Steve Pinker made a five-minute appearance on Tuesday’s “Colbert Report.” Pinker emphasizes that the TSA, and the news media, overemphasize the dangers caused by terrorism compared to other and deadlier threats. He also decries the failure of the U.S. government to perform cost-benefit analysis on things like Homeland Security.
Note Colbert’s joking reference to Pinker’s “helmet,” and, since we’re talking about his hair, I have to add that this is the first time I’ve seen Steve wear a sport jacket rather than a suit.
Note: If the YouTube video doesn’t work in your country, you can watch the segment on the official Colbert site here.
That segment was enjoyable. Colbert did his homework reading Pinker’s book. Pinker succinctly got his points across.
Agree, though I think Colbert did defer a bit more to Pinker than he often does to other guests. So this was less comedic and more informative than most of his interviews. That is not necessarily a bad thing: it could be Colbert wanted to give Pinker a chance to get his message across without the comedic asides. Or it could’ve just been that Pinker talks really fast. 🙂
This was Colbert deliberately letting Pinker have his say. Colbert is very intelligent and he does this for some percentage of his guests. It is his way of promoting reason.
I recorded this and watched it last night because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to see it online (usually Canadians can’t see Colbert’s stuff). I thought Colbert did defer but it is impressive how Steven Pinker can quote the stats and stay focused. I’d be all dazzled and come off comatose. 🙂
I liked Colbert’s joke question about whether we should invade “Ladderstan” because of all the ladder deaths.
Diana, any idea who we can blame for being shut out on these videos? CTV?
I think it only happens when you go to the originating US network Web site. You know how the networks are operating on distribution rights from the 60s etc…..If it’s on YouTube like this video is, you’re good!
Great, thanks. I usually PVR Jon Stewart, but not Colbert.
U tube wont let me watch either. Some sarcastic remark like our polite nature. GRRRR
D’oh! YouTube let me! It lips you off when you play it from this site? That’s just nasty!
Comedy Central should work. I think this is the link to the correct Colbert Report but if not you can always find it in there. You’ll have to sit through 3000 commercials first…okay 2 or 3.
Hey, it just worked from WEIT above. I’m happy.
I’m sorry; there is an official video on the Colbert site, which I didn’t mention because I couldn’t embed it. If you’re Canadian or live somewhere else that blocks the video, you can find it here.
D’oh that one blocks us and tells us we’re too polite but the comedy central one I pasted above works for Canadians. Sorry I can’t help those in other countries but the YouTube *should* work.
There are always other <cough>http://thepiratebay.sx/</cough> options, of course….
b&
proxy
That was my impression too. I’m very often frustrated by his interviews with authors, with his incessant talking over them.
I know it’s his “thing”, but he has a whole show; he could give his guests 5 minutes.
It was surprised in a good way that he let Pinker have his say too.
Pinker also obviously did his homework: stay good-natured and laugh at the host’s jokes.
The US response to 9/11 was, and remains, absurdly disproportionate to the event, horrific as it was. It was exactly what Bin Laden wanted, actually.
Hopefully it is a lesson learned.
A successful democracy works from the bottom up and is not something you can impose on a country.
It all starts with the common man and woman.
The U.S. response to 9/11 barely affects the day-to-day lives of most Americans. And part of that response was to kill bin Laden and massively disrupt the terrorist organization he founded.
It certainly affected those soldiers and civilians that lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan!
It still does. It’s a bloody mess.
This is such a ridiculous statement I can’t tell if this is intended as a poe or not.
Consider the source. I did. Not any point in responding to it.
Yes indeed, you are sooooo right.
What the fuck plant are you living on, dude?
Thanks to the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, we have the Department of Homeland Security, we have the TSA gate-raping everybody who travels by air, we have the NSA out of control, we have our very own Star Chamber in the form of the FISA court, we have the Berlin Wall re-creation on the Mexican border, we have the TSA moving its gate-rapes to busses and trains and even private vehicles with their VIPR program….
