Terrorists are hampered by biases as much as the rest of us. In a Wired commentary "The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail" Bruce Schneier discusses the interesting findings of Max Abrams in his paper
You wrote: "This is bad news for terrorism as an effective coercive means to political or social ends.".
But that is true only for the political or social end of persuading your enemies to change their policies. This is probably not the political or social end that most terrorists are trying to accomplish, and there is reason to believe that terrorism is a very effective means to other ends.
I don't think people underestimate the odds of being killed by terrorism. As far as I know, the subjective risk literature is pretty unanimous in pointing out that subjective risk tends to be overestimated for improbable but dramatic events, especially if there is an element of moral outrage involved. Maybe some people or nations think they are at less risk than they are and trust their governments to be effective, but it doesn't seem to fit the UK and the US at least.
BTW, I found this interesting paper when responding:http://www.econ.ku.dk/Event...I havent gone into it much, but it seems to be pretty relevant for this blog: how should public policy reflect risk perceptions, when these may be biased?
Anders, the odds of any one person being killed in a terrorist attack in their lifetime is very low. The bias literature indicates that most people would tend to *under*estimate even these very low odds. Add to this that people would tend to *over*estimate the odds of the government preventing future terrorist attacks, and I would predict that on average we individually feel our lives are quite safe from terrorism. (see, e.g., http://www.sciencedaily.com...
If so, terrorists just don't kill enough civilians often enough to raise the odds of being killed to a worrisome prospect. There's no need to change policy when on average we don't feel threatened. This seems a simpler explanation for why we don't bargain with terrorists.
Michael Vassar, the first to actually coin the term "terrorism" were French revolutionaries carrying out the "Reign of Terror" in reference to themselves. I agree that the non-state actor and "propaganda of the deed" stem from 19th century anarchists.
Anders Sandberg, John Robb claims that today's "global guerrillas" using "open source warfare" in a "bazaar of violence" intentionally try to hollow-out a state and cause system dysfunction without actually completely collapsing the state or replacing it. I think he greatly exaggerates all this. Oddly enough (given its name), the somewhat related blog Coming Anarchy has a more optimistic take on the ability of state actors (with the Victorian era empires as a model) to deal with this issue.
Anders,I understand that you think that you think (not a typing repitition error) that people are motivated by their stated goals more often than your academic peers do, and perhaps than the general population does.
Beyond that, I hope you share an interest in me in what the best empirical data can tell us on this topic, even if it contradicts one or both of our intuitions.
In general, the economic methodology is to assume self-interested behavior, where a person's interests can be to some degree inferred by their accomplishments so far, especially if those accomplishments are difficult. This approach may not always match reality, but it seems to frequently be fruitful.
It is noticeable that none of the terrorist groups discussed in Abrahms list have general anarchy as a goal. Overall, subverting society and ushering in an era of chaos (that will lead to utopia, of course) doesn't seem to be very popular these days. Maybe because it was so obvious that this maximalist goal completely failed. Most terrorist groups probably have a hard time telling exactly how well they are doing.
Hopefully Anonymous: I think you are reading far too much into my intentions. I think intentions can be viewed as a vector sum of goals, where some goals are publicly stated and some aren't. Assuming that the main goals are usually unstated (or stated) would constitute an individual or cultural bias (I don't think there is any human universal in this). Even trying to fix these priors with historical data will be contentious, leaving people disagreeing about who is really biased. I tend to think that in my community of western intellectuals people are biased towards overestimating the impact of hidden goals and underestimating the impact of overt goals, and no doubt they think I'm naive and biased in the opposite way.
I believe that late 19th century anarchists were among the earliest terrorists in the modern sense, and that human rights abuses and cabinet failures were high among their explicit goals.
The "war for oil" argument never made sense to me because we were getting more oil from iraq before the invasion than after, and at much cheaper prices. I think think it gives too much credit for the actual architects of the war. Oddly enough, the one place I found that offers this sort of sensible (since I agree with it, of course!) view is this column by Michael Neumann at CounterPunch.
The ultimate goal of most organizations with a military wing is rarely to kill a bunch of people, but I think that often does become a sort of operating goal. I think a lot of people joined the army after 9/11 because they were angry and wanted to kill a bunch of ragheads, and a lot of people join al Qaeda because they are angry and want to kill a bunch of Americans. The actual leaders of al Qaeda proper have tried to prevent the franchise in Iraq from turning it into a Sunni-Shia war, but that's a sensible approach, and not want the enthusiastic recruits on the ground wanted. There is a satisfaction to be gotten from seeing your enemies get taken down a notch, even if it doesn't accomplish anything, like when the football team you're rooting for sacks the other quarterback even if a flag on the play makes it meaningless (I actually don't really watch football much and don't know how good of an example that is).
