UPDATE 1PM: let’s be fair to our beleagured security officials (see end of post)
The NYT correctly mocks the new US government travel alert:
Where is the threat? Europe. What is the target? Subways, railways, aircraft, ships or any “tourist infrastructure.”
The government’s cluelessness is even more breathtaking once we include two simple truths about risk:
(1) a warning covering an extremely broad area implies the risk in any one location is very low.
(2) risk must always be judged relatively, not absolutely. How does the risk of travel in Europe compare to the risk of staying at home? At home, you are likely at greater risk from a much more dangerous group than Al Qaeda: your fellow drivers every time you take the road. In Europe, you won’t be driving as much as you traipse through picturesque Euro-sites.
Oh, wait, you will be driving more than usual because the government also tells you that — if you are foolish enough to brave Europe — you should avoid the safest forms of transportation: subways, railways, aircraft. It’s obvious you should minimize risk by using non-seat-belt-equipped tiny taxis made out of aluminum and cardboard piloted by speeding cabdrivers.
What point is Professor Aid Watch making with this post today? Perhaps that we should worry about any government this stupid about elementary probability theory when it takes on any other areas that require risk management such as just about everything. Maybe some tax money should be spent on economists, statisticians, and mathematicians giving probability courses to government officials?
UPDATE: let’s give our security officials a break and exempt them from considering other risks of everyday life, so the Europe alert should be compared only to security at home — where the threat level is also on high alert (either YELLOW: SIGNIFICANT RISK OF TERRORIST ATTACK or for airline flights it is ORANGE: HIGH RISK OF TERRORIST ATTACK.)
Could our government kindly clarify WHICH it is recommending: that we should be attacked at home or in Europe?
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I have nothing to add other than laughter. Couldn’t agree more.
(it’s all about politics… if there is a terrorist attack they can say “I told you so” despite the “telling” being completely worthless)
The government is not clueless; they are responding to human nature.
There is an inverse relationship between the regularity with which we confront risk and our response to it: the more times we face it, the less concern we have about it due to the increasing number of times we overcome it and the self-confidence in the face of it that accrues.
I hike in the back country of the Rocky Mtns and invariably a non-hiker will ask: ‘Aren’t you afraid of bears’? I will usually reply that the greatest danger in wilderness travel is driving by automobile to and from trailhead. Usually they don’t get it.
We see this same phenomenon in the media. If I got smucked in a car accident en route to trailhead, that would rate a column inch of space in the paper – maybe. If I got chawed by old Griz while on the trail, that would be head-line news.
This actually reminds me of an experiment done by Daniel Kahneman on attribution bias. Kahneman took two groups of people. He offered one of them insurance against their death in a terrorist attack on their vacation. And he offered the other group insurance against their death, no matter what the cause was. He consistently found that people were more willing to pay for the terrorist insurance, even though the other insurance would also cover terrorist attacks. My guess is the same irrational-type thinking is going on with our government officials. They are substituting fear in place of rational calculation.
People always get angry at me when I tend to downplay the threat of terrorism (not that I don’t think terrorists are a problem, I certaintly think we should invest resources to stop them). When I tell them I’m more afraid that I’ll be hit by a car or my neighbor will murder me in the night than I am of a terrorist attack people always react with shock and ignore my pleas to basic probability assessment. There is something about the fear of terrorism that makes everyone just forget about rational calculation.
This also makes me skeptical of the claim of people like Thaler and Sunstein that governments should use nudges to exploit behavioral biases of the population to improve social and economic outcomes. Yes, behavioral biases exist among large portions of the population – yes, there exists many irrational idiots. Yet, we somehow assume that our government isn’t filled with these same irrational idiots- as illustrated by this case it’s fairly clear that’s an unsafe assumption. Clearly our government is suffering from severe attribution bias intefering with rational calculation.
Also, the color coded terror scare scale is one of my random pet peeves. First, they are never going to increase the status to red – no matter how large the threat it, as people would panic. Second, nobody changes their behavior based on the scales color so what’s the point? And thirdly, if we are going to have a dumb scale can it at least be numerical since I never know what it means when they say the level is “yellow” at the airport.
It’s crap like color coded scales and absurdly complex powerpoint diagrams that makes me think our Pentagon and Homeland Security are either run by idiots or by middle schoolers working on a science project.
So… in response to a sweeping and imprecise warning about terrorism threats, we’re pointing to a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit calculation, implicitly claiming this is the correct metric that governments should act on, extrapolating from that to the galling stupidity of all government officials, and then issuing a sweeping and imprecise warning about ever relying on government.
I feel like there’s at least one more step we need to take here…
does this have anything to do with elections and with the democrats appearing to be tough on terrorism?
This is nothing but a CYA strategy of the type “Heads, I win, Tails, you lose”: If nothing happens, officials can congratulate themselves on having effectively “prevented” an act of terrorism and if something happens and a US tourist gets caught in the middle, officials can say “Well, we told you so…”
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