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Comment by cbd1984 | Hacker News Reader

cbd1984

Tying profiling to political correctness means you want racial profiling or similar, which would have such a huge false negative and false positive rate as to be worse than useless. Besides, I'm sure the TSA already de facto does it, because sentiments like yours are so common.

If you want to profile, ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin.

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This x1000. I generally concur that there will need to be sacrifices in terms of false positives inconveniencing people by "profiling" them, but I seriously doubt that race, religion, and/or national origin is the best metric we can come up with for profiling reasons. Honestly, I think there's a strong parallel with the way we see neural networks "play" games without following the heuristics that work best for our brains (which we have seen historically that human generated heuristics are not optimal heuristics).

And what else is the intention of profiling except to create a good enough "heuristic"? Let's strive for a better heuristic please.

"other than race, religion, or national origin."

Let's look at the terror watch list: I can bet 9/10 people on the list are from similar middle eastern countries, similar skin color and are from the same or similar religion.

Profiling based on this information isn't profiling based on any of these things, but based on risk factors and previous history.

The problem is that you can't even profile based on obvious history without also being accused of profiling based on religion or skin color.

This is what I'm talking about when I refer to 'political correctness'. Suspicious people can't be singled out without the PC police coming out in full force.

"ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin."

I wish the terrorists bombing planes and killing innocent people were from different countries with different religions, but it's just not reality.

It can't possibly have a higher false positive rate than literally treating every person the same. When the first old white lady commits an act of terrorism, then let's screen them, but until then, let's not.

That's an extreme example, but if you agree that we don't need to look at old white ladies, then we both agree that profiling is preferable. All that's left to discuss are the boundaries.

I'm fairly sure the Israeli profiling is based on profiling behavior. Highly trained and skilled agents looked for body language tells.

Of course Israel racially/religiously profiles.

So why, I asked, are we still allowed to board airplanes at Ben-Gurion International Airport with bottles and tubes of liquid brought from home, while in Heathrow or JFK they confiscate our face cream and toothpaste? "Oh, that's simple," he answered matter of factly. "We use racial profiling, they don't." read more: http://www.haaretz.com/in-israel-racial-profiling-doesn-t-wa...

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