Terrorism, Tylenol, and dangerous information

Upvoted for being an important idea, but I actually disagree with the advice. The relationship of ideas to action is exceedingly complex, and I strongly doubt (but do not know how to test) that the idea simply hadn't occurred to someone who wanted attention through harm.

I find it much more likely that there's a large uncertainty in the effectiveness (in terms of attention to be had) of uncommon attacks, and when it's not already in the public eye, it's known but not considered as a reasonable mechanism. Much like cryogenics is weird and uncertain, even for people who would like to be revived, poisoning medicine (dangerous idea: why only medicine, not other foods?) was weird and uncertain until it had been shown to work.

I suspect the dangerous information is that it has succeeded at least once, and gotten a lot of press attention. This information is much harder (and less desirable) to suppress.

In the software world, ideas are rampant and cheap. Execution of the correct idea is the path to success. I expect it's similar as a terrorist, except there are way fewer people to help you choose, refine, and change your ideas, so you only get one shot (as it were).

I also note a similarity to the disclosure debate about computer vulnerabilities - there's a tension between publishing so that potential victims can protect themselves or watch for attacks vs keeping quiet so vendors can fix underlying bugs before very many attackers know of it. There are a LOT of factors that go into these decisions, it's not as simple as "don't spread harmful information".

Another example, which I don't know if it supports my position or yours: Tom Clancy published Debt of Honor in 1994, which included a near-decapitation of the US government by a pilot-turned-terrorist flying his 747 into the capital building. Only 7 years later, real-life terrorists did something very similar. We immediately instituted systems to prevent repeats (and a bunch of systems that added irritation and did not protect anything), and there have been no copycats for 17 years.

There seems to have been vehicle attacks before the recent ones, they just didn't get widespread press coverage as "terrorism", such as the one in 2006, or the guy with the Killdozer: http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heemeyer.html

As usual, Wikipedia has a list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack

This reminds me of my favorite TV show Survivor. There are a number of reasons why it's great, but one aspect that is so fun to watch is seeing someone come up with a new strategy or tactic and then seeing how it immediately gets adopted in the later seasons. One of the most intellectual players, Yau-Man Chan, had the idea to create a fake immunity idol. Now it is standard to save pieces from things to try to make one. Russell Hantz started looking for hidden idols before clues to them were even found. That's become standard too and new strategies and counter-strategies keep being invented and you can see how fast memes take off in the show. From sanitation to eating Tide Pods, memes are powerful.

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.

One practical way to deal with it is to write any discussion pertaining to those matter in the language that's academic enough that the kind of people who can't think on their own won't follow your writing.

That method is generally used quite successfully by academics to prevent certain papers to be read by a broader public.

Someone actually did try a 9/11 style attack back in the 1970s. A man named Samuel Byck tried to hijack a passenger jet with the goal of crashing it into the White House and assassinating President Nixon, but instead of hijacking a plane in flight, he boarded one by force and demanded that it take off - which did not happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Byck

I'm actually somewhat worried that this post is still a bit dangerous (I guess my cruxes being 1) an assumption that, since _I_ hadn't heard of the truck strategy, there's still a lot of room for more people to hear about it, 2) an assumption that if this post were to become reasonably linked to (which it seems memetically fit enough to probably achieve), it has a nontrivial chance of getting noticed by the wrong person both due to direct-linkage and general google search.

This does seem like the minimum-viable version of this post that gives any examples though, and not sure if the previous incarnations of it (that had literally zero examples as far as I remember) were memetically fit enough to do their job anyhow. Shrug?

I wonder if, instead of trying to suppress ideas (which is almost impossible), we should instead try to drown effective ideas in less-effective ones. Publish TONS of ideas, the vast majority are less likely to "work" than tried-and-true techniques.

"If you REALLY want to make a splash, attacking a police station with a plastic fork is definitely the way! You're almost guaranteed lots of reporting and press just for the attempt."

While the late 19th and early 20th century anarchist attackers often wanted to target the well-off (and indeed carried out many assassination attempts in service of this goal), they weren't averse to making indiscriminate attacks as long as the target was vaguely upclass - consider the Cafe Terminus attack or the Galleanist Wall Street bombing, which were indiscriminate in nature.

Similarly, the anarchist doctrine of "propaganda of the deed" held that attacks would break down the state's monopoly on violence and show the people that revolution was possible, and as such the attacks were valuable simply as demonstrations, even if they did not kill their intended targets; the 1919 Galleanist bombings, while notionally assassination attempts against various powerful figures, killed only a night watchman and blew a servant's hands off, but were still considered blows struck for anarchy.

My sense is that Galleani and his followers would have been quite happy to crash vehicles into crowds of people, especially in financial or government districts, but they didn't much realize it was an option.

Interesting post, and I'm sure "not having thought of it" helps explain the recency of vehicular attacks (though see the comment from /r/CronoDAS questioning the premise that they are as recent as they may seem).

