This is not a good argument against caring about terrorism; I wrote a blog post about this but it seems to be frequently misunderstood so it’s probably not very good.
This basically means that the attacks terrorists use today have the feature that very little people die as a result. That makes it more important to not spread information about ways that actually kill a lot of people not less.
It is evidence, however, that terrorists aren’t trying (or aren’t JUST trying) to kill a lot of people. They’re trying to do something else, and that something else could well mean that ideas aren’t the bottleneck, and we shouldn’t worry about trying to keep ideas for killing a lot of people suppressed.
If it were just about killing people, I think Mao still holds the record, with “ideology-driven central government planning” as the most effective mechanism. I still strongly believe we’re better off publishing the effectiveness of that than suppressing the knowledge.
Well, if you want to go into details, Mao had a lot of help and he didn’t explicitly plan to cause the famines. The person who personally killed the most people that he specifically intended to kill is the guy who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Extremely low amount of deaths is due to terrorist attacks (https://i.redd.it/5sq16d2moso01.gif, https://owenshen24.github.io/charting-death/), so this is not important, and people should care about such things less.
This is not a good argument against caring about terrorism; I wrote a blog post about this but it seems to be frequently misunderstood so it’s probably not very good.
“Conceptual gerrymandering” is a very useful concept. Thanks for writing the post.
This basically means that the attacks terrorists use today have the feature that very little people die as a result. That makes it more important to not spread information about ways that actually kill a lot of people not less.
It is evidence, however, that terrorists aren’t trying (or aren’t JUST trying) to kill a lot of people. They’re trying to do something else, and that something else could well mean that ideas aren’t the bottleneck, and we shouldn’t worry about trying to keep ideas for killing a lot of people suppressed.
If it were just about killing people, I think Mao still holds the record, with “ideology-driven central government planning” as the most effective mechanism. I still strongly believe we’re better off publishing the effectiveness of that than suppressing the knowledge.
Well, if you want to go into details, Mao had a lot of help and he didn’t explicitly plan to cause the famines. The person who personally killed the most people that he specifically intended to kill is the guy who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.