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Notes -
Anything more recent than, say, 5 years old AT LEAST has zero business being involved in any article on stochastic terrorism. Which is probably a legitimate thing, we know radical thought has at least some influence on mainstream thought such as the Overton Window idea -- but if we look to the world of finance, which actually does have to deal with a similar kind of problem paradigm, we can learn a few important lessons.
Namely, timescale matters. If your lifetime goal is to retire, then you shouldn't try and time the market. Keep your stocks in play, don't panic sell. Assuming your goal is lifetime political accuracy, rather than just winning a single election or maybe two, adjusting your priors about stochastic terror based on a a few events is very similar to panic selling at signs of a market slump. At the time and people scales we're working at, it's just too hard in my opinion to accurately judge an underlying distribution's makeup based on fundamentally very rare events on a short time scale without massively increasing false positive risk. This is doubly true since we don't have a good, consistent model for the underlying (stochastic part of the conversation) terror event generation function or frequency. The model for political assassination is sort of broad, I guess, maybe dating back to the era of personal firearms in general, but still so data-sparse I'd be skeptical of anyone claiming to understand the distribution too deeply.
And I'd bet if you chased some of the Wikipedia citations, most of the actual science involved would caution exactly the same.
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