Something reminded me of this thread, causing me to re-browse it. Having done that, I can't resist the temptation to post a few remarks.
1) The correct answer to Craven's question was "zero". Nobody died of a terrorist attack in the continental US between the spring of 2003 and the spring of 2004.
2) While the median voter in this poll gave the correct answer ("0-10"), the average vote estimated the death toll at 373 victims, which turns out to be 373 too many.
3) Clary had commented in autumn 2004 that there might be an attack in London, and that her son was very nonchalant about the risk, given how many Londoners there were to attack. Indeed there was such an attack in July 2005, killing 56 people. And Clary's son was confirmed in his nonchalance: The risk of the average Londoner of being killed in that attack was about 1:142,000. And I trust he was not among them.
4) What reminded me of this thread is that I'm currently re-reading Allan Paulos' wonderful book
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its consequences (1988). Here is a paragraph from the introduction to this book, trying to convince the readers that innumeracy is a problem worth their attention:
Allan Paulos wrote:If you don't have some feeling for probabilities, automobile accidents might seem like a relatively minor problem of local travel, whereas being killed by terrorists might seem to be a major risk when going overseas. As often observed, however, the 45,000 people killed annually on American roads are approximately equal in number to all American dead in the Vietnam War. On the other hand, the seventeen Americans killed by terrorists in 1985 were among the 28 million of us who traveled abroad that year -- that's one chance in 1.6 million of becoming a victim. Compare that with these annual rates in the United States: "one chance in 68,000 of choking to death, one chance in 75,000 of dying in a bicycle crash, one chance in 20,000 of drowning, one chance in 5,000 of dying in a car crash."
The point Paulos makes here is 17 years old, but it has aged well: Even after 9/11, Madrid, and London, terrorism remains petty cash in the currency of deadly risks. There is no reason at all to sacrifice our civil rights to the prevention of that risk. And don't get me started about sacrificing them to the unverifiable
promise of preventing that risk There is no reason at all to do any of that, except electorates with large majorities of innumerate people, and governments who take advantage of their innumeracy.
