Luckily for the forces of law and order, we have a few things going for us. Number one, effective people with good judgement generally find ways of resolving their grievances that do not involve terrorism—these types of people are required to scale any idea. Two, the world’s security services are tending towards more, not less, effectiveness and generally prioritize shooting members, and would be members, of terrorist groups’ technical staffs. Three, terrorist groups tend to develop along predictable lines, with predictable organizational structures and predictable personalities in various roles; these predictable features are not conducive to technical achievement.
Over-valuing received wisdom, and inordinate amounts of time spent on reinforcing ideology distract from effective engineering development. Non-technical management staff, waterfall development, a fear of innovation emerging from outside the (non technical) gurus who produce the ideological ideas, and the insularity driven by both ideological and security requirements really do hamper effective engineering.
The movie Four Lions is by far the best movie I’ve seen on terrorism. For whatever reason, people don’t like to believe me when I tell them this. ‘The Joker’ or ‘mad evil genius’ archetypes, though common in movies, are extremely rare in practice.
Rather than a $ scale of damage, I like to think of technique danger on a log scale, meaning, how many logs of human lives could this attack destroy at the high end.
Morons will always be able to hit 0; anyone at all with a little thought could hit 1. 2 is challenging, but unfortunately achievable by someone acting alone. 3 logs is 9/11.
Truck attacks probably cap out at 1 log, so in an absolute sense, are probably better from the perspective of the security services than attacks involving explosives, which have hit two logs with alarming frequency.
When it comes to ‘evil psychology’, most people when ‘thinking like the baddie’ start from a place of ‘if I were exactly who I am today, and set the goal of , how would I go about doing it. Obviously I’d have to just turn off my emotions and pretend I’m a psychopath to start’.
This creative thinking often leads to anxiety (when interesting 1-2 log ideas are generated), and confusion that usually goes something like this: ‘my goodness, it would be so easy to , we should be terrified that someone could figure it out!’
This fails to take into account that on the one hand, ‘psychopathic’ terrorists are rare because psychopaths are notoriously unable to execute plans that require discipline over a long period of time, and on the other, that a person who is pursuing a terrorist attack is often in a mental and emotional state that is very, very different from yours. The terrorist may be prioritizing things that in your view, would seem counterproductive to the point being downright stupid.
As an example, I recall a school shooting (don’t make me look it up, there have been a whole mess of them) where one of the victim stories described the result of an authority figure shouting something to the effect of ‘I have a wife and kids’ to the shooter through a door. A normal person, in a normal state of mind would find that to be a sympathetic, though not necessarily a persuasive message. The shooter, whose motives were later ascribed to frustration at his own inability to achieve things like a girlfriend or family, responded to this plea with a hail of gunfire. Though we cannot know what he was thinking, I assess that the shooter could be believed to have added ‘and YOU never will’ to the victim’s statement, and responded with rage and frustration to the perceived insult. A separate school shooter was apparently defused when a female teacher repeated ‘I love you’ over and over to him when he entered the building with a gun. Note: the suggestion that ‘if we have a mass shooting, one of the cute but not intimidatingly hot girls should try mustering up as much sincerity as she can and repeat I love you to the shooter’ probably will not go over well at your office for cultural reasons.
Anyway, if you are nervous about any of your ideas that you’re thinking about releasing on the internet, feel free to PM me and I’ll be happy to help you work through the logic. If your proposed technique can do one log of harm, it’s probably fun to talk about in public and unlikely to make the world worse; two and up might require some discretion when it comes to the technical details (everyone loves finding a dead terrorist splattered across his apartment), but I would err on the side of disclosure in general terms, particularly if the technique is novel or simple, as the people who are best positioned to spot an attack in its incipient stages probably are not security professionals. If you can reliably generate ideas that you’re sure can hit three or more, for the sake of your health, I suggest avoiding participation in radical politics.
I’ve spent many years with this issue.
Luckily for the forces of law and order, we have a few things going for us. Number one, effective people with good judgement generally find ways of resolving their grievances that do not involve terrorism—these types of people are required to scale any idea. Two, the world’s security services are tending towards more, not less, effectiveness and generally prioritize shooting members, and would be members, of terrorist groups’ technical staffs. Three, terrorist groups tend to develop along predictable lines, with predictable organizational structures and predictable personalities in various roles; these predictable features are not conducive to technical achievement.
Over-valuing received wisdom, and inordinate amounts of time spent on reinforcing ideology distract from effective engineering development. Non-technical management staff, waterfall development, a fear of innovation emerging from outside the (non technical) gurus who produce the ideological ideas, and the insularity driven by both ideological and security requirements really do hamper effective engineering.
The movie Four Lions is by far the best movie I’ve seen on terrorism. For whatever reason, people don’t like to believe me when I tell them this. ‘The Joker’ or ‘mad evil genius’ archetypes, though common in movies, are extremely rare in practice.
Rather than a $ scale of damage, I like to think of technique danger on a log scale, meaning, how many logs of human lives could this attack destroy at the high end.
Morons will always be able to hit 0; anyone at all with a little thought could hit 1. 2 is challenging, but unfortunately achievable by someone acting alone. 3 logs is 9/11.
Truck attacks probably cap out at 1 log, so in an absolute sense, are probably better from the perspective of the security services than attacks involving explosives, which have hit two logs with alarming frequency.
When it comes to ‘evil psychology’, most people when ‘thinking like the baddie’ start from a place of ‘if I were exactly who I am today, and set the goal of , how would I go about doing it. Obviously I’d have to just turn off my emotions and pretend I’m a psychopath to start’.
This creative thinking often leads to anxiety (when interesting 1-2 log ideas are generated), and confusion that usually goes something like this: ‘my goodness, it would be so easy to , we should be terrified that someone could figure it out!’
This fails to take into account that on the one hand, ‘psychopathic’ terrorists are rare because psychopaths are notoriously unable to execute plans that require discipline over a long period of time, and on the other, that a person who is pursuing a terrorist attack is often in a mental and emotional state that is very, very different from yours. The terrorist may be prioritizing things that in your view, would seem counterproductive to the point being downright stupid.
As an example, I recall a school shooting (don’t make me look it up, there have been a whole mess of them) where one of the victim stories described the result of an authority figure shouting something to the effect of ‘I have a wife and kids’ to the shooter through a door. A normal person, in a normal state of mind would find that to be a sympathetic, though not necessarily a persuasive message. The shooter, whose motives were later ascribed to frustration at his own inability to achieve things like a girlfriend or family, responded to this plea with a hail of gunfire. Though we cannot know what he was thinking, I assess that the shooter could be believed to have added ‘and YOU never will’ to the victim’s statement, and responded with rage and frustration to the perceived insult. A separate school shooter was apparently defused when a female teacher repeated ‘I love you’ over and over to him when he entered the building with a gun. Note: the suggestion that ‘if we have a mass shooting, one of the cute but not intimidatingly hot girls should try mustering up as much sincerity as she can and repeat I love you to the shooter’ probably will not go over well at your office for cultural reasons.
Anyway, if you are nervous about any of your ideas that you’re thinking about releasing on the internet, feel free to PM me and I’ll be happy to help you work through the logic. If your proposed technique can do one log of harm, it’s probably fun to talk about in public and unlikely to make the world worse; two and up might require some discretion when it comes to the technical details (everyone loves finding a dead terrorist splattered across his apartment), but I would err on the side of disclosure in general terms, particularly if the technique is novel or simple, as the people who are best positioned to spot an attack in its incipient stages probably are not security professionals. If you can reliably generate ideas that you’re sure can hit three or more, for the sake of your health, I suggest avoiding participation in radical politics.