I mean, really. Just in the past decade, we’ve gone from a mildly paranoid Western democracy to a bad parody of Soviet Russia.
If you think nothing significant has changed since 9/11, you’ve either been living in a cave or you’re seriously brain damaged.
…or, of course, you’ve been drinking long and deep from the Cato / Koch / Rand Kook-Aid well. But I repeat myself.
b&
…and I can’t go shopping in the US without a passport and integration by immigration damn it! I used to just use my driver’s licence to cross the boarder. It was the first thing I said after 9/11….well better get my passport for the US day trips!
Oh, but you’re one of those commie pinko furriner proto-terrorists, so you’re not one of those regular people whose everyday lives our everyday Randite is describing.
I’ll admit, for the straight white Libertarian males who never venture far from the safety of their parents’s basements, daily life is probably little different from a decade ago — save, of course, from the enhanced graphics of the computer games.
b&
Psst, Ben, I think she’s an atheist, too…
Shhhh don’t out me! 😀
It’s funny Ben, I actually have heard American politicians (that don’t live near the border because the ones who do shake their heads at them) say that they wanted to “keep Canadians on their side of the border”. Dude, we just want to buy cheap shoes! We’ll go back.
I make the joke that Americans in border cities must think that you can’t buy decent shoes in Canada because of all the old shoes people throw out in America so they can wear the newly bought ones over the border – I remember my mom doing this with me as a child.
Hmmm…what with the exchange rates that have only recently come to parity, I’d have expected it to be the other way ’round.
Then again, I typically only buy a new pair of shoes when the soles of the existing pair have started to de-laminate, and that takes years. I might not exactly have a sufficient dataset to work from on this one….
b&
It’s prices here – we get totally ripped off. I actually have a car that I had imported from the US – you save that much!
If it makes you feel better, all y’all make up for it with healthcare….
b&
Thanks to the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, we have the Department of Homeland Security, we have the TSA gate-raping everybody who travels by air, we have the NSA out of control, we have our very own Star Chamber in the form of the FISA court, we have the Berlin Wall re-creation on the Mexican border, we have the TSA moving its gate-rapes to busses and trains and even private vehicles with their VIPR program….
Ignoring your usual hyperbolic rhetoric, the actual burden of these programs on most people’s day-to-day lives is what, exactly?
The only thing you’ve identified that has any significant tangible effect for most people is enhanced airport security procedures. It takes a bit longer to go through security, you have to take your shoes off, you can’t take scissors or large quantities of liquids in your carry-on bag, etc. Big frackin’ deal. That’s what you’re hyperventilating about?
Wow. My response to Diana really was spot-on.
Gary, you’re not living in the real world. Not even close.
If you ever do venture out from your parents’s basement, be sure to order some SPF-30 sunscreen from Amazon, first. That monitor tan isn’t going to keep you from getting sunburned, even if the weather is completely overcast.
b&
Still waiting for you to clearly describe these terrible burdensome impacts you seem to imagine our response to 9/11 is having on people’s lives. All we get is more of your customary hyperbolic rhetoric.
What “we,” kemo sabe?
You’re the only one living in your fantasy world where TSA agents are merely provident complimentary (sic) health services such as breast cancer screening and the NSA is only listening in on Al Qaida sleeper cell phone calls.
The rest of us out here in the real world are laughing at your naïvely petulant demands for evidence as much as if you were demanding evidence that water really is wet.
b&
I don’t see why a violation of my constitutional rights has to be “burdensome” to be objectionable. If the government suddenly imposed jail time for saying the word “birkenstock,” it would not be a burden on me at all. I doubt I’ve ever said the word. It would still be a violation and I would still object to it.
Recording my phone and internet conversations without a warrant? A violation.
Search without probable cause? A violation.
The president having the power to kill or incarcerate US citizens indefinitely without a trial? A violation.
Will any of these things ever cost me anything more than my tax dollars? Realistically, probably not. I still object and I thnk its perfectly reasonable to do so.
It goes even beyond that. Waaaaaaay beyond that.
See “chilling effects.”
