which is that the number of people killed by terrorists is much more variable than the number of people killed by lightning.
High or low variation does not mean easy or hard to control. Estimates of the cost of the War on Terror since 9/11 are going to be upwards of $6 trillion at this point. That's a lot of money.
How much would it cost to install a few million more lightning rods? Install giant wires to draw lightning strikes? Develop a mandatory early warning system tied into all smartphones' GPSes to warn people? Researching better medical treatments to deal with the long-term cognitive & psychological damage? Banning kites and taxing umbrellas? Subsidizing cardiac arrest kits? Relocating millions of people to less lightning-strike-prone regions?
(None of this sounds more costly or intrusive than spending $6t+, requiring millions of travelers to shed shoes annually for decades, invading multiple countries and creating millions of refugees, maintaining continuous drone strikes on multiple continents, running a global network of torture sites, etc etc etc.)
Since lightning strikes are almost completely uncorrelated random events, the distribution of deaths by lightning is governed by the Central Limit Theorem and so is nearly Gaussian.
True (perhaps), yet almost completely irrelevant to the question of how to allocate resources.
I entirely agree with you about what a calamity the war on terror has been (heres a comment I wrote a while back suggesting that the negative impact of the WoT might be about as big in magnitude as the positive impact of the tech revolution).
I was just observing that there is a meaningful statistical difference between the two types of events and therefore it isn't wildly irrational to be more concerned with one type than the other, even if a naive expected loss calculation suggests the opposite.
Chris Nolan's Joker is a very clever guy, almost Monroesque in his ability to identify hypocrisy and inconsistency. One of his most interesting scenes in the film has him point out how people estimate horrible things differently depending on whether they're part of what's "normal", what's "expected", rather than on how inherently horrifying they are, or how many people are involved.
Soon people extrapolated this observation to other such apparent inconsistencies in human judgment, where a behaviour that once was acceptable, with a simple tweak or change in context, becomes the subject of a much more serious reaction.
I think there's rationalist merit in giving these inconsistencies a serious look. I intuit that there's some sort of underlying pattern to them, something that makes psychological sense, in the roundabout way that most irrational things do. I think that much good could come out of figuring out what that root cause is, and how to predict this effect and manage it.
Phenomena that come to mind, are, for instance, from an Effective Altruism point of view, the expenses incurred in counter-terrorism (including some wars that were very expensive in treasure and lives), and the number of lives said expenses save, compared with the number of lives that could be saved by spending that same amount into improving road safety, increasing public helathcare expense where it would do the most good, building better lightning rods (in the USA you're four times more likely to be struck by thunder than by terrorists), or legalizing drugs.
What do y'all think? Why do people have their priorities all jumbled-up? How can we predict these effects? How can we work around them?