
Fluctuations in silver prices can predict the probability of terrorist attacks? - ninetax
https://twitter.com/benmarrow/status/1180140772387168256
======
locust101
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they talked to absolutely no
one local (Pakistani or Muslim) before they published this. The threshold
before people pay zakat is like $300 so fluctuations in silver price has very
low effect. Do you think someone with $300 in savings is giving donations?

Government only deducts the zakat from the checking account. I am from
Pakistan and very few people(basically salaried employees for corps/govt which
is a very small portion of population) have bank accounts and the main use is
to just withdraw the salary immediately every month. People who are on the
threshold of $300 lifetime savings have almost negligible chance of owning a
bank account.So I am going to call BS on this paper. There are so many
problems with the data in this paper that I can't even. Also quite racist to
say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and
the proof for this is nada. They are using metrics for terrorist attacks in
Pakistan (most of which used to happen indiscriminately in public places in
metros where most people with bank accounts live). Do you really think that
people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks
against themselves?

~~~
hogFeast
There is a cottage industry within academia for this kind of sophistry around
terrorism.

I studied IR at a uni with a fairly good research reputation, one of the hot
projects (funded to the tune of 7 figures) at the time (some time ago now) was
the physical identification of terrorists i.e. by various body
measurements...I am 100% serious. And this guy was not an idiot, in the
conventional sense at least, PHd in Biology from Oxbridge, "genius", who (at
the time) was talked about in breathless tones of wonder by the science
departments (and ridiculed everywhere else).

Every few years a scientist will say: "Terrorism isn't solved...but I have a
formula"...stop, we know why terrorism occurs but it isn't as simple as your
calculus homework.

And I agree, it is totally unfounded to suggest that charities are funding
terrorism (or that people who would give to charities and somehow be unaware
of that fact, if it was the case).

~~~
im3w1l
I think it may be possible to get some signal from body measurements. Skin
color, sex organs, teeth health (wealth proxy), scars/injuries (been in fights
before?), maybe you could find some marker of chronic stress.

But yeah it's going to be pretty poor and not really actionable.

~~~
tomatotomato37
>Skin color

I see we are playing with fire today

~~~
im3w1l
I mean, he is predicting whether someone is a terrorist... based on physical
measurements. It's pretty much the definition of prejudice. What could he
otherwise be doing?

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MR4D
Correlation is not causality!

Also,...

Over-fitting data.

My god these things drive me crazy.

If it’s real, then he should be able to answer this question posted on Twitter
by Gregory Allen Perry ( @gallenperry ):

 _What is the payout on a $1000 bet that a terrorist attack in will occur in
Kashmir in the month of February with no less than 20 victims killed if the
price of silver drops by 5% immediately prior to Pakistani tax assessment in
the year before?_

If he can’t answer a question at least somewhat in the same vein as that, then
this is crap. If he can (within any reasonable degree of confidence), then I’m
wrong.

~~~
bnegreve
That would be if the price of silver _increases_ by 5% then.

According to the post if the price of silver is higher, the tax threshold
increases and more people have extra money to support whatever organization
they want.

~~~
tgtweak
Actually no, the lower the price of silver the more people are eligible to
donate since the criteria to fall in that group is lower.

Despite the lower price of the silver, the "tax" is a static fiat-based % so
basically more people are donating the same %. All the people that were
donating 1.5% if holding a balance over $380 would still be donating it (and
the same $amount) if the threshold were $360 (silver price drops), more people
would be donating since now everyone between $360 and $380 would also be
donating a 1.5% in addition.

If the donation was in silver then it might even itself out, but you'd have to
look at a distribution curve of income to know for sure.

~~~
bnegreve
But if I understand correctly people donate when they _don 't have_ to pay
tax.

From the twitter posts:

> Individuals who fall _just_ below the threshold one year due the chance
> price of silver suddenly avoid a 2.5% gvt tax. Those people then increase
> their private donations to charity (since they have more disposable income +
> islam calls for alms-giving).

Or in clearer terms:

> ↑silver price → ↑tax threshold → ↓taxes → ↑charity → ↑terrorist financing →
> ↑terrorist attacks!

~~~
tgtweak
I stand corrected.

------
umeshunni
Reminds me of these charts: [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

~~~
peignoir
Damn you beat me at it :) makes you think about what unsupervised AI training
can lead to... imagine not having insurance because you bought some Nutella on
amazon during a full moon or any other crazy scenario

------
Hasz
Link to the actual paper

[https://t.co/s0NZ1PcpQf](https://t.co/s0NZ1PcpQf)

Is it normal for econ papers to use the first person? Super weird to read. His
Latex formatting is a mess too. Check out page 37 for a scatter plot of rock
solid correlation, lol. Not going to read the full 56 page mess because that's
a job for an unpaid reviewer, not an unpaid commentator.

That being said, there's a shit ton of easy hidden variables here. Mountains
of them. People are going to talk about spurious correlations, which is fine,
but there' s a more subtle trick here, the hidden variable.

Sunscreen use is correlated with an increase in shark attacks and increase in
hot dog sales. Are sharks attracted to sunscreen? Is there a secret ingredient
in hot suncreen that makes people eat hot dogs? I can come up with pretty good
explanations, that pass a qucik sniff test, all day long.

The answer is of course not. More people are simply at the beach. More people
--> more collisions with sharks, more hot dogs shoved down gullets.

Not familiar enough with the culture of Pakistan to point out the specific
variables, but that's the guess.