Common slang terms (e.g., “Dat shit’s da BOMB!” ) are all but guaranteed to get any young black male who utters them in an airport terminal subjected to violent interrogation, to pick an easy example. I personally wouldn’t engage in a discussion about nutrition in many public places, because somebody might decide I should be body-slammed into submission for talking about a bomb calorimeter.
I’m hopefully not that far away from putting in my garden. I might get a kick out of seeing what I can do with tomatoes in hydroponics, and I’d love to plant one or two breadseed poppies for muffins. But doing either would place me at significant risk for having my house invaded by armed, uniformed, jackbooted thugs.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. How many people have been assaulted by police for exercising their First Amendment rights to speech, assembly, and petition merely for having the temerity for doing so within a one-mile perimeter of a quadrennial gathering of current and hopeful elected officials? How many of those people are going to think twice about saying those same things that got them arrested on the telephone, knowing the NSA is listening in?
We are well and truly fucked; it’s just that the degree of our fuckèdness hasn’t quite sunk in yet.
b&
Recording my phone and internet conversations without a warrant? A violation.
Search without probable cause? A violation.
The president having the power to kill or incarcerate US citizens indefinitely without a trial? A violation.
You can obviously object to those acts, but that’s just your personal opinion. It’s not a logical consequence of empirical facts. It rests on subjective judgments about the relative value of privacy, liberty, security, etc. Apparently, lots of people believe the acts you list are sometimes justified, in the interests of national security or something else they value. This also seems to be the case with airport security procedures.
Wow, Gary.
You really do hate America and everything it stands for. That, or you’re the worst kind of coward, eager for the strongman to protect you from his own thugs.
Why don’t you go somewhere that your kind is welcome? Afghanistan springs to mind. So does Saudi Arabia or Somalia.
b&
Whoa! Gary just turned into Mohammad! Same stupid argument.
Troll alert!
You really do hate America and everything it stands for.
You’re the one who is constantly insisting that the U.S. is somehow tantamount to a fascist dictatorship, and yet you claim that I “hate America.” You are truly hilarious.
“The country that will trade a little liberty for a little security will lose both and deserve neither.”
It’s what Ben hinted at and Eric nailed squarely–the steady erosion of liberty, bit by bit. Boiling frogs comes to mind. Are you really going to wait until some jackbooted thug kicks you in the balls before you complain about the encroaching police state? Remember, we’ve got one political party that thinks “A Handmaid’s Tale” is a picture of an ideal society, and that “1984” is a policy manual. (The other big party isn’t so socially abhorrent, but isn’t any smarter).
Somebody ought to rewrite Niemoller, using liberties instead of groups of people. Let’s see, start off with “First they restricted the freedom of people traveling by plane, but I didn’t say anything because I don’t travel by plane.”
You give no attribution for your liberty/security quote. Who is supposed to have said it? It sounds like a screwup of a quote from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Note the difference. I agree with Franklin’s quote. I don’t agree with yours. In fact, I think yours is just silly. As a matter of fact, we give up “a little liberty” in return for extra security in all sorts of ways.
Not a screwup; I’ve made it a little punchier on purpose.
Now, explain to me again how the erosion of just a little personal freedom, a little constitutional protection against various activities of the proto-police state, a little self-determination is *not* an essential liberty; while you’re at it, would you be so kind as to define what would be a violation of essential liberty? Telescreens in your bedroom? Injections of nanotech GPS devices to track your position? Electronic leashes? Here’s another silly idea I’ll propound–when you reach that stage, especially in the light of security measures that are of exponentially increasing efficacy and undetectability, it’s too (insert the expletive of your choice here) late.
In order to drive on public roads, you are legally required to obtain a driver’s license. In order to board a commercial flight, you are legally required to go through security screening. In order to maintain ownership of a house, you are legally required to pay property taxes. In order to sell a product to other people, you are legally required to comply with product safety regulations. In order to serve food in a restaurant, you are legally required to pass regular health code inspections. In order to enter and leave the country, you are legally required to possess a valid passport. And so on and so forth. Your liberty is restricted in numerous ways in order to protect you and others from various threats to your health, safety and well-being. Only the most extreme libertarians oppose all restrictions on liberty in order to enhance security. Are you really one of them?
