I know. What a ridiculous statement that was! A failure of imagination! Ha!
I thought you said you wanted to have a serious conversation. But I guess you don’t. When you want to argue with what I said, not what you want to argue against, let me know.
You’re not arguing against what I am saying. I am saying that it should be a reasonable data point. You’re merely repeating what I have already said. In order to correlate attendance at a mosque known to output terrorists, you must first identify that the person IS in fact a Muslim.
The politically correct idea that it’s not ok to profile someone’s religion simply arbitrarily limits the profile.
And yes you’re right, the salient feature of this is considering where the information comes from. But as long as we dogmatically insist that we can’t consider a particular data point for purely emotional reasons, we hamstring ourselves. When you build a profile, no single data point is significant by itself. So when you say that their religion is an insignificant data point you aren’t saying anything meaningful. It’s the picture that is presented by thousands of data points, including religious affiliation, that paints a picture.
Just to be clear, I am not even arguing anymore, merely repeating myself over and over again. I’m responding to you, because you’re the only person whose actually addressed my argument meaningfully.
What about reasons that aren’t motivated by political correctness?
I mean, so far as I can tell, people arguing this point with you in this thread have not claimed political correctness as a motivation. Perhaps they’re concealing it, or simply mistaken about their own thoughts, but it seems to me that alternate reasons for not profiling based on religion have been issued, and you’ve been arguing on the subject of some of them; whether religion is something that can be obviously told, whether religion is a useful data point, whether there are more important or correlated data points which can be focused on which might make religion alone an unnecessary and harmful inclusion, whether the upside of profiling by religion if it exists and is helpful is enough to outweigh any possible downsides in continuing the preventative system on other fronts.
No none of those arguments have been relevant because people are talking like religion is going to somehow trump other factors in the profile. This is obviously contained within your language, “Based on religion”. Profiles are not BASED on profile data points. There can’t be any other reason other than political correctness to oppose the use of religion as a data point. Why else would you use the loaded term, ‘BASED’, otherwise? Basically, people are setting up a straw man profiling system where religion will trump all other considerations and then knocking that down. But that’s not how profiling works.
What’s the point of having a profile if it isn’t based on profile data points? Isn’t that the whole point? The idea is that you want to try and find which data points correlate to the unwanted behaviour, so that you can then understand who is a higher risk and perhaps focus more attention on them.
Perhaps we’re simply disagreeing on a definitional basis?
Certainly there can be. I listed a good few of them. At the most basic point, if religion doesn’t correlate with the unwanted behaviour, then there’s no good reason to use it as a data point - and there may be negatives to doing so, such as added bureaucracy, incurring the annoyance of citizens, and inadvertently blunting the effects of actually correlated data points.
wouldn’t consider the term “based” to be a loaded one. To be clear, may I ask, are you specifically suggesting that my own motivations may be affected by political correctness? I’m uncertain.
I’m not arguing that religion as a vast, hugely important data point is unnecessary. If profiling is accepted, then religion should have the statistical weight that the correlation indicates it should have; if religion is highly correlated, then it should have a large weight compared to other points, and not if not. But, the arguments I have pointed out hold even with a data point weight that’s very low - even when religion is treated exactly as any other point might be, treated fairly, not as a huge strawman principle - there are good reasons for not using it as a data point. For one thing, that the data point weight is very low.
I am arguing with what you said. Here’s what you said:
In that post, you very clearly and unambiguously proposed limiting routine screening security procedures only to members of a particular class of passengers. I didn’t make that up. You said it.
If that’s not what you meant, then you should explain what you meant, not just duck out of the debate by pretending that I’m deliberately misinterpreting you.
No, what we’re doing is pointing out that religion is a statistically useless factor in the profile.
Other factors related to religion—such as membership in a particular militant radical religious organization, or involvement with a particular religious charity that launders terror funding—can indeed be useful indicators of suspect activity.
But mere religious affiliation itself is so weakly correlated with suspect activity that it’s statistically useless as a profile factor.
Oh, and how about answering my previous (repeated) question to you about how your proposed religious profiling will actually “avoid unnecessary bullshit”?
AFAICT, mswas, you seem to have entered this discussion with some nebulous and ill-thought-out notion that including religion in passenger screening will somehow improve screening effectiveness while reducing inconvenience for the vast majority of passengers who don’t fall into the category of Muslim males aged 17 to 40. But you don’t seem able to explain any of the specifics of how it’s supposed to increase effectiveness or reduce inconvenience, and you don’t seem able to grasp the nature of the arguments against it.
