思考与写作gwern.net
恐怖主义与恐惧无关
Terrorism is not about terror
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导读
Gwern 的这篇文章从博弈论和数据分析角度论证：恐怖主义作为一种策略在达成政治目标上其实非常低效，恐怖袭击的真正功能往往不是制造恐惧或迫使政府让步，而是服务于组织内部的凝聚、信号传递等目的。文章基于 Max Abrahms 的研究，对“恐怖分子是理性政治行动者”这一主流假设提出质疑。
为什么经久不衰：它把一个被情绪化讨论的话题变成可分析的问题，提供了少见的冷静框架，多年后重读仍有启发。
HN 评论精选
恐怖主义研究的根本困难在于定义：排除国家恐怖、排除后来成功合法化的案例，会让分析产生系统性偏差。
分析恐怖主义最大的问题在于定义。把真主党和基地组织都归为恐怖组织，等于把定义扩大到任何曾经轰炸过平民的团体——真主党远不止是恐怖组织，其成败并不取决于恐怖主义。第二个偏差是排除了后来被合法化的成功恐怖活动：IZL 和斯特恩帮算不算？斯大林和早期俄国共产党人呢？如果恐怖分子有足够支持并早期成功，恐怖主义就变成种族清洗或革命，被从名单上剔除。第三个问题是恐怖主义按定义似乎只能是弱者的手段，因为国家恐怖被排除在外——台湾白色恐怖或皮诺切特都把恐怖当作策略，却不被归类为恐怖主义。
nabla9查看英文原文
Biggest problem with analyzing terrorism is in the definition. Classifying both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda as terrorist groups means that you have spread the definition for any group that may have bombed civilians at some time or another. I would claim that Hezbollah is much more than terrorist group. Their success or failure does not depend on terrorism. Second bias might be exclusion of successful terrorism that is later legitimized. For example, are IZL and Stern Gang included? I would say that they were highly successful. How about Stalin and early communists in Russia? If terrorists have enough support and are successful early, terrorism turns into ethnic cleansing and/or revolution and it is taken out from the list. Third problem is that terrorism seems by definition be the underdog because official or state terrorism is excluded. Many dictators use terrors successfully as tactics (kidnapping, torturing and killing civilians or relatives of their opponents) but this does not fit under terrorism. Taiwans White Terror or Augusto Pinochet used terror as tactics but it's not classified as that.
恐怖主义本质是群体归属问题，所谓“独狼”其实极少真正孤立，网络联系是分析关键。
恐怖主义关乎寻找“内群体”。我最喜欢的一段关于互联网如何影响恐怖主义的引述：“如果我们把恐怖主义视为部落或帮派活动而非政治行动或战争，那么线上联系对分析就格外重要，否则会被所谓‘独狼’迷惑。早期的‘独狼’如麦克维和鲁道夫，细看之下都与志同道合者有联系；真正毫无同伴接触的独狼，如卡辛斯基，在20世纪数以万计的恐怖袭击中是极其罕见的例外，作为例外，用精神疾病等解释即可。”
Artistry121查看英文原文
Terrorism is about finding an "in" group. How do you combat this? My favorite quote about how the internet impacts terrorism: "If we see terrorism as more of a tribal or gang activity than political activism or warfare, then online connections become especially important to our analysis, otherwise we will be fooled by so-called lone wolves. Earlier ‘lone wolves’ like bombers Timothy McVeigh or Eric Robert Rudolph turn out on closer inspection to have ties, social & otherwise, to like-minded people; McVeigh lived with several other extremists and was taught his bomb-making skills by the Nichols, who also built the final bomb with him, while Rudolph remained on the run for several years in a community that wrote songs and sold t-shirts to praise him and was ultimately caught clean-shaven & wearing new sneakers. Lone wolves who genuinely had no contact with their confreres, such as Ted Kaczynski, are vanishingly rare exceptions among the dozens of thousands of terrorist attacks in the 20th century, and as rare exceptions, otherwise implausible explanations like mental disease account for them without trouble."
恐怖主义的实际威胁被严重高估，它之所以主导政策讨论另有原因。
别再争论皇帝新衣的款式了。恐怖主义对生命、健康和财产的威胁，只是西方社会众多被广泛接受的制度所构成威胁的一小部分，但它却是华盛顿唯一被认为值得讨论的话题。这背后会不会有什么原因？
jessaustin查看英文原文
Let's not spend any more time arguing about the style and cut of the emperor's new clothes. Terrorism constitutes a tiny fraction of the threat to life, health, and property that numerous widely-accepted institutions in Western societies constitute. For some reason, though, it's the only topic that folks in DC find fit for discussion. Could there be a reason for that?
