|
|
|
|
|
|
by feoren
959 days ago
|
|
|
Great points in general, but two things: > you don't want to give lots of information to the CIA if they're violent maniacs because they might use that information recklessly ... the biggest problem in the scenario is if the CIA is composed of violent maniacs, or if it's incentivized to cultivate rather than restrain people's tendencies to violent maniacal behavior. The problem is that the system can act like a violent maniac without any individual human being one. Each person running a model, typing into Excel, making just a small decision, can add up to enormous injustices. Similar to how an experiment that just tries to collect all the data can be much more vulnerable to p-hacking and researcher bias, even with well-intentioned researchers who would never dream of intentionally faking or fabricating data. > As an analogy about the base rate argument, people have argued that it could be beneficial for people's health to perform fewer tests And I think a similar argument could be made to show that, in the face of flawed models (possibly much more flawed than diagnostic tests), it may be beneficial for the country if spy agencies actually had less information. I think this is why I included "gait" as one of my features that identified my theoretical terrorist. Maybe it's a useful feature, maybe not. Maybe he injured his foot yesterday, causing him to walk like someone who's planning a bombing. To make it really obvious, how would you feel if you found out the CIA was using Zodiac signs as one of the features of its terrorist-detector model? I'm sure it's not literally doing that, but I'm less sure it's not using features that are just as spurious. |
|
|
Even this idealized scenario about the terrorism-detector and taking action based on it... well, it's one that came up a lot around the post-9/11 environment (with selectees and the no-fly list [the rare case where people could actually experience the government making an adverse determination against them on classified grounds and get even the one bit of information] and the Guantanamo detainees and the drone kill lists).
However, the task of deciding if person X is a good guy or a bad guy, or trying to make a list of the bad guys within some population, is a very small part of what the intelligence community does. And that's partly because of the super-expansive notion of national security that we've been talking about, where so many parts of the government feel that it's their business to know everything that's going on in the world, largely without even thinking about the "who is a terrorist" question at all. As we discussed elsewhere in the thread, the government does not think that Petrobras is a terrorist. But somehow it thinks that it should know what Petrobras is going to do in the future, including "by hook or by crook".
I guess there are really at least two threads in the conversation, one of them being the inherent morality of surveillance and espionage activities, and another being "given how (one might think, but probably doesn't actually know) a government makes choices about the use of force, is it a good idea for that government to have access to more and more information?".
I think one of riversflow's points in reply to you was basically that, if a government doesn't make choices about the use of force in a good way, that's already a problem, which is not clearly improved by reducing the government's access to information, although you're also right that it could be. (And I've seen Bayesian arguments about that before, including a Bayesian justification for some legal standards involving in the rights of criminal defendants.) But overall, if we know so little about how those decisions are made at all, it will be hard to be very confident about whether more or less information would be likely to make them better or worse!