This isn’t the rest of us being PC here. This is you being stubbornly obsessed with a poorly conceived suggestion that wouldn’t actually achieve any practical improvement in security.
Man, my arms are getting tired from beating down the straw man.
sigh A profile is BASED off of thousands of data points. Not one arbitrarily weighted one that we can use to beat a dead horse. this is again a repetition of something I have already said a dozen times in this thread So the profile isn’t BASED on their religious affiliation it is BASED on many data points up to and INCLUDING religious affiliation.
I feel like the argument is against the idea of using religion as a primary data point. IE, weighting religion as being more important than other aspects. But I at least am not suggesting that. The quoted bit of the OP may be suggesting that, but that would make him ignorant of how profiles actually work too. It’s correct to say that religious affiliation in a vacuum is not useful information. But it’s not correct to say it’s insignificant.
I don’t see where you get the added bureaucracy idea. We’re talking about analytic data. We’re talking about an increase processor load, but using religion as a particular data point isn’t going to increase the processor load time that significantly. We live in an age of computers, people don’t need to do the math by hand.
I am not trying to accuse YOU personally of anything. But I think inherent in the counter-argument is “ZOMG DEESCREEEMEEENAAAATIIOOON!!!” Based generically isn’t a loaded term. But I think you all are weighting religion higher than other things. I am saying you should weight religious affiliation appropriately as it correlates with possible terrorist profiles. Kind of like how you might use membership in a right-wing militia separatist style movement as an example of a data point.
This, this is what I have been arguing this whole time.
‘High’ is all relative. The more granular your profiling system the more robust the profile it can render. Also one data point can help the algorithm choose which other data points to examine. If you determine that someone is a Muslim, then you can start examining the available data for mosque attendance. Did they attend a mosque known support terrorism? Did they attend a mosque known to advance harsh anti-western rhetoric? The Muslim data point in and of itself is not significant, but the Muslim data point in CONJUNCTION with other data correlated to religious affiliation can be important. The purchase of fertilizer is in and of itself innocuous. The purchase of fertilizer in massive quantities in conjunction with the purchase of other items can tell us if someone is attempting to build a bomb. The weight of a data point is changed by it’s relationship to other data points.
You are arbitrarily holding me to some standard or profiling. Rather than accept that that was merely a ‘sketch’ of how profiling works you’re trying to hold me to it as though I am advancing it as the end-all be-all of profiling.
You’re hanging up on my rough sketch, at the expense of the larger argument. The point is not those individual characteristics I mentioned as data points. My point was about how quickly you can narrow down a search field with relatively few data points.
Yes, I get that. But my point was, then what do you do with that narrowed search field? Do you limit routine screening procedures only to the few people who fit into the narrowed search field, or do you keep routine screening in place for all?
If the former, how do you relax routine screening for the vast majority of passengers without creating a security weak point that terrorist organizations can easily exploit? If the latter, how are you eliminating any “useless bullshit” for anybody?
No, you match it up for correlation with the profile of terrorists.
You relax the completely useless procedures like taking your shoes off. All of the pointless inconveniences that don’t increase safety for anyone can be eliminated with rational profiling techniques.
Then there’s no need to collect the “Muslim data point” as independent information. If we care about people’s membership in particular terror-supporting mosques or in particular militant anti-American organizations (and I quite agree with you that we SHOULD care about things like that), then we should focus on collecting that data directly.
In fact, your insistence on using such data specifically in conjunction with information about being Muslim would be less informative than looking at that data independently. For instance, I want to know about everyone who belongs to some militant-Islamist organization with terror ties, whether they’re officially Muslim or not.
In fact, I’d be more concerned about a member of such an organization with a **non-**Muslim religious affiliation. Because I’d suspect that that person might be some fellow-traveling radical or mercenary who was being recruited by the organization to use as a “terror Trojan horse” precisely BECAUSE s/he doesn’t match the religious profile identified with the “usual suspects”.
If they really are completely useless, then why shouldn’t we just eliminate them for everybody anyway, irrespective of what profiling techniques we use?
“Akbar the time for your mission is here, but we have a probelm.”
