Diminishing freedoms due to poor grasp of statistics

[Laivasse]

I've chanced across a lot of articles recently about subjects such as new info-snooping databases in the UK, police abuses of power and terror paranoia, and it's caused me to think a lot about the nature of freedom nowadays.

So when I read this article just now, which happens to be very much in line with my own opinions on the matter, I figured I'd post it here. It's not just about paranoia with regrads to terrorism, but sensationalism over child snatching lurkers and other things people tend to assume the worst about despite their extreme rarity.

The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity's natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We're just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

The everyday threat of having our goods stolen, our ability to travel and earn our livings curtailed, and our personal information harvested by every junior terrorist fighter who wants to see your ID before letting you do anything is overshadowed by the one-in-a-billion confluence of someone with terrorist goals, the means to accomplish them, and the intelligence to bring them off (hint: you can't really blow up an airplane with hair-gel and iPods).

Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated "tests" for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

Personally, apart from an over-emphasis on the idea of 'statistics', I'd say he's bang on. The reason I say it's an over-emphasis is because I don't believe it's primarily a poor grasp of statistics that causes people to overreact in this way, though it might play a part, but rather an overblown sense of entitlement to safety. This in turn has been spawned IMO from too much soft living - eg. lack of exposure to peril, comforts taken for granted, people living beyond their means, etc - combined with the shallowness and superficiality which has turned people into creatures who live not for their ideals, but for their creature comforts. Essentially it's become so that most people's only ideal is that they should be able to live to excess, in comfort, in perpetuity!

And so, where people might in the past have accepted a modicum of risk as an inevitable element of daily life, nowadays they would happily trade the freedom to accomplish anything of meaning or of substance with their lives, for the reassurance that the odds of being knocked down while crossing the road will be reduced from 1-in-a-million to 1-in-slightly-more-than-a-million.

Views?

EDIT: This article is another one by the same author and is written along the same lines. Also seems worth a read.

 

[repiV]

That's pretty much it. Everything that is good in life is being wantonly sacrificed for the benefit of either safety nazis or eco-fascists - especially if the government can turn a profit out of it.
You only need to look at the obsession with making driving a miserable experience in some misguided pursuit of "safety" (and "saving the environment") when a statistically insignificant 3000 people are killed each year over some 35 billion journeys.

This country makes me want to puke nowadays. On the other hand, Boris Johnson appears to be doing a genuinely good job, and I think we are seeing a paradigm shift in British politics. It took a long time, but people are finally seeing this corrupt, incompetent, mind-bendingly arrogant government for what it is and have had enough.
At the end of the day, until the spineless pussies who inhabit this land stop bending over and taking it, we will continue to get reamed.

 

[Dan]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/rudmin1.html

 

[lame-o]

Well I say we're all hypocrites. If any of you believe in that you would do something. I know that I can understand what's happening but for some reason I don't care enough. Just like Sri Lanka - who cares? But it's the biggest natural disaster to occur within what? Ever? That one has always stumped me, even though I too don't care.

 

[kirovman]

Sri Lanka? Do you mean Burma? Biggest disaster since the 2004 tsunami anyway.

Anyway I agree that many things have been sacrificed in the name of security.

 

[lame-o]

Sri Lanka? Do you mean Burma? Biggest disaster since the 2004 tsunami anyway.

Anyway I agree that many things have been sacrificed in the name of security.

I mean Sri Lanka, that's where most of the 2004 tsunami hit. It got MUCH less publicity than 9/11.

 

[kirovman]

Not to quibble, but I thought Indonesia was worse hit?

But anyway you are right.
People are only interested in what affects them directly.
9/11 had economic repercussions around the world. (some may argue the credit crunch is the aftershock of 9/11). Tsunami was just a bunch of poor people dying on the other side of the world and that happens everyday on the news (in some people's view).
9/11 felt a lot closer to home for some people.