Gary: “You can obviously object to those acts, but that’s just your personal opinion. It’s not a logical consequence of empirical facts.”
They are a rational consequence of a perfectly normal reading of the fourth amendment. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
No probable cause means the government can’t get a warrant for search or seizure. Not specifying exactly who I am means the government can’t get a warrant for search and seizure. Its pretty plain.
The language in the Bill of Rights is intentionally vague. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t specify the meaning of “unreasonable” searches and seizures or “probable cause.” Those are questions that must ultimately be decided by judges confronted with specific cases. The answers may change over time in response to changes in social conditions and circumstances. Also, no constitutional right is absolute. Any right may infringed when it conflicts with another right or with an important state purpose, like protecting people from terrorist attacks. What you claim to be a “perfectly normal reading” is simply your own reading.
And given that the public reaction to the supposed “outrages” of drone strikes, warrantless wiretaps, Guantanamo, etc. has largely been a collective shrug, it doesn’t seem like Americans in general feel that these actions are unjustified infringements of fundamental rights.
The US is not alone in its over-reaction to the threat of terrorism. Here in the UK as well, both the present and the previous Governments have been keen to erode away basic rights and freedoms in the name of security. They are keen for example to snoop on all e-mail and other electronic communications and to get around legal hurdles to this, UK security forces have done murky data swaps with their US counterparts.
Apologists for this kind of thing say ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’ but this is very naive. Apart from the fact that – as Eric points out – it’s just wrong, it is easy to conceive of scenarios in which perfectly innocent people can fall foul of government snooping. Just one example of such a potential victim: a journalist investigating a story the government of the day is keen to close down.
None of this means that we have to just ignore terrorism and pretend it doesn’t exist but we do need to keep the response proportionate to the risk.
Apologists for this kind of thing say ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’ but this is very naive.
I think this cartoon puts that idea into the proper light:
http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2013/07/26
And this one is pretty good, too:
http://www.gocomics.com/mattdavies/2013/06/17
None of this means that we have to just ignore terrorism and pretend it doesn’t exist but we do need to keep the response proportionate to the risk.
Well said!
As if that’s the most important metric.
What is the most important metric, then?
Kilometres
Sacrilege! Celsius! 😀
Planck length. 1.61619926 × 10-35 meters.
That reminds me of an answer a contestant once gave on Family Feud:
In which month of pregnancy does a woman first start to show?
September.
I think the Euclidean metric is the most commonly used.
0.
[I would have said +1, but that is the curvature for a hyperbolic metric. So plane metric it is.]
D’oh! “Flat” metric. Moar coffezzz…
notice how the public has been conditioned to fear.
So much so that when the TSA made the actually sensible suggestion about no longer getting paranoid about pocket knives (people, including me, are around you amost everywhere with pocket knives all the time, a plane is no different) the public and the political establishment went into an absolute panic.
The fear factor: the authoritarian’s friend.
This is the knife that I always have in my pocket, except mine is red and quite beat up.
Obviously, any TSA agent would shit his pants if I tried to board with it.
But, you see…the cutting edge of the blade is almost exactly 3″ long. The long edge of my driver’s license — without which they’d not let me on the plane — is about 3 1/4″ long, and it would only take a minute or so to put a razor’s edge on it.
I also have one of these on my keyring, but, again, in plain red. Very beat up, chipped red. The knife would be confiscated as terroristic contraband if I forgot to leave it at home, but the three keys I have on the ring would be just fine. And my car key in particular is longer and much sturdier than the knife blade…and the three keys on the ring would make for a weapon at least as fearsome as any set of brass knuckles.
