Another Pinker statistical fallacy, which can teach students how NOT to look at risks and mix random variables of different tail properties, or confuse types of estimators. This afternoon, to kill time on a long flight I decided to look for scientistojournalistic fallacies so I went to Steven Pinker’s twitter account. I immediately found one there. Heuristic: go to Pinker. He promotes there a WSJ article to the effect that “Terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders”; the article was written by a war correspondant, Ted Koppel and is very similar to his Angels thesis.
Now let’s try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.
A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy. They are subjected to strong bounds, etc. It is “impossible” to have, say, >1% of a country’s population dying from falls from ladders the same year. The chances are less than 1 in several trillion trillion trillion years. Hence a journalistic statement about risk converges to the scientific statement.
B- Terrorism is fat tailed. Your estimation from past data has monstrous errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One biological event can decimate the population.May be “reasonable” to claim that terrorism is overhyped, that our liberty is more valuable, etc. I believe so. But the comparison here is a fallacy and sloppy thinking is dangerous. Worse, Koppel compares terrorism today to terrorism 100 years ago when a terrorist could inflict very limited harm.

via Another Pinker statistical fallacy, which can… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.