~~~
lootsauce
Got a good chuckle “that's a job for an unpaid reviewer, not an unpaid
commentator.”

------
curiousgal
> predict the probabilities

Yeah that's all I needed to read to know that this is BS.

On a more serious note, if charities are indeed funding terrorism, you
wouldn't have data on them. Especially in Pakistan where keeping data is
something only the reputable orgs do.

This "paper" is not peer-reviewed and it will never get published. Just a
usual case of a smartass thinking they can justify that their correlation
means something when in fact it doesn't.

------
codazoda
Fluctuations in stork births can predict human births. Sidebar: Did you know
that's why storks carry babies in cartoons?

"Correlation is not causation."

------
nobrains
612 grams of silver is $342 today. Those who have life-savings of $342 in bank
or more, get auto-taxed. At this level, we are talking about the un-banked
mostly, so they don't have accounts in the first place. In other words, nearly
all bank accounts get auto-taxed, so silver price fluctuations do not really
affect this.

Second, try to calculate the silver price fluctuations, and calculate the
ACTUAL dollar amount that becomes disposable to spend. Its peanuts.

Finally, this category of people do not give charity. They take charity.

~~~
kasey_junk
The paper is not arguing that the people that go from zero tax to some tax are
driving the charitable giving tax. It’s arguing about the people in higher
income brackets & it shows pretty robustly that charitable giving is linked to
the price of silver.

~~~
nobrains
He talks about "nisaab" which is the minimum amount you must own before you
are auto-taxed, and that amount, based on today's rate is $342. See tweet 3 of
9:
[https://twitter.com/benmarrow/status/1180140774127742979?s=2...](https://twitter.com/benmarrow/status/1180140774127742979?s=20)

~~~
kasey_junk
And here is the actual author describing the link
[https://twitter.com/nicolalimodio/status/1181581317596745728...](https://twitter.com/nicolalimodio/status/1181581317596745728?s=21)

You could also read the paper. The part linking silver prices to charitable
giving is straightforward.

------
ninetax
Full paper here:
[https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5f...](https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5fDSNfK)

~~~
thedudeabides5
"This page isn't working"

Anyone else have a link to the paper/data?

~~~
ivanech
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/8x66xc3wcvfns4a/Limodio_TerrorFina...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/8x66xc3wcvfns4a/Limodio_TerrorFinancing.pdf?dl=0)

------
mlang23
[https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

~~~
thaumasiotes
As I look at the page (which I believe changes randomly), I especially
appreciate the 0.81 correlation between "letters in winning word of Scripps
National Spelling Bee" and "number of people killed by venomous spiders".

It's a good one in two ways. First, it's nicely obvious that these things are
unrelated. Second, these are two variables that fluctuate (together) over time
-- a lot of the spurious correlations turn out to be two things that basically
just increase or decrease more or less constantly over the period in question.

~~~
jaclaz
>I especially appreciate the ...

And you missed this > 0.99 one (a bit dated, still ...):

Apple iPhone sales

correlates with

People who died by falling down the stairs

[https://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28669](https://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=28669)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Sure, but like all the 0.99+ correlations, that one is just two lines moving
in the same direction.

------
panpanna
This seems extremely far-fetched, see for example comment on Twitter pointing
out some flaws.

Reminds me of that company that revived millions of dollars for their software
for finding hidden messages on the internet and somehow predicting terror
attacks.

~~~
lonelappde
No one sells silver in this story. It's a benchmark currency used to set the
tax baseline.

The main flaw is that the graph doesn't show a correlation of fluctuations, it
just shows two high-variance metrics increasing over time.

> [https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
> correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

> 2.5 million terrorist chat board messages from the dark web

Now that's fascinating.

~~~
panpanna
Sorry, removed that part before I saw your comment :(

I agree with your comment.

------
slowhand09
Relevant: In the words of master data visualist Edward Tufte, “Correlation
isn’t causation, but sure is a hint.”

------
harsh3090416
Not anymore. They now know that you know.

~~~
kasey_junk
I suspect that this was meant as a low value comment but it’s pretty important
here that the paper is decidedly not saying that the people giving to
charitable organizations are intentionally funding terrorist attacks.

------
heisenbit
Correlation, causation. So similar, so different.

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WrtCdEvrydy
So, Silver Causes Terrorism?

~~~
lolc
The paper suggests that cheaper silver causes more terrorism, yes. Hilarious
how people try to explain spurious correlations with a far-fetched chain of
causation.