Sheer, pure, unadulterated lunacy is our security theater.
b&
I flew from Auckland (NZ) to Paris last month. (That’s Paris, France, not Paris, Texas). And Air New Zealand on the flight between the well-known terrorist hotbeds of Auckland and Sydney supplied us with, as expected, plastic cutlery. True, it was quite high-class plastic. Much to my surprise and approval, Etihad Airways en route to Abu Dhabi gave us proper stainless steel knives, forks and spoons. And so did Air France on the final leg. Maybe they’ve figured their plane is unlikely to be successfully hijacked with cutlery. Or maybe Air France in particular object to their (notably superior) cuisine being attacked with… plastic.
(Note to quote-miners – I was being facetious about Auckland and Sydney…)
I tells ya, the middle east doesn’t have as many ridiculous, reactionary rules!
There remains a major problem with the idea of security in a democracy. Not the tension between rules and rights, not the question of who guards the guardsmen. It’s the problem of politicians who are afraid of not doing enough, having something go wrong, and being called to account. This is their nightmare scenario. It would take braver men than we currently have to say that there is an acceptable level of risk.
+1
Wrong! The main thing politicians are afraid of is losing money from the security lobby. They need it to get re-elected.
Pinker makes good points, but it could be argued that just a few cases of bird flu is not worth a huge medical response, when in fact a small response is the worst thing we can do to nip a disaster in the bud. Maybe it is not worth repairing a small leak in a flood levee, but should we wait until it totally blows out before we fix it? We must be able to differentiate between small events that have potential disastrous effects if not attended to, and those events which have no potential for future disaster. Under reaction is as risky as over reaction. Making good decisions and taking preventative actions are more difficult than they appear.
Pinker’s book (and interview) is about decreasing impact of intentional human violence in the 20th/21st century compared to previous time periods and other sources of harm.
Its not about whether natural disasters can be catastrophic if we don’t mitigate them. Of course they can be. In fact, given Pinker’s position, I think he’d probably say that such disasters become relatively more important as humans become more peaceful, because earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. do not decrease in number or size with modern social controls.
I don’t think Pinker is advocating for under reaction. I think he’s advocating for a measured reaction on proportion to the seriousness of the situation based on risk assessment.
Exactly.
Every month, the United States suffers about as much loss of life and property as a result of vehicular collisions as we did on September 11, 2001. That is, we’d have to suffer a 9/11-scale attack every month just to make the threat from terrorism rise to the danger of a daily commute.
If, instead of spending trillions of dollars on hopeless overreactions and multiple overseas imperialistic conquests, we had spent the exact same amount of money on a state-of-the-art transportation system, we’d all of us have been so much better off in so many ways it’s not even funny.
I mean, do you have any idea of what kind of a transportation system you could buy for that kind of money?
b&
“I mean, do you have any idea of what kind of a transportation system you could buy for that kind of money?”
In Boston, that would be 2 duck tour vehicles.
Ha ha! I refused to go on the duck tour vehicles in Boston because they freaked me out! I recall one sinking either in Boston or in Toronto. I took a fun trolly tour though because our tour guide driver was hilarious!
Yeah, but just think of how big a hole they could have dug!
b&
More people die in auto accidents than terrorist attacks, true. We, of course, also spend a lot of money trying to prevent this. My latest car has airbags that come out from every direction imaginable, for example. Plus, my car doesn’t really want to kill me like terrorists do. If my car, or step ladder, plotted my death 24-7, I would certainly spend more resources preventing it than I do now (probably disproportionately so, since it would be much scarier). If we didn’t install seatbelts, many more people would die. If we didn’t have anti-terrorist activity, many more people would die.
“…has airbags that come out from every direction imaginable…”
I hope NOT from below you butt. 😉
No, that’s INCONCEIVABLE!
Right. The fact that only a very small number of people die in terrorist attacks does not mean our complex set of anti-terrorism policies is an overreaction. It’s a bit like saying that our stringent safety standards for airplanes are an overreaction because only a very small number of people die in plane crashes.
You can’t extrapolate (well) from everyday, accidental occurrences to rare, intentional ones. The reason you have airbags is because we have a large empirical record of how people are hurt or not without them. We have statistics that show their value, and those past statistics are trustworthy, in part, because we understand that the cars are not trying to defeat these measures.
