Why people overreact to terrorist attacks

They're rare, often spectacular, and come out of nowhere. But security expert Bruce Schneier reminds everybody that many other things in this world are far more dangerous and which get little if any notice. (Media coverage has not exactly been restrained these last 24 hours.) Schneier, author of "Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive," says that, "What happened in Boston, horrific as it is, is theater to make you scared. That's the point." He spoke to Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein:

Bruce Schneier: I tell people if it's in the news, don't worry about it. By definition, news is something that almost never happens. The brain fools you into thinking the news is what's important. Our brains overreact to this stuff. Terrorism just pegs the fear button.

EK: What should policymakers do in the aftermath of this kind of event?

BS: Nothing. This is a singular event, and not something that should drive policy. Unfortunately, you can't prevent this sort of thing 100 percent. Luckily, terrorism is a lot harder than people think, and it happens rarely. The question people asked after 9/11 is what if we had three of these a year in the United States? Turns out there were none. People get their ideas on terrorism from movies and television.

EK: What makes terrorism so difficult? After 9/11, lots of people thought we'd see suicide bombers in malls across the country, or crude chemical weapons unleashed in subway systems. Why were they wrong?

BS: Because there are a lot of steps to pulling it off, and if you make mistakes in any of them, you go to jail. There's not a lot of practicing you can do. The criminal mastermind is an invention of comic books; 9/11 just barely worked. They got unbelievably lucky; it was by no means inevitable.

EK: You seem skeptical of the ability of policy to keep us safe, but doesn't the relative safety of the last few years suggest that our post-9/11 policies have actually worked?

BS: The problem with rare events is that you can't make those sorts of assessments. I remember then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking two years after 9/11. He said that the lack of a repeat event was proof that his policies worked. But there were no terrorist attacks in the two years before 9/11, and he didn't have any policies in place. What does that prove? It proves that terrorist attacks are rare.