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

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without consulting google, on what date did the Indian ocean tsunami hit?

!918 Flu Epidemic

[Mercedes308]

Plus it's amazing how many people have no idea about the 1918 Flu epidemic that killed between 50 - 100 million yet the only significant event that caused a heavy death toll that we often remember of the period was the Great War.

Re:Nice soundbyte there...

[despisethesun]

Really? Without looking it up on the internet, tell me the exact day the Hindenberg crashed. Same with the Titanic. The Eschede train disaster. If 9/11 were caused by lightning it would certainly have been a memorable event and wound up on about a hundred Discovery Channel specials, but the exact date of it would likely have been forgotten, and there wouldn't be the huge politicisation of the event that there was. Nobody would be telling you to "remember 9/11". It would just be some crazy shit that happened, of interest mostly to airplane and disaster buffs and an excuse for people afraid of flying to stay on the ground.

MOD PARENT UP

[brunes69]

The Tsunami led to way more deaths than the WTC attacks did. Yet it received far to little press and nowhere near enough aid.

I don't know about that...

[rewt66]

Looking at what Schneier is saying, what humans are really doing is paying less attention to non-intelligent threats, even though they are more deadly. That does not sound like a successful survival strategy to me.

Perhaps it is about intentionality

[Infonaut]

When people fly two planes into the WTC, and their fellow travellers express the intent to conduct further attacks, the human intention behind it is pretty clear. Accidents happen, of course, but generally people aren't *trying* to get into car accidents. The idea that people are out there dreaming up further schemes involving mass destruction is what freaks people out. Sure, the odds are still absurdly low that you or I are going to get whacked by terrorists, but human beings are deliberately trying to create the destruction. I think it feels much more personal when you realize that human beings are behind these events, rather than random chance or nature.

Re:Perhaps it is about intentionality

[SQL Error]

This is exactly right.

Humans naturally and correctly respond more strongly to intentional attacks than to accidents.

Accidents will happen, and at any given point they may be more statistically threatening than whatever deliberate attacks may be going on. But accidents are relatively constant, and societies work to minimise them. Intentional attacks, on the other hand, tend to have people working to maximise the effects.

There are people right now who would bomb every airplane in the world if they had the ability to do so. There is no possibility of an accident happening on any similar scale.

The guy on the street who knows nothing of statistical analysis is right, and Bruce Schneier is wrong.

Re:Nice soundbyte there...

[Breakfast Pants]

I'm sure 5 years after the hindenberg crashed a hell of a lot of people could tell you when it happened.

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.

As an American...

[Eevee]

As an American, I'm offended you think I don't know about Boxing Day.

It's the day you celebrate all the brave lads who died to keep China British.