Anders,You wrote:"There can certainly be benefits in engaging in a conflict that have little to do with the stated goals, for example increased domestic cohesion. But while these benefits might be a motivator to engage their role would plausibly be overstated by outside observers in analogy with the intention inference. This seems related to conspiracy theory or cynism: rather than believe stated goals one assumes the real goals to be hidden, domestic or directly self-serving. We have been seeing a ridiculous amount of this kind of explanations of recent US interventions in the Middle East. While oil, cohesion or Haliburton profits might be motivating, it seems excessive to assume (as many people I have talked with do) that one or more of these constitute the main motivation, at least without further evidence.
I have noted that in general reasonably well-educated westerners these days have a hard time accepting a stated reason for *any* historical war. The sophisticated thing to do these days is to assume self-serving interest among the players, not that they actually believed in what they were claiming. But this may often be our bias in evaluating intentions combined with the illusion of transparency (as well as signalling being an unafraid and honest person attacking hypocricy) rather than an unbiased judgement. One sign of this is how we tend to not look for any hidden agendas when the war had an obvious and stated self-serving goal."
Whether or not something is the sophisticated thing to do doesn't bear on whether it's an accurate explanation for a phenomenon. And a theory that a domestic agent makes foreign policy decisions (including performing conflict) to maximize domestic political outcomes is different in kind than a theory that a domestic agent makes these decisions to maximize on oil or haliburton profits. For one thing, domestic political agents are rewarded and punished with domestic political success and failure, so I think the useful analytical starting point may be to see the degree to which their primary motivations are domestic political success.
To say "This seems related to conspiracy theory or cynism: rather than believe stated goals one assumes the real goals to be hidden, domestic or directly self-serving." but I'm not sure the relevance of this point. I think the reasonable option is that a goal is either stated or that it's unstated. Are your using the words "conspiracy theory", "cynism", and "hidden" pejoratively? If so, why?
Probably sometimes, in some cases, an individual or organization will have stated goals which match actual goals. Probably sometimes, in some cases, an individual or organization will have unstated goals which don't match stated goals. Sometimes these unstated goals may be internally transparent to the individual or organization (definitional real conspiracy), and sometimes these unstated goals may not be internally transparent to the individual or organization (incomplete self-knowledge of internal motivations). How actual vs. stated goals and internal transparency sort out seem to me to be investigative questions, and regardless of what is "sophisticated" to do, or what is the Anders Sandberg thing to do, I think we should retain some space from analytical flexibility rather than cast any one of these analytical reference points pejoratively.
For example, you identified a potential bias at play in automatically assuming every agent is engaging in self-serving interest. I think there is another potential bias at play in assuming an agent's externally (or even internally) stated goals are their actual goals, particularly if as the observer one may also be vested in believing that those are their goals.
That you seem to uncritically sort organizational agents into the categories of "governments" and "terrorists" indicates to me that your analysis might be rooted more in conventional representational pageantry than a search for the best models of these social phenomena. The approach seems to be "I represent the western archetype, helping to protect the west from Bin Laden, a representative of the radical islamic terrorist archetype" -thus you may yourself be vested a bit in the representational privilege that this construct confers, and may have more difficulty analyzing it in terms of conferring such privilege to certain global subpopulations and not others. I'm bring this up not as an ad hominem, but as an indication of one reason why a preference to believe a party's stated goals (internally transparent or not) match their actual goals may exist -one may consider onesself to be a stakeholder in representational privilege on the opposite end of a performed conflict with that other party, where the representational privilege would lose salience if it was transparent that both parties were performing the conflict primarily to benefit from such representational privilege (regardless of whether they where internally transparent about that being the primary motivator or not).
Sorry if this isn't clearly organized, but I trust you at least Anders are bright enough to parse through this morning jumble.
Anders, I was merely pointing to some of the effects of terrorism, I did not state whether or not these effects were intentional or not on part of the current set of terrorists (or their sponsors/political leaders/religious leaders/ect.). Whether or not these consequences are intentional or not, we do observe them, and that is my main concern.