With terrorism it is much harder to distinguish the effective measures from Homer Simpson’s “tiger repelling rock” (no tiger…it must work!). One can support homeland defense while recognizing that (a) we are probably funding some tiger-repelling rocks, and that (b) it is in our best societal interest to critically examine our measures to find and eliminate the tiger-repelling rock security theater when we find it.
Risk does not justify waste.
99.999% of the “security” response to threats to air travel was security theater. All we needed to do was to replace the cockpit doors with a reinforced bulkhead and give the pilots their own entrance. In practice, all that means is putting said bulkhead on a diagonal separating the two front entrances. When you stepped on the plane, you’d see a sloping wall leading to the cabin instead of the opposite door. The pilots would enter through that opposite door.
There you go, hey-presto, hijackings are magically a thing of the past. (Ignoring, of course, that passengers will now execute mob justice upon any would-be hijackers rather than be upset that they’re going to have an unexpected layover in Havana.)
Instead, the security theater has done nothing to make us safer, and a whole hell of a lot to put us at much increased risk, both from terrorists (who can trivially wear explosive vests that they detonate at the thoughtfully-provided insecure choke points of the security checkpoints) and from petty tyrants with delusions of grandeur (aka, gate-raping TSA agents).
b&
Not to mention the TSA insanity where they make you take off your shoes and go through their scanners. I feel bad for the people who are somewhat dazed by everything & get yelled at. Is that really necessary? Are you making me safer by being rude?
I have no idea why no one wants to look at Israel as a model. They deal with terrorism all the time and they don’t ask for ridiculous procedures. Everything they do makes sense and they are polite about it. At least this has been the experience of friends who travel to/live in Israel.
The goal of the TSA isn’t to make you safer. It’s not even to make you feel safer.
It’s to simultaneously make you afraid (of both the terrorists and the TSA agents) and to get used to the idea of jackbooted thugs gate-raping you and rifling through your things.
Be sure to have your papers ready to show to the TSA agent as you pass through security, and don’t even think of attempting to sneak any contraband past them.
b&
What are you talking about? Israel has the most elaborate, intrusive air travel security procedures in the world. They profile passengers on the basis of race, age, sex and religion. They have armed guards throughout the airport constantly watching people and monitoring their behavior. If they decide a passenger is suspicious, they’ll detain and question him. All vehicles entering Ben Gurion airport are searched at a security checkpoint. And so on.
But, but, but, how would the pilots get their coffee delivered????
Oh, no worries. Starbucks has teamed up with Pizza Hut to deliver fresh coffee and pizza to the cabin crew. Richard Branson is supplying the jetpacks for the kids making the deliveries.
b&
I agree that it’s much harder to do cost-benefit analysis for anti-terrorism policies than for things like air bags in cars. But that’s as much a problem for people who argue that anti-terrorism policies are wasteful as for people who argue that they’re justified.
No, it isn’t, because for government spending the burden of proof rests on the program to show it has (or will have) value. The burden of proof does not rest on public watchdogs to show that it doesn’t have value. That has nothing to do with terrrorism – that’s standard practice across all parts of government.
And its the general rule of thumb for private sector corporate spending too. You do not simply hand someone proposer money unless/until the naysayers prove the proposer’s idea won’t work. That’s insane. What you do is you make the guy who wants the money justify why he should get it, before you give it to him.
There is no general requirement to prove that the benefit of a law or policy exceeds the cost, in part because such a demonstration is usually impossible. There is no proof, for example, that the benefit of passenger screening at airports exceeds the cost. Do you therefore think the federal law requiring this screening should be repealed?
So, you are defending the ADE 651 and other similar purchases?
Surely you must recognize that a procedure or technology must be able to demonstrate that it actually does what its intended to do, before the government implements it across the country, right?
