Comment by mlyle
20 hours ago
Here's the options:
- You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case.
- You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off.
- You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.
This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.
Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities
If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.
I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).
I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...
What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.
I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.
Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.
The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
I think godelski is being far too permissive in his odds. As he says, we need to examine how (un)likely is it that somebody is trying to execute this terrorist action, including being competent enough to create a workable bomb, to sneak it through security, and so forth. That's all his numbers show.
But we've also got to factor in
A) How likely is it that this bomb is going to have some bluetooth component? It seems like needless complexity, so we should weigh strongly against this. Further, it's less likely that our hypothetical terrorist needs to have expertise in this domain as well.
B) How likely is it that he would clearly paint the word "BOMB" on the side of his device (figuratively, of course, since this is digital)? That's amazing levels of stupidity. And then intersect that with the claim that he's competent in all the other things (bomb making, sneaking through security, making a bluetooth trigger for his bomb) but is so incredibly stupid that he'd label it a bomb.
Factoring all of this in, godelski is being far too generous in assessing this with odds similar to finding the winning Powerball ticket outside the front door while simultaneously being hit by lightning.
I acknowledge that the airline captain has some responsibility for our security. But part of this responsibility is being a steward for our overall well-being. And in this case, the "security" aspect is so vastly overwhelmed by the damage it did to passengers in other ways, that it was obviously a bad call on the captain's part.
Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics.
Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things.
Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
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Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.
I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.
I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
We're not just talking things labeled "bomb" here. TFA has a very different example that's not so easily arguable as that.
Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect.
For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt.
Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.
What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today?
Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money
As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.
That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training.
And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.