The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

Still, there is a wide variety of violent behavior throughout the world, and so academics have sought a somewhat more precise definition to distinguish terrorism from its counterparts. One definition, employed by a widely used database of terrorist incidents,45 requires that terrorist acts must be intentional, that they must entail actual or threatened violence, and that they must be carried out by “subnational actors” (meaning, not directly by sovereign governments themselves). The incidents, moreover, must be aimed at attaining a political, economic, social, or religious goal. And they must involve some element of intimidation or coercion—intended to induce fear in an audience beyond the immediate victims. The type of terrorism that most explicitly meets these criteria and which is most familiar to us today has relatively modern roots. The UCLA political scientist David C. Rapoport dates it to 197946—the year of the Iranian Revolution. He relates it to religious extremism, particularly among Islamist groups. This wave of terrorism is associated with a sharp rise in the number of attacks against Western countries and Western interests; from 1979 through 2000 the number of terror attacks against NATO countries rose almost threefold.

Fuck off with this shit.