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A friend of mine growing up had an older brother who was abducted. His mother quit her job and spent the next 5 years looking for him. Eventually, she found him
by sachingulaya 14y ago
A friend of mine growing up had an older brother who was abducted. His mother quit her job and spent the next 5 years looking for him. Eventually, she found him. She called her mother's home and her son picked up the phone. He had been abducted by his uncle and told that his mother had sent him to live with his extended family. No one suspected it.
Now, I know n=1 is not a good sample size, but to downplay the significance of kidnappings by "someone the child knows" or that "it was a family member" is not reasonable.
Also, a study on the effectiveness of amber alert messages on the freeway be extrapolated to give data on results from a 404 campaign.
I can't estimate whether or not internet amber alerts are a good or a bad idea. Just tossing in my 0.02.
- sliverstorm 14y agoYour parent is not arguing that kidnappings by non-strangers are insignificant; rather, that public service announcements about such kidnapping are unproductive. Whether this is actually the case, I have no idea.
- tlrobinson 14y agoAnd your parent was providing an example where public service announcements about such kidnappings could have been productive.
- scotty79 14y agoI don't think he provided example for successful public service announcement.
- rmc 14y agoYes they did. In the original story, no-one doubted the uncle's claim that the child had been sent by their parents. If there were public service announcements that "This child is offically missing", someone might have copped that something was up.
- grhino 14y agoIf the right individuals had seen the public service announcment. Were there any public service announcements for that abduction example given? I think it's a given that nearly all the impressions of a public service announcement of a child abduction will be seen by people who have never seen that child. There's a cost of seeing a PSA of a child abduction. People will now consider child abductions more likely than they actually are. This causes them to make decisions that may be against the best interest of their children like go outside and play.
- jmilloy 14y agoRight. Instead the example that refutes the idea that public announcements aren't necessary for finding kids who were kidnapped by family members because the authorities would have looked there anyways by providing a anecdote where a public service announcement could have helped find a kid who was kidnapped by family members and not found (for a long time).
- coldarchon 14y agoA mother quitting her job for five years finding her son randomly is not providing an example about productive public service announcements.
- r00fus 14y agoSome way to tag your children (see Woz's attempts) are probably going to be more successful than alerting random people.
- xenophanes 14y agoOr how about raising children self-confident enough to make a phone call home and demand to talk to their mother directly after a couple weeks.
- icebraining 14y agoAnd they would let him, why?
- xenophanes 14y agoIf they won't, he knows something is up. Did they never let him outside in public, never go to school, never have contact with anyone who could help? If so, he was basically just locked in the basement, the whole thing about saying he was sent there didn't actually matter.
- icebraining 14y agoI don't mean flat-out deny, There's a reason why simple social engineering works with a very high degree of success, and manipulating small children who have trust in his kidnapper (which isn't rare, since they're often family members) is even easier.
- xenophanes 14y agoWhich is why I suggested raising less gullible, passive, compliant people. Gullibility is a problem, here and elsewhere. I think raising people to be good, independent non-gullible people is a better approach than sticking trackers on them.
- 14y ago
- fludlight 14y agoIt would be more effective to have the FBI do face recognition on everyone's vacation photos on Facebook. Assuming that the kidnappers want to raise the kid as their own, they are bound to post pictures of him. This won't work for the 75% that chimeracoder alleges are murdered, but it might for the scenarios like the one you described. Why would a kidnapper would post pictures of a child they kidnapped on FB? Criminals are not always rocket scientists, and even then they aren't always rational(1). The kids also tend to go to birthday parties, school, and other places where other people post pictures of them that get posted on social networks. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak
- alanh 14y agoWouldn’t there be a prohibitive number of false positives? It sounds like the poster child for this sort of calculation: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way...
- tlrobinson 14y agochimeracoder was saying 75% of kids who are murdered after being kidnapped are murdered within 3 hours of being kidnapped. i.e. in conditional probability notation, P( A | B and C) = 0.75 where A = murdered within 3 hours of being kidnapped, B = kidnapped, and C = murdered.