“What is it?”
“You look too Muslim, you dress Muslim, you have a beard. It is a problem because they are profiling Muslims.”
“Oh my, how will I achieve my holy mission?”
“Yes, that is difficult, because it is not like we can put you ini a busiess suit, shave your beard.”
“We can’t?”
“Oh wait, I guess we can. Here’s your ticket.”
Well, perhaps you can point to a few of these exceptions to the muslim rule, and we can add them to our database? Remember, we are talking about people who have tried to set off an explosive device on a plane. The only group doing this are certain extremists; until extremists from other sectors of the population pop up, surely it is best to focus our efforts on specific groups?
Ah, I see the problem. When I say “based on religion”, I don’t mean “solely based on religion”, or “sourced on religion, with secondary other factors”. I just mean that it is one of those data points which are taken into account. Something can be based upon many things, as you say there. Profiling may be based upon religion just as it is based upon many other data points, with it not necessarily being more or less an important factor than others.
I think it was just a definitional issue.
How do you know? We’d have to look at the data to know that.
That’s true, but we do need to enter that information into computers - and perhaps more costly so far as time and resources go, we need to find that information in the first place and interpret it. We need to decide what is an acceptable level of information to base an accepted religious identification upon. We need to decide to what level of specificity we go to - do we put, for example, “Christian”, or “Catholic” or do we need to note a specific faction or idealogy within that group that the person holds? And then at the other end of the scale, we need to figure out how to apply that knowledge to actual law enforcement/security officers and members of the public. It’s not just a matter of computers.
Well, you’re accusing me generally of something. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily better that you’re not highlighting me in particular with your accusation, if you believe that inherent to the argument I and others are using is “ZOMG…” and so on.
Given that you and I agree on this point, may I please be excluded from your “you all” statement just above?
That’s true, but sometimes greater robustness can be unhelpful. Selecting an appropriate level of focus is important so that, among other things, you don’t spend too much time focusing on what’s less important when devising the system as opposed to using it. Plus bureacracy problems above.
Except this would indicate that the point we should be looking at is association with extremist groups. The Muslim data point isn’t particularly useful in conjunction with other data, because it’s not the Islamic nature of the other data points that’s the concern or point worth looking at, it’s the extremist nature of the groups. Put another way, you are correct that data points may, as in this example, in conjunction with other data be useful; but in the case you give here it really isn’t.
I think you’ve phrased this inelegantly; I think it would be more reasonable to your argument to say that it is not the weight of a data point that changes by it’s relationship to other points, but rather, that the weight of a combination or conjunction of several data points may be more than the sum of the seperate weights. The problem is that I think you’re adding an unnecessary data point; adding Muslim to the combined data point of “extremist group membership” and the other things you mention doesn’t add any greater weight, so far as I can tell. It seems like adding “likes cheese” to the group; members of extremist groups are going to be a higher risk whether they like cheese or not, and likewise, they’re going to be at a higher risk whether they’re Muslim or not. Arguably we would gain accuracy, robustness, by knowing how well extremist group members and cheese liking correlate, but it’s not a particularly helpful measure and it doesn’t add any additional weight to it.
And we’d have to go around asking people if they fancy a bit of cheddar! 
Seriously? You can’t understand signal to noise ratios?
Exactly. We can include elimination criteria also. As I mentioned above. If they are travelling with their family, it is highly unlikely that they are on a suicide bombing mission. So that can help reduce the correlation.
If the US started heavily profiling against Muslims how hard would it really be for a would-be terrorist to change his name and pass off as a non-Muslim? That is the problem with the profiling; your average law-abiding Muslim will be put through the extra scrutiny and resent it while the terrorist will likely find a way of getting around it. In the meantime there will be real resentment and alienation building up in the the Muslim community in the US which might mean less information on extremists and even a rise of radicalism among some US Muslims. So while there might occasionally be a benefit to profiling but what I never hear is a serious argument for why the benefits would be greater than the costs especially in the long run.
And you want your reactionary idiocy validated. So what?
Setting aside the fact that religious profiling is illegal… until you come up with some workable means of determining who is a Muslim and who isn’t, this whole idea is absurd. Your current plan seems to be centered upon some sort of belief that the government will just know, or that suicide bombers are completely stupid and will tell you that they’re Muslim even though they know they’ll be subjected to additional scrutiny.