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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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See Gwern's terrorism is not effective. Thesis:

Terror⁣ism is not about causing terror or ca⁣su⁣al⁣ties, but about other things. Evidence of this is the fact that, de⁣spite often con⁣sid⁣er⁣able re⁣sources spent, most terrorists are in⁣com⁣pe⁣tent, impulsive, pre⁣pare poorly for at⁣tacks, are in⁣con⁣sis⁣tent in planning, tend to⁣wards ex⁣otic & difficult forms of at⁣tack such as bombings, and in practice ineffective: the modal number of ca⁣su⁣al⁣ties per terrorist at⁣tack is near-zero, and global terrorist annual casualty have been a round⁣ing error for decades. This is de⁣spite the fact that there are many examples of extremely destructive easily-performed potential acts of terrorism, such as poi⁣son⁣ing food sup⁣plies or rent⁣ing large trucks & running crowds over or en⁣gag⁣ing in sporadic sniper at⁣tacks.

He notes that a terrorist group using the obvious plan of "buy a sniper rifle and kill one random person per member of the terrorist group per month" would be orders of magnitude more effective at killing people than the track record of actual terrorists (where in fact 65% of terrorist attacks do not even injure a single other person), while also being much more, well, terrifying.

One possible explanation is given by Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent – the propaganda of the deed is more effective when the killings are spectacular (even if inefficient). The dead bodies aren’t really the goal.

But is this really plausible? Try to consider the terrorist-sniper plan I suggest above. Imagine that 20 unknown & anonymous people are, every month, killing one person in a tri-state area28. There’s no reason, there’s no rationale. The killings happen like clockwork once a month. The government is powerless to do anything about it, but their national & local responses are tremendously expensive (as they are hiring security forces and buying equipment like mad). The killings can happen anywhere at any time; last month’s was at a Wal-mart in the neighboring town. The month before that, a kid coming out of the library. You haven’t even worked up the courage to read about the other 19 slayings last month by this group, and you know that as the month is ending next week another 20 are due. And you also know that this will go on indefinitely, and may even get worse—who’s to say this group isn’t recruiting and sending more snipers into the country?

Gwern concludes that dedicated, goal-driven terrorism basically never happens. I'm inclined to agree with him. We're fine because effectively nobody really wants to do as much damage as they can, not if it involves strategically and consistently doing something unrewarding and mildly inconvenient over a period of months to years (as would be required by the boring obvious route for bioterrorism).

I personally think the biggest risk of catastrophe comes from the risk that someone will accidentally do something disastrous (this is not limited to AI -- see gain-of-function research for a fun example).

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