>Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause.
I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.
It is important to recognize the order of magnitude of the probability of the risk. At CERN they don't publicize that there is a long-tail risk of causing the destruction of the world because the probability, though non-zero, is exceedingly tiny (and people freak out, unable to think about tiny probabilities.)
>terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.
I believe terrorism generally creates more terrorism, so the limit you suggest would be amplified by the ability of terrorists to create more terrorists. However, I would interested in seeing some hard stats on this.
I guess the relevant end-state here is civil war. For which the historical upper bounds are pretty high indeed, like 50%. (Unless you've defined terrorism so narrowly that it only counts if it's directly ordered from a different continent, or something.)
> I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.
The limit is not “natural”. The limit is at least partially because we are excessively vigilant about terrorism, and put measures, effective and ineffective, in place to anticipate and prevent terrorism. The far reaching and extensive nature of those measures is a result of the same risk calculus that I describe here, and is a manifestation of the same phenomenon that the research linked here found.
If a terrorist acquires a nuclear weapon and detonates it in NYC, what happens to the death rate? The point about tail risk is that probabilities that seem rare, aren't as rare and defined as you'd hope.
A gun style nuclear bomb isn't that complicated. If terrorists were able to get enriched uranium, then they could probably make one. If there were no counter-terrorism efforts at all, then there is a reasonable chance that they would be able to get enriched uranium.
I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.
It is important to recognize the order of magnitude of the probability of the risk. At CERN they don't publicize that there is a long-tail risk of causing the destruction of the world because the probability, though non-zero, is exceedingly tiny (and people freak out, unable to think about tiny probabilities.)