Terrorist baby down the well: a look at institutional forces

Seems like politicians are willing to invest in prevention if the prevention is fighting against a human enemy, because then it moves from the "prevention" category to the "war" category.

War against terrorism = soldiers go and kill some foreigners. War against drugs = policemen go and kill some dealers, or arrest some users.

War against flood = ???. Not gonna happen.

And probably the "prevention" aspect is completely irrelevant. You can get votes for being tough on drugs or terrorism, even if your policies do not in fact reduce drug usage or terrorism. The war itself is the product you sell; prevention is just an excuse.

If people would believe that Flood Fairy exists and causes flood, you could get some points as a politician for assembling a special team of super fighters to kill the Flood Fairy. That would be exciting. Other ways of preventing floods are boring.

The average voter does not care about rationality, only about killing.

"Governments overreact to the threat of terrorism" is an overly charitable way of describing it. It's like describing DRM as "software companies overreacting to the threat of piracy". No, it's not. Most of their motive for DRM is other things, such as preventing sales of used product. Piracy is just the official excuse; it's not their real reason.

Governments don't "overreact to terrorism". Governments seize power and divert money to the politically well-connected. Terrorism is just how they justify it to the public.

You may as well claim that Russia in Crimea is "overreacting to the threat of Nazis in Ukraine".

When we talk about prevention in health care we are talking about doing something about the root course.

In terms of terrorism that's having a foreign policy that doesn't make citizens of other countries want to bomb your country and having internal politics that no secession movement wants to bomb your country.

And both these facts are true. But... they contradict each other.

No. If you have to invest into strong security that's a sign that you didn't do anything to prevent the threat from arising in the first place.

One is about a lack of prevention, the other about an excess of prevention. And there are more examples of excessive prevention: the war on drugs

The war on drugs doesn't prevent anything. Decriminalization in Portugal didn't increase the amount of drug use. The war of drugs is about punishing people who take drugs or deal drugs, it's not about prevention at all.

There's not enough money spent to prevent the social conditions that lead to drug use.

Humans overestimate risks of hostile action, and underestimate risks of natural phenomena. The base rate of terrorism is tiny compared to that of natural disasters. So yes, we deploy excessive preparation in one case and insufficient preparation in the other.

Another is to note that some forms of preparation work against both natural and artificial disasters. For instance, emergency medical training is useful in treating people who've been injured by a terrorist bomb or an earthquake.

And both these facts are true. But... they contradict each other.

No, they don't. First, people and institutions are different. Second, institutions have their sets of incentives (not necessarily coherent) which you must take into account when analysing their behaviour. In particular, the reasons they do things and the reasons they say they do things are often different.

For example, I tend to see the war on terror (as well as the war on drugs, by the way) as a government's way of extending and solidifying its control of the population.

I made a related argument recently:

A theory that doesn’t account for detailed behavior is an approximation, and even in scientific domains, you can find conflicting approximations. When that happens—and if you’re not doing science, it’s “when,” not “if”—if you want to keep using your approximation, you have to use the details of the situation to explain why your approximation is valid. Your best defense against reductio ad absurdum, against Proving Too Much, is casuistry. Expect things to be complex, expect details to matter. Don’t ascribe intention or agency to abstract concepts and institutions. Look for chains of cause and effect. Look at individual moving parts and the forces acting on them. Make empirical predictions, and look for unintended empirical predictions. Ask what the opposite principle explains, and find the details that make those explanations compatible.

A penny of prevention could be worth a pound of cure, but that doesn't actually mean it's worth it to prevent unless the prevention lowers the chances of the adverse event by at least an absolute probability of (1 penny / 1 pound).

People are more afraid of things which could kill anyone at any time.

point to any particular natural disaster and the majority of people can either say that you'll see it coming hours, days or weeks in advance or the majority are not subject to risk of that disaster.

Terrorism on the other hand could technically strike anyone, at any time.

people also give a weighting to human actions. if 1 person per day in a big city is killed in road accidents that's no big deal. if one utterly random person a day is shot by a sniper the whole city will shut down.

Seems like a special case of facts being invertible. Generalize carefully.

In a second best sort of way, we don't spend too much on terrorism prevention if there are strong political forces that compel politicians to overreact to successful terrorist attacks.

It seems like the War on Terror, etc, are not actually about prevention, but about "cures".

Some drug addiction epidemic or terrorist attack happens. Instead of it being treated as an isolated disaster like a flood, which we should (but don't) invest in preventing in the future, it gets described as an ongoing War which we need to win. This puts it firmly in the "ongoing disaster we need to cure" camp, and so cost is no object.

I wonder if the reason there appears to be a contradiction is just that some policy-makers take prevention-type measures and create a framing of "ongoing disaster" around it, to make it look like a cure (and also to get it done).