It depends what you mean by “what it’s intended to do.” Obviously, it makes sense to check that, say, metal detectors in airports actually can detect metal weapons like guns and knives. That’s a clear empirical question that’s easy to test. But how do you demonstrate that the benefits of metal detectors, and all the other components of the air security system, in terms of preventing attacks on planes outweigh the costs (not just the direct financial costs, but also the cost in terms of loss of privacy, inconvenience, deterring people from flying, etc.)? I don’t see how there can be any clear objective answer to that question. It’s ultimately a political question, not an empirical one. I think the same is true for pretty much every significant security policy.
That is notwhat you were arguing. You were arguing that our inability to assess anti-terrorism policies is just as much a problem for the cons as the pros. No, it isn’t, because anti-terrrorism procedures and policies should be implemented exactly the same way anti-flu or anti-robber procedures and policies are implemented: FIRST the government or vendor must show they stop terrorists, THEN we buy them.
As I said way above, one can be supportive of homeland defense without being stupidly supportive of every single thing the government does. Test for effectiveness, keep the effective measures, discard the ineffective and ambivalent ones. Its amazing to me that you have a problem with that strategy. “OMG, terrorists” is not a license for the government to buy dowsing rods – or do/buy anything else that can’t demonstrate any better effectiveness.
No, it isn’t, because anti-terrrorism procedures and policies should be implemented exactly the same way anti-flu or anti-robber procedures and policies are implemented: FIRST the government or vendor must show they stop terrorists, THEN we buy them.
As I already told you, we don’t implement laws and policies like that. There is no general requirement to prove that a policy will have an intended effect before it is implemented. In most cases, such a demonstration would be impossible. And even if a specific effect could be proved (“this policy will save X lives over Y years”), that wouldn’t answer the question of whether the benefit from that effect outweighs the policy’s costs.
We implement systems like that. If Congress wants to set a policy that all airports be made secure or 100% of all cargo be inspected, that’s fine by me. A policy absent any implementation is just air anyway. When it comes down to conops and instruments – what will be done to whom, when, and where, then yes abosolutely the government must show that the system they intend to field must do what it’s supposed to do. And in such cases, the pro- side absolutely has the burden of proof; you must demonstrate that it *will* work before proceeding, the con- side has no burden of proof to show that it won’t.
It is the intrusiveness and ineffectiveness of these systems to improve our safety and security that people question. And they should. And you should, too.
Unfortunately, fearmongering works.
“If we didn’t have anti-terrorist activity, many more people would die.”
Unfortunately, a claim that needs a reference.
I thought it was a fairly established consensus among conflict research that the militancy of US, including its anti-terrorist activity, has killed many more people than a strict non-militant politic?
Not my best day. “… conflict researchers …”, “… than a strict non-militant politic does”.
Of course there are safety measures in place to reduce road accident deaths and injuries but the point is that things like seat belts, air-bags, speed limits and so on are by and large proportionate to the level of risk. The argument here is that the response to terrorism has been entirely disproportionate.
And the reply is that since it’s so hard to do cost-benefit analysis of anti-terrorism policies, you’re not in a position to confidently assert that the response has been disproportionate.
§
I haven’t flown in a good while and am not planning to fly anytime in the future. It is just too much hassle these days. I have two metal knees, so I get the full treatment. So yes, 9/11 has made an impact on my life, as I have previously flown quite a bit, both nationally and internationally.
This comment thread needs a kitten video:
http://youtu.be/QrlTijuhVOA
I see Massimo and PZ are not big fans of Pinker’s latest article on scientism, in contrast to almost everyone else except the religious and the right. I found the arguments were a bit apoplectic, almost as if they were reading different articles and reading in things that Pinker never said.
Steve Pinker is a god.
Steven Pinker is a powerful, very wise, but non-divine being. Remember, the cardinality of the set of all divine beings is equal to the cardinality of the null set.
No. He just has a, material, halo.
Poor A.C.Grayling has been criticised for his hair as well!
This is the kind of message that you wish Pinker was getting on O’Reilly or any other mainstream news site.
It would indeed be good to have Pinker’s views more widespread. But it’s hard to have a productive conversation when there is a huge gap in IQs. One reason this interview was so good is that Colbert is really, really smart too.