From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jul 26 2002 - 13:16:33 MDT
Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> ### You are drawing very far-reaching conclusions from my words. I never
> claimed what is imputed by some of your questions. Please ask for
> clarification if you have doubts about what I mean. But ad meritum - women,
> especially older ones, are less likely to be effective terrorists. I am not
> using a magical formula - merely the observation (doubtless well-known to
> security professionals) that out of the thousands of hijackers ever known to
> law enforcement, none were elderly women (well, I am not a professional, so
> I might not know about a couple exceptions). This means that terrorist
> groups will find difficult to recruit elderly women. We also know it is
> difficult for a young man to pose as an elderly female. Therefore, as a
> matter of simple inference, I conclude that advanced investigation
> (including procedures cumbersome to the subject) of grandmas is less likely
> to yield a positive result than a similar investigation of a young, restless
> male. Do you find anything wrong with this reasoning?
Profiling is not an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. Profiling may look
like a winning strategy relative to the terrorists' *current* strategy,
but profiling has an easy "best reply" by the terrorists which makes
profiling actually worse than a random strategy. Simply put, terrorists
currently do not recruit grandmothers because they have *no reason* to
do so. If you institute profiling, you *give* them a reason to do so,
and the terrorist grandmothers - whether they're real grandmothers or
not - will walk right through the system.
If this were evolution, security would walk blindly right into the
profiling trap, because evolution can't see even one move ahead.
Neither, apparently, can politics. It's sad to see how many people
assume that just because you do something unfair and unethical, the
result must be an increase in "efficiency". Great sacrifices are not
always matched with great results, but it sure looks very impressive and
determined, doesn't it?
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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