用群体存续竞争的视角看，恐怖袭击的功能是提升组织声望、争夺成员，而非达成其宣称的政治目标。
我们应该从自然选择的视角看团体。任何个体的时间有限，团体永远在争夺成员；可以把团体看作以成员为“食物”的单一有机体。团体可能有超越自身存续的公开目标，但不投入精力维持存续的团体终将消亡——震教徒因要求独身而几乎消亡就是例子。有趣的是，许多团体的存续压力与其公开目标直接对立，比如 NAACP 的目标是消除种族主义，一旦成功它自己也就没有存在必要了。从这个角度看恐怖组织就合理多了：随机袭击高度显眼，能提升组织的公众形象，让它在竞争的极端团体中显得更强。
munificent查看英文原文
I think we need to get better at looking at groups from a natural selection perspective. Any given individual has a finite amount of time to contribute to the social groups they belong to. That means groups are always competing for members. You can think of a group as a single organism competing with other group-organisms in an environment where members are "food". The group may have overt goals that are not about the group's own survival, but groups that do not devote significant effort to their continued existence—whether deliberately or inadvertently—simply can't compete and die out. The Shakers[1] are a good example of this. They religion requires celibacy which means the only way the group survives is through adoption and conversion of new members. That makes it very hard for them to compete with other faiths, and the religion is almost totally gone today. What I find fascinating is that in many groups, survival forces directly oppose the group's own overt goals. The classic example is the NAACP. It's goal is the elimination of racism, but if we ever pull that off, there's no need to have an NAACP anymore either. From this angle terrorist organizations make a lot more sense. Random terrorist attacks are highly visible and increase the public profile of the group. They make the group appear relatively strong compared to other competing extremist groups. Being inflexible and dogmatic makes them less effective, but satisfies members who join the group specifically because of its extreme views. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
“恐怖主义”是宣传性标签，且按文中标准衡量，和平运动同样“低效”；自杀式袭击在吸引注意力上其实很成功。
如果按同样方法分析和平政治运动——只看最初宣称的目标、忽略部分达成目标的结果——也能得出绝大多数和平运动并不比恐怖主义更有效的结论。何况“恐怖主义”本身就是个宣传用语：没有组织自称恐怖分子，它被用来标签一大类战术，许多恐怖组织从未杀过人或针对平民。文章只聚焦最极端的形式——伊斯兰极端分子的自杀袭击，这在西方其实相当罕见；而且可以说他们相当成功：仅凭几次得手的袭击，就让全世界十多年来几乎每天关注他们。
rickmb查看英文原文
One could analyze peaceful political movements based on their stated original goals, ignore all results that only partially meet those goals, and conclude that the vast majority are hardly more effective than terrorism. Not to mention the fact that "terrorism" itself is a propaganda term. No organisation calls itself "terrorist", and it is used to label a broad range of tactics. There are plenty of terrorist organisations that have never killed anyone or never targeted innocent civilians. This focuses completely on the most extreme forms of terrorism, the islamic extremists with their suicide attacks. A form of terrorism that has been quite rare in the West, despite all of the publicity. And one could argue that those have been quite successful so far: with only a few successful attempts, they've gotten our full, almost daily, attention for over a decade now.
恐怖主义只是游击战的战术之一，用孙子“杀一儆百”就能理解，文章过度学术化。
“杀一儆百”——孙子。抛开流行社会学的漫谈，恐怖主义是游击战的一个组成部分，而游击战本身是在双方资源和力量投射差距悬殊时有效且常获成功的策略，美国独立战争和越南战争就是例证。恐怖主义的首要用途仍是地区冲突中一方的游击战术；现代更常见的用法只是把冲突扩展到全球规模——圣战者是在对整个星球打一场宏大的游击战。这篇文章学术到毫无意义的地步。
run4yourlives查看英文原文
Kill One, terrorize a thousand - Sun Tzu. Wistful meanderings in to pop-sociology aside, terrorism is a component of general guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare itself is a valid and often very successful strategy to winning a conflict where there are vast resource and power projection differences between combatants. Two episodes in US history are pretty accurate portrayals of this - the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. Terrorism's number one use is still simply a tactic of a regional conflict where one side is employing guerrilla strategies, exactly inline with Sun Tzu's teachings. The more modern "common" use of the word is simply an extension of the conflict to the global scale; Jihadists and others are involved in an epic guerrilla war against the entire planet - they are looking to remake the world in their vision. It's rather simple and straightforward to see where terrorism fits in this respect. The article is academic to the point of meaninglessness.
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