Bruce Schneier On Perceived and Real Risks

prostoalex writes "Encryption guru Bruce Schneier takes a look at perceived and actual risks with some insightful commentary on how warped the public perception of risks may be: '...we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.'"

Comments

Re:War on ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of road deaths in the US *per annum* is 10 times that of the 9/11 attacks. You might be thinking of the UK road deaths which are the same order of magnitude (3,500 per annum).

Actually, Americans tolerate 15 9-11's per annum

[Anonymous Coward]

Around 45,000 transportation-related deaths take place in the US every year. That's 15 times the number of premature deaths that occurred on 9-11. Every year.

http://trb.org/news/blurb_detail.asp?id=5380

The point is that if we were truly concerned about our lives, we would pay attention to this problem with as much vigor and zeal as we pay attention to terrorism - or American Idol. But this kind of fact doesn't get any play in the media. It is roundly ignored.

Just because the deaths are dispersed doesn't mean the cost or the tragedy is any less. Put those 45,000 bodies in a pile together with all the twisted metal and accident debris, and you have a pretty nasty mess.

And there are at least 6 times as many injuries as there are deaths. Transportation-related injuries raise healthcare costs for everyone, over a long span. Such things are not fixed in part because the systems are too entrenched. And tragedy is profitable to many. Insurance, pharma, etc. "A stitch in time saves nine," sure. But just think of how much you can charge for those nine stitches!

But they are also not fixed because of the diffuse nature of the events. There is a lack of public awareness to these surprising statistics. And due to our cultural conditioning it is anathema to openly compare lifestyle-related self-destruction to obliquely-motivated wanton destruction. Because the themes are too emotional for our rational minds to engage them.

Yet the fact is that beneath the themes that color these events, the dynamics are simple. Directed energy spells consequences. American progress, the lifestyle of travel, coupled with imperfect systems, leads us to a certain amount of collective self-destruction, which we accept as the cost of our manner of being. Meanwhile, energy is being directed from without to harm and punish us collectively. Outwardly destructive and wanton, our foreign policy has been and remains: to instill instability in regions we wish to usurp, and to engage openly only with those who are sufficiently subservient to capitalist interests. We step on many toes, and we get bitten by radicals, sometimes even the very radicals we armed and trained in the first place.

Fact is, even with so many deaths every year, from major causes (like transportation-related incidents and heart disease and obesity), and minor causes (like electrocutions and terrorism), we're still increasing in numbers and thriving generally. The herd is healthy enough, so if a few are culled it's acceptable to the bottom line - the bottom line of those who are paying attention to such numbers. Those who know and could do something, aren't, in any case. So draw your own conclusions.

Re:Nice soundbyte there...

[cold fjord]

I would certainly hope it would be famous for violating the laws of physics

No need for Data, Scotty, or Spock to get involved. The real explanation is much more mundane.

Debunking The 9/11 Myths - Mar. 2005 Cover Story

"Melted" Steel
CLAIM: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."

FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1500F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800 it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

The original article lead to a book Debunking 9/11 Myths, needed now more than ever.

The Conspiracy Industry, By James B. Meigs, Editor-In-Chief, Popular Mechanics

Re:Nice soundbyte there...

[Lemmy Caution]

You make an excellent point: we remember these events in relative, "lived-in" time, not in absolute historical time. Absolute historical time is very much a late development - the classical historians didn't really use it, and it isn't really "natural" or intuitive. When we recall, for example, when we lost our virginity, when a relative died, and so forth, we refer to our age before we refer to the year it occured; we locate it experientally proximate events (where we were living and working, for example.)

I remember exactly where I was for all the events you listed that occurred during my lifetime, though I know the exact date only for a few of them.

The topic of relative and absolute historical temporalities is well-discussed in a book by Donald Wilcox called The Measure of Times Past.