If one was in fact interested in undermining human rights and political stability in a Western country, judging by these papers, terrorism is one of means to achieve this end that seems to work. No matter what the current set of terrorists wants, this is not good news.
I don't think correspondent inference theory says we are incapable of seeing things from the other's perspective, it just says that we tend to be biased or make mis-judgements about it. My initial reaction to a suicide bomber might be a horrified thought that he was an evil person seeking the deaths of innocents. A bit of reflection might suggest other goals, but that initial evaluation will likely bias my thinking anyway. If I am upset enough I might just discount all other goals, and state that given the evil perpetrated they don't matter at all. In less emotionally charged situations seeing the other's perspective may be much easier.
Biases are troublesome because they are invisible to us. We discount or misunderstand the real goals of others, then act on this biased information - and the other person will then discount or misunderstand our already biased intentions. Even a small bias might set up a feedback that neither of us wants.
I like the idea in some situations of using consequences to infer intentions, but in the case of terrorism, I don't think that anyone who hears about a suicide bombing would conclude that their sole intention was to harm people. I seriously doubt that most people would think that the primary motivation of a terrorist would be to cause horrific deaths.
Most people, I would think, recognize that there are other primary goals and that the terrorists attempt to use violent acts as a means to achieve their goals.
From our perspective, it seems inefficient and irrational for them to continue, but clearly they must see things differently. Another possible explanation for the tendency of people to not see terrorist acts as related to their stated intetntions is that we simply have trouble comprehending how the acts are related to their stated intentions. From our perspective, it just doesn't make sense. It seems unlikely that they share our conclusions regarding their methods.
Attempting to see from their perspective is undeniable evidence that we rise above drawing conclusions from consequences alone and our thoughts are not consistent with this theory. In fact, I believe that from a young age we are taught to try to see from another person's perspective before coming to conclusions.
Tell me if it seems I misunerstood correspondent interference theory, but it seems to imply that we are not capable of incorporating prior/outside information and attempting to see from another's perspective.
The sophisticated thing to do these days is to assume self-serving interest among the players, not that they actually believed in what they were claiming.
That's the fashionable thing to do in all walks of life nowadays. It started in politics and economics, and now it's spread.
Coincidentally I just happened upon this article, which is quite relevant and authoritative:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_cul...
You wrote: "This is bad news for terrorism as an effective coercive means to political or social ends.".
But that is true only for the political or social end of persuading your enemies to change their policies. This is probably not the political or social end that most terrorists are trying to accomplish, and there is reason to believe that terrorism is a very effective means to other ends.
I don't think people underestimate the odds of being killed by terrorism. As far as I know, the subjective risk literature is pretty unanimous in pointing out that subjective risk tends to be overestimated for improbable but dramatic events, especially if there is an element of moral outrage involved. Maybe some people or nations think they are at less risk than they are and trust their governments to be effective, but it doesn't seem to fit the UK and the US at least.
BTW, I found this interesting paper when responding:http://www.econ.ku.dk/Event...I havent gone into it much, but it seems to be pretty relevant for this blog: how should public policy reflect risk perceptions, when these may be biased?
Anders, the odds of any one person being killed in a terrorist attack in their lifetime is very low. The bias literature indicates that most people would tend to *under*estimate even these very low odds. Add to this that people would tend to *over*estimate the odds of the government preventing future terrorist attacks, and I would predict that on average we individually feel our lives are quite safe from terrorism. (see, e.g., http://www.sciencedaily.com...
If so, terrorists just don't kill enough civilians often enough to raise the odds of being killed to a worrisome prospect. There's no need to change policy when on average we don't feel threatened. This seems a simpler explanation for why we don't bargain with terrorists.
Michael Vassar, the first to actually coin the term "terrorism" were French revolutionaries carrying out the "Reign of Terror" in reference to themselves. I agree that the non-state actor and "propaganda of the deed" stem from 19th century anarchists.
Anders Sandberg, John Robb claims that today's "global guerrillas" using "open source warfare" in a "bazaar of violence" intentionally try to hollow-out a state and cause system dysfunction without actually completely collapsing the state or replacing it. I think he greatly exaggerates all this. Oddly enough (given its name), the somewhat related blog Coming Anarchy has a more optimistic take on the ability of state actors (with the Victorian era empires as a model) to deal with this issue.
"an interest in me" should read "an interest with me".
