There have been numerous terrorist incidents in world history, and triggers to war, and it’s not clear to me that 9/11 is the most visceral.
I do think part of the problem here is ‘reference class tennis’, where you can draw boundaries in different ways to get different conclusions, and it’s not quite clear which boundaries are the most predictive.
As I understand Eliezer’s point in that section, Paul’s model seems to predict there won’t be discontinuities in the input/output response, but we have lots of examples of that sort of thing. Two years before the 9/11 attacks, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the ocean by its first officer with 217 fatalities, about 10% of the 9/11 fatalities, and yet the response to Flight 990 was much, much less than 10% of the response to 9/11.
Before orchestrating the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the same person orchestrated the assassination of King Alexander Obrenović and others in 1901, which did not lead to a war 10% the size of WWI (just sanctions and withdrawn ambassadors).
Separately, there’s the question of how much you should expect there to be trend-breaking events. If you’re working with just data collected up until 2000, I think you’ll be surprised by 2001; the number of fatalities is far outside of distribution (the recent plane crashes primarily killed passengers, you have to go back to WWII to get kamikaze attacks that kill more people on the ground than passengers, and even then the average number of casualties per suicide was 2, with the highest I can find being 389), and there isn’t a trendline suggesting a huge increase is coming.
I think you’ll be surprised by 2001; the number of fatalities is far outside of distribution
Good point. I think I had overstated the extent to which terrorism had been a frequent occurance. 9/11 is indeed the deadliest terrorist attack ever recorded (I didn’t realize that few other attacks even came close).
However, I do want to push back against the idea that this event was totally unprecedented. The comparison to other “terrorist attacks” is, as you hint at, a bit of a game of reference class tennis. When compared to other battles, air raids, and massacres, Wikipedia notes that there have been several dozen that compare in the context of war. But of course, the United States did not see itself in an active state of war at the time.
The closest comparison is probably the attack on Pearl Harbor, in which a comparable number of people died. But that attack was orchestrated by an industrializing state, not an insurgent terrorist group.
I do think part of the problem here is ‘reference class tennis’, where you can draw boundaries in different ways to get different conclusions, and it’s not quite clear which boundaries are the most predictive.
As I understand Eliezer’s point in that section, Paul’s model seems to predict there won’t be discontinuities in the input/output response, but we have lots of examples of that sort of thing. Two years before the 9/11 attacks, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the ocean by its first officer with 217 fatalities, about 10% of the 9/11 fatalities, and yet the response to Flight 990 was much, much less than 10% of the response to 9/11.
Before orchestrating the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the same person orchestrated the assassination of King Alexander Obrenović and others in 1901, which did not lead to a war 10% the size of WWI (just sanctions and withdrawn ambassadors).
Separately, there’s the question of how much you should expect there to be trend-breaking events. If you’re working with just data collected up until 2000, I think you’ll be surprised by 2001; the number of fatalities is far outside of distribution (the recent plane crashes primarily killed passengers, you have to go back to WWII to get kamikaze attacks that kill more people on the ground than passengers, and even then the average number of casualties per suicide was 2, with the highest I can find being 389), and there isn’t a trendline suggesting a huge increase is coming.
Good point. I think I had overstated the extent to which terrorism had been a frequent occurance. 9/11 is indeed the deadliest terrorist attack ever recorded (I didn’t realize that few other attacks even came close).
However, I do want to push back against the idea that this event was totally unprecedented. The comparison to other “terrorist attacks” is, as you hint at, a bit of a game of reference class tennis. When compared to other battles, air raids, and massacres, Wikipedia notes that there have been several dozen that compare in the context of war. But of course, the United States did not see itself in an active state of war at the time.
The closest comparison is probably the attack on Pearl Harbor, in which a comparable number of people died. But that attack was orchestrated by an industrializing state, not an insurgent terrorist group.