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The inquiry alone is frightening, although much less so than the implications of a surveillance state. Watching Trumbo and learning more about how the US dealt
by lowglow 11y ago
The inquiry alone is frightening, although much less so than the implications of a surveillance state. Watching Trumbo and learning more about how the US dealt out the "Red Scare" is crushing to my soul. You want to assume people are inherently good actors, but that's not always the case.
- pmarreck 11y ago> You want to assume people are inherently good actors, but that's not always the case. Most people are... But reality is subjective, and the people you call "bad actors" in this case surely thought themselves "good actors." The problem happens when, in your good-actor zeal for righteousness (capturing bad-actors), you inconvenience a large number of good actors in order to more completely capture a small number of bad ones... and thus become a new bad actor. (I believe this would be called "high recall, low precision" if you know stats or have done any machine learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall and the goal is to maximize both, not just one- also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthews_correlation_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthews_correlation_coefficie... ) An example of another (IMHO) "high recall, low precision" practice is AML/KYC laws, which find a very small percentage of bad actors at the cost of inconveniencing a large number of good ones (as well as missing some bad actors).
- wlesieutre 11y agoFor reference: AML = anti-money laundering, KYC = know your customer.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>You want to assume people are inherently good actors I wish I could assume such but having studied a bit of psychology, I have found no evidence to support such an assumption.