Anders,I understand that you think that you think (not a typing repitition error) that people are motivated by their stated goals more often than your academic peers do, and perhaps than the general population does.
Beyond that, I hope you share an interest in me in what the best empirical data can tell us on this topic, even if it contradicts one or both of our intuitions.
Evidence for self-serving war-making by US presidents
http://www.marginalrevoluti...
In general, the economic methodology is to assume self-interested behavior, where a person's interests can be to some degree inferred by their accomplishments so far, especially if those accomplishments are difficult. This approach may not always match reality, but it seems to frequently be fruitful.
It is noticeable that none of the terrorist groups discussed in Abrahms list have general anarchy as a goal. Overall, subverting society and ushering in an era of chaos (that will lead to utopia, of course) doesn't seem to be very popular these days. Maybe because it was so obvious that this maximalist goal completely failed. Most terrorist groups probably have a hard time telling exactly how well they are doing.
Hopefully Anonymous: I think you are reading far too much into my intentions. I think intentions can be viewed as a vector sum of goals, where some goals are publicly stated and some aren't. Assuming that the main goals are usually unstated (or stated) would constitute an individual or cultural bias (I don't think there is any human universal in this). Even trying to fix these priors with historical data will be contentious, leaving people disagreeing about who is really biased. I tend to think that in my community of western intellectuals people are biased towards overestimating the impact of hidden goals and underestimating the impact of overt goals, and no doubt they think I'm naive and biased in the opposite way.
I believe that late 19th century anarchists were among the earliest terrorists in the modern sense, and that human rights abuses and cabinet failures were high among their explicit goals.
The "war for oil" argument never made sense to me because we were getting more oil from iraq before the invasion than after, and at much cheaper prices. I think think it gives too much credit for the actual architects of the war. Oddly enough, the one place I found that offers this sort of sensible (since I agree with it, of course!) view is this column by Michael Neumann at CounterPunch.
The ultimate goal of most organizations with a military wing is rarely to kill a bunch of people, but I think that often does become a sort of operating goal. I think a lot of people joined the army after 9/11 because they were angry and wanted to kill a bunch of ragheads, and a lot of people join al Qaeda because they are angry and want to kill a bunch of Americans. The actual leaders of al Qaeda proper have tried to prevent the franchise in Iraq from turning it into a Sunni-Shia war, but that's a sensible approach, and not want the enthusiastic recruits on the ground wanted. There is a satisfaction to be gotten from seeing your enemies get taken down a notch, even if it doesn't accomplish anything, like when the football team you're rooting for sacks the other quarterback even if a flag on the play makes it meaningless (I actually don't really watch football much and don't know how good of an example that is).
Anders,You wrote:"There can certainly be benefits in engaging in a conflict that have little to do with the stated goals, for example increased domestic cohesion. But while these benefits might be a motivator to engage their role would plausibly be overstated by outside observers in analogy with the intention inference. This seems related to conspiracy theory or cynism: rather than believe stated goals one assumes the real goals to be hidden, domestic or directly self-serving. We have been seeing a ridiculous amount of this kind of explanations of recent US interventions in the Middle East. While oil, cohesion or Haliburton profits might be motivating, it seems excessive to assume (as many people I have talked with do) that one or more of these constitute the main motivation, at least without further evidence.
I have noted that in general reasonably well-educated westerners these days have a hard time accepting a stated reason for *any* historical war. The sophisticated thing to do these days is to assume self-serving interest among the players, not that they actually believed in what they were claiming. But this may often be our bias in evaluating intentions combined with the illusion of transparency (as well as signalling being an unafraid and honest person attacking hypocricy) rather than an unbiased judgement. One sign of this is how we tend to not look for any hidden agendas when the war had an obvious and stated self-serving goal."
Whether or not something is the sophisticated thing to do doesn't bear on whether it's an accurate explanation for a phenomenon. And a theory that a domestic agent makes foreign policy decisions (including performing conflict) to maximize domestic political outcomes is different in kind than a theory that a domestic agent makes these decisions to maximize on oil or haliburton profits. For one thing, domestic political agents are rewarded and punished with domestic political success and failure, so I think the useful analytical starting point may be to see the degree to which their primary motivations are domestic political success.
To say "This seems related to conspiracy theory or cynism: rather than believe stated goals one assumes the real goals to be hidden, domestic or directly self-serving." but I'm not sure the relevance of this point. I think the reasonable option is that a goal is either stated or that it's unstated. Are your using the words "conspiracy theory", "cynism", and "hidden" pejoratively? If so, why?
