A capitalist should appreciate this line of thought, but . . .
The Bottom Line, a blog hosted by Corante has this to say about the costs of doing or not doing Bush's Total Information Awareness program:
Filtering and Errors
Here is an example of poor use of mathematics.
Heather MacDonald, defending Total Information Awareness, called us all Luddites for not being thrilled by the capabilities of this new technology. She would, she said emotionally, be happy for her daughter to answer a few questions if it meant she wouldn't be blown up at her college. Patrick Ball, who does statistics and relational databases for a living in human rights work, challenged her with some numbers. We are, he said forcibly, talking about hundreds of millions of suspects and a few dozen terrorists. Even the tiniest error rate, he pointed out, means hundreds of thousands of false positives and therefore investigations.
It is MacDonald who is right and Ball who is wrong. Think of it this way: what do we do without a database? Then we will have a larger error rate and even more investigations.
Or, implicitly, we will not have any terrorist investigations. In that case we save the cost of the investigations (both to the government and to the people who would have been investigated). That's wonderful. Except that now we pay the price of more terrorist incidents, which might be $100 billion each (look at 9-11).
In order to know whether an error rate is costly or not, we need to know what the alternative would be. If the alternative is a higher error rate and/or more terrorism, that puts the error rate of a database in perspective.
You know, if you don't want to pay the price of more terrorist events, you might consider not empowering extremists for your own benefit.
See, the thing about extremists is if you don't agree with them point-for-point, they're going to do something extreme.
But, I suppose it's too late to think along those lines now. Oh, well . . .
posted by Prometheus 6 at 4/7/2003 09:06:51 AM |
