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> It is if your goal is to intercept contraband. It isn't. Some airports select a small subset of people and swab their bag manually for drug residue. If peo
by fighterpilot 5y ago
> It is if your goal is to intercept contraband.
It isn't.
Some airports select a small subset of people and swab their bag manually for drug residue. If people are sampled randomly for swabbing, yet drug smugglers have a demographic skew to e.g. young people, then you've got a suboptimal policy in terms of maximizing the proportion of all searches that find illicit drugs.
> Previous contraband seizure statistics will be skewed by survivor bias.
What do you mean by this? Are you suggesting that it's difficult to design an appropriate skew in search frequencies due to a lack of high quality data about the demographics of drug smugglers?
> This kind of reasoning results in ... ineffective solutions (security theater)
I disagree. Peak ineffectiveness and theater is searching 90 year-old women as often as 21 year-old men, when nearly 100% of suicide attacks and mass shootings are perpetrated by young men and 0% by old women.
Searching 21 year-old men may still be theater to an extent, but it is less theatrical than searching 90 year-old women with equal frequency.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cartoonworld 5y agoYour math is wrong. You cannot determine who to search in this way beforehand because you think a certain group might have more contraband or crime. Aside from the trivial bypass you would introduce, that will additionally cause the survivor bias in your search statistics. Adjusting some proportion of searches to one group or another in this way will ignore the types of people in the group. What works from NYC->Las Vegas will be absurd according to your logic when applied to NYC->Florida retirement communities. It is drugs or bombs? The results will also look different in both scenarios. The correct solution is screening. I have news for you about drug smuggling, its the 21 year old who are caught. You should probably just let them have their MDMA. It is all destined to be absurd, however; in the movie theater hypothetical, searching some percentage of 21 year old men is uselessly ineffective. What is the ratio of movie theater attendees to movie theater shooters? It's on the order of homeopathy. The logic and methodology in this is so tragically flawed. > This kind of reasoning results in ... ineffective solutions (security theater) You missed the important parts.