of possible tail events. For newly emerging threats like engineered pandemics, average statistics doesn’t even make sense at all, since we’ve never had an engineered pandemic.
Hey, just a quick comment to say something like this line of objection is discussed in footnote 3.
I’m going to propose the following further edits:
Compare with terrorism deaths over 50 years from 1970.
Mention HIV/AIDS in the main text and some other tweaks.
Add further discussion in the footnote.
I missed that part of footnote 3, it does seem to address a lot of what I said. I appreciate your response.
I do think the vast majority of people will not read footnote 3, so it’s important for the main body of the text (and the visuals) to give the right impression. This means comparing averages to averages, or possible tail events to possible tail events. It sounds like this is your plan now, and if so that’s great!
Good post, though I should point out that HIV entered the human population independently at least twice (HIV-1 and HIV-2), so your counterfactual world missing HIV might not be as likely as one might otherwise think.
(There are also counterfactual worlds where SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV or similar took off as well with an even higher death count.)
Didn’t actually know that about HIV, good to know!
Agree with this completely.
The fact that this same statistical manoeuvre could be used to downplay nuclear war, vaccines for diseases like polio, climate change or AI risk, should also be particularly worrying.
Another angle is that the number of deaths is directly influenced by the amount of funding- the article says that “the scale of this issue differs greatly from pandemics”, but it could plausibly be the case that terrorism isn’t an inherently less significant/ deadly issue, but counterterrorism funding works extremely well- that’s why deaths are so low.