Another factor: Other attractive methods, previously easy, are now harder--lowering the opportunity cost of a vehicular attack. For example, increased surveillance has made carefully coordinated attacks harder. And perhaps stricter regulations have made it harder to obtain bomb-making materials or disease agents.

This also helps to explain apparent geographical distribution of vehicle attacks: more common in Europe and Canada than the United States, especially per capita. Alternative ways to kill many people, like with a gun, are much easier in the US.

Yet another explanation: Perhaps terrorist behavior doesn't appear to maximize damage or terror is that much terrorism is not intended to do so. My favorite piece arguing this is from Gwern:

• Terrorism is not about Terror
• Gwern's 2009 LessWrong post on this topic [LW · GW]

While I have no definitive proof of this, it would seem to me that there has actually been advancement in the area automobiles that have increased their lethality. Mainly more powerful and efficient engines, and other such refinements in design which make them more robust, easier to use, and handle better increasing their utility as a weapon. I realize this is a bit vague, I am not an engineer, but it would seem to me that if I had to choose between a truck produced in the first half of the 20th century or a modern model, the former would likely not be my first choice for a vehicular assault. Of course this is not say that the changes are prohibitive for their use just that it seems to me that there probably has been some relevant changes.

Secondly, I am not sure the actual problem is simply the idea. Take the case of tampering with medication. You point out that regulations were put in place afterwards that made it harder to tamper with medication. However this makes it seem that the subsequent lack of tampering cases may be linked to this, when it is more likely that the first case was simply an outlier. In the past, especially in america, there has been a long history of completely unregulated drug markets, and dubious cures sold out of the back of carts. Many products such as soda often started out as questionable curealls. For instance coca cola was made with actual coca (the plant cocaine alkaloids are derived from) and sold as a cure for headaches. Other drug-laced, or even mildly toxic products were often sold to the public in great quantities. As such there have been many times that anyone with the will to tamper with medications and trick people into consuming poisons has always been possible. In fact it has been quite easy. This holds true not just for medications, but for many consumables that change hands several times on the way to the consumer.

I think the limiting factor here is not the idea, nor the accessibility of means to inflict harm, but instead the lack of will to kill indiscriminately on the part of most humans. Even during wars I have read it is common for most soldiers to deliberately miss the enemy (Dave Grossman's On Killing, although I think some of the claims in that book may have been called into question by more recent research). I would guess it is the case that most of these attacks are unified more by the fact that they were committed spur of the moment by individuals with rare combinations of mental traits and social environments. It is the rarity of such people, with whom the idea enables which is crucial. Further I would say that the idea doesn't cause these people to act violently, it instead adds to their repertoire of possible violent actions, from which they would likely choose either way.

Of course, that is not to say that meme transmission has little to do with the expressions of violence, it is of course of utmost importance in shaping most of our behavior, I simply do not really believe it is the factor of importance in this case.

Finally I just want to say that it strikes me that the idea of "dangerous information" is similar to the idea of computer security by obfuscation. The problem with "security by obfuscation" is that it often also impedes solutions to various attacks, it only works if your opponent has no way of guessing as to how to defeat your security. If I recall correctly that was the justification of releasing the genetic sequence from the research on what mutations could cause the avian flu virus to go airborne. While it is also true that this could enable someone to induce the same change into flu virus, it was judged more important for the scientific community to understand the genetics of pathology. Even if it wasn't released, it would not have taken much for any similarly equipped bio-weapons research lab to turn out the same result. Creating just as much, if not more, danger than public release. As such I tend not to agree with trying to withhold information, unless it can be reasonably established that the information is oddly asymmetric in it's cost and dangers (If some mad genius figures out how to macguyver a nuke out of chewing gum, baking soda, and bits of string, that would certainly be worth keeping secret.)

Well anyways sorry for the longwinded rambling post, just my two pence.

This seems to me analogous to keeping a good startup idea under wraps, but for the case of disutility.

However, violence in general and warfare in particular are more controlled subjects of expertise than anything commercial. It would be much more difficult to quietly gather information to check your suspicions, consult experts, etc. In many cases steps taken to verify whether you have a dangerous idea could be considered a crime.

Fortunately, people in general are powerfully unlikely to do anything to cause a lot of harm on purpose, so we lose very little by keeping this kind of thing to ourselves.

Further, I would generally say that the types of people who make attacks are cunning but unimaginative.

Why? Up until this point I thought the crux of your argument was that people would commit an attack are generally unintelligent. Why would they have cunning specifically but no imagination?

X-risks are one cause area where "raising awareness" is probably a bad idea.

Extremely low amount of deaths is due to terrorist attacks (https://i.redd.it/5sq16d2moso01.gif, https://owenshen24.github.io/charting-death/), so this is not important, and people should care about such things less.