Probably sometimes, in some cases, an individual or organization will have stated goals which match actual goals. Probably sometimes, in some cases, an individual or organization will have unstated goals which don't match stated goals. Sometimes these unstated goals may be internally transparent to the individual or organization (definitional real conspiracy), and sometimes these unstated goals may not be internally transparent to the individual or organization (incomplete self-knowledge of internal motivations). How actual vs. stated goals and internal transparency sort out seem to me to be investigative questions, and regardless of what is "sophisticated" to do, or what is the Anders Sandberg thing to do, I think we should retain some space from analytical flexibility rather than cast any one of these analytical reference points pejoratively.
For example, you identified a potential bias at play in automatically assuming every agent is engaging in self-serving interest. I think there is another potential bias at play in assuming an agent's externally (or even internally) stated goals are their actual goals, particularly if as the observer one may also be vested in believing that those are their goals.
That you seem to uncritically sort organizational agents into the categories of "governments" and "terrorists" indicates to me that your analysis might be rooted more in conventional representational pageantry than a search for the best models of these social phenomena. The approach seems to be "I represent the western archetype, helping to protect the west from Bin Laden, a representative of the radical islamic terrorist archetype" -thus you may yourself be vested a bit in the representational privilege that this construct confers, and may have more difficulty analyzing it in terms of conferring such privilege to certain global subpopulations and not others. I'm bring this up not as an ad hominem, but as an indication of one reason why a preference to believe a party's stated goals (internally transparent or not) match their actual goals may exist -one may consider onesself to be a stakeholder in representational privilege on the opposite end of a performed conflict with that other party, where the representational privilege would lose salience if it was transparent that both parties were performing the conflict primarily to benefit from such representational privilege (regardless of whether they where internally transparent about that being the primary motivator or not).
Sorry if this isn't clearly organized, but I trust you at least Anders are bright enough to parse through this morning jumble.
Anders, I was merely pointing to some of the effects of terrorism, I did not state whether or not these effects were intentional or not on part of the current set of terrorists (or their sponsors/political leaders/religious leaders/ect.). Whether or not these consequences are intentional or not, we do observe them, and that is my main concern.
If one was in fact interested in undermining human rights and political stability in a Western country, judging by these papers, terrorism is one of means to achieve this end that seems to work. No matter what the current set of terrorists wants, this is not good news.
I don't think correspondent inference theory says we are incapable of seeing things from the other's perspective, it just says that we tend to be biased or make mis-judgements about it. My initial reaction to a suicide bomber might be a horrified thought that he was an evil person seeking the deaths of innocents. A bit of reflection might suggest other goals, but that initial evaluation will likely bias my thinking anyway. If I am upset enough I might just discount all other goals, and state that given the evil perpetrated they don't matter at all. In less emotionally charged situations seeing the other's perspective may be much easier.
Biases are troublesome because they are invisible to us. We discount or misunderstand the real goals of others, then act on this biased information - and the other person will then discount or misunderstand our already biased intentions. Even a small bias might set up a feedback that neither of us wants.
I like the idea in some situations of using consequences to infer intentions, but in the case of terrorism, I don't think that anyone who hears about a suicide bombing would conclude that their sole intention was to harm people. I seriously doubt that most people would think that the primary motivation of a terrorist would be to cause horrific deaths.
Most people, I would think, recognize that there are other primary goals and that the terrorists attempt to use violent acts as a means to achieve their goals.
From our perspective, it seems inefficient and irrational for them to continue, but clearly they must see things differently. Another possible explanation for the tendency of people to not see terrorist acts as related to their stated intetntions is that we simply have trouble comprehending how the acts are related to their stated intentions. From our perspective, it just doesn't make sense. It seems unlikely that they share our conclusions regarding their methods.
Attempting to see from their perspective is undeniable evidence that we rise above drawing conclusions from consequences alone and our thoughts are not consistent with this theory. In fact, I believe that from a young age we are taught to try to see from another person's perspective before coming to conclusions.
Tell me if it seems I misunerstood correspondent interference theory, but it seems to imply that we are not capable of incorporating prior/outside information and attempting to see from another's perspective.
The sophisticated thing to do these days is to assume self-serving interest among the players, not that they actually believed in what they were claiming.
That's the fashionable thing to do in all walks of life nowadays. It started in politics and economics, and now it's spread.