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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Can't see the difference between setting off dry-ice bombs in your back yard versus an airport? That's nothing to be proud of! It's a sign of the inability to relate emotionally to other people, not clear-headed rationality.

People aren't afraid of things in descending order of the probability of those things happening. Otherwise people would be a lot more afraid of cars and a lot less afraid of murders, etc. That's a characteristic of peoples' emotional makeup that policymakers have to deal with, just as aerospace engineers have to deal with gravity or friction or other things that can be inconvenient.

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> It's a sign of the inability to relate emotionally to other people, not clear-headed rationality.

I dunno. In my books the ability to disregard emotional biases is the definition of clear-headedness.

I get that people aren't rational. But that's not a good reason to waste money and inflict social damage in the process of placating them.

Your argument could just as well be used to advocate for the "inconvenience" of promoting intelligent design in public science education.

edit: juste a note to assure you that my intentions are just to correct a misunderstanding of the current topic, not attacking your position of how one should think or assess the gravity of any situation.

> I dunno. In my books the ability to disregard emotional biases is the definition of clear-headedness.

When it's your own emotional bias you disregard we can talk of clear-headedness[1]. But here we are talking about taking other's emotional state into account.

In other words:

the ability to disregard other's emotional biases is not the definition of clear-headedness.

[1] but we are not machine and we have to take our own emotional state into account sometimes.

There's a difference between an explanation and an excuse; rayiner was giving the former, not the latter.

In any case, is it a flaw of our government that our legislators write laws that the majority of people happen to want? The fact that the majority want something irrational is incidental; people want it, and that's why politicians do it.

Is it though? Politicians are elected by majority, but their actions aren't really decided by majority. That has been shown time and time again, perhaps especially after Snowden.

Either way, a majority outcry to implement X doesn't mean an alternative solution Y should be disregarded.

Clear-headedness is the ability to account for emotional biases, not the ability to disregard them. There is a world of difference between acknowledging a fuller set of influences versus deluding yourself into believing no other influences exist.

I'm on your side. It's one thing to relate to people's emotions, but it's another to ignore the fact that people can be in control of their emotions. Just because people might get worked up about scary-looking things doesn't mean that the correct response is to go to all lengths to prevent scary-looking things without discriminating between things that are actually dangerous and things which aren't.

You clearly missed the point. The point is: >>Having them set off in a secure airport area doesn't illustrate any new vulnerabilities. We already know that trusted people can subvert security systems. So what?

point is that an inside man setting off a dry ice bomb does not highlight 'a breach of security'. His rhetoric on the harmlessness of a dry ice bomb seems to be aimed at the fact that a dryice bomb is harmless, set off by an insider is the sole reason to come to the conclusion that LAX lacks security.

I think your point makes sense. I also think you made it better than the author. He does appear to equate this person's actions with his own as a college student or younger in the backyard. I suspect the mindset and motivations though between the two are vastly different. So personalizing it in this way just makes for a confusing side story.

So you're saying that the airport security theater that terrorizes so many of us is necessary because it reassures some other people? And that the emotional needs of those people, who are not rational, must be catered to while the emotional needs of the rational people must be suppressed and ignored?

If you're a utilitarian, you should start counting and get actual numbers of both these classes of people.

You would also need to quantify the difference in disutility between a passenger and his/her children being forcefully groped by security and a passenger being startled by a smoke bomb.

Security theater has gone way beyond a cost justifiable by placating the ignorant. Where is the utilitarian argument?

You just made one. An unfounded one because you pulled the numbers out of your ass, but you're making the claim that the utility provided by security theater is outweighed by the disutility it creates. So, less ass-pull, more numbers.

No, I asked a question. Maybe an implicit one: What value would you ascribe to placating the ignorant? Or, more fundamentally, is there any utility at all in that?

Or, if there is nothing to the placating, do we have to reach lower still, to asking about the utility of providing sinecures to the self-important and otherwise unproductive?

The cost numbers are in the federal budget. What do you think the numbers are for the value of "placating?"

SOME of the cost numbers are in the federal budget. But there are other costs that dwarf that. The real costs also include people missing their flights, people wasting time unproductively at the airport because they had to leave two hours earlier, people wasting extra time on the freeway or needlessly dying on the freeway. Not to mention the "deadweight loss" from every time somebody is dissuaded from taking a trip at all that they would otherwise have taken due to the extra cost (in time AND money AND stress) of dealing with the idiot brigade.

Those people have just as much a right to feel placated by airport security as you do to feel terrorized by it.

Is the goal of airport security to mitigate fear or to mitigate credible threats to the safety of the occupants?

Schneier isn't endorsing the practice of setting off dry ice bombs in airports, he's only pointing out that if a system is designed to stop actions that will result in actual harm to humans, then we shouldn't consider the failure to stop grossly inconsiderate pranks a failure.

Consider that:

* The perpetrator wasn't carrying any substances that could be used in a credible threat to the airport occupants.

* Did not execute a plan to physically harm anyone.

* Was not in contact with individuals who intend to carry out any credible threat to the airport.

"Safety" is emotional as well as physical.

Ugh. Ok, so rephrase that as "mitigate credible threats to the physical safety of the occupants".

If we expand the role of the TSA at airports to protecting the emotional safety of travelers, we've set ourselves to an impossible task. What comforts one person will disturb another.

I think we can all agree that setting off dry ice bombs in airports is not something we should allow. The question is, what measures will we take to prevent it? I'm not sure it warrants a TSA-like response.

In that case: the current TSA is quite harmful to my emotional safety. Disbanding it and letting me just go to the gate and get on the damn plane unmolested would greatly improve my emotional state.

In all honesty, I think a HUGE part of why people think the airport is dangerous is due to the security. People falsely assume that where there's smoke there must be fire. In this case that assumption is wrong. We should replace TSA with prominent signs explaining how unlikely all the movie-plot threats are. At a minimum, we need:

(1) a poster explaining that a gun fired on an airplane is highly unlikely to damage the plane at all and - contrary to hollywood myths - can't cause a loss of cabin pressure much less "explosive decompression".

(2) a poster explaining why 9/11-type attacks became nearly impossible to repeat shortly after the event became general knowledge.

If the prosecution asked for a punishment that is congruent with what damage that dry-ice prankster actually caused it would be a step forward. Politicians (I include elected officials such as the district attorney) do have to put up with public opinion, but they are also in a position to nudge it this way and that.

That seems like a good argument to set off MORE harmless bombs in airports, so people and the authorities get a chance to learn and get used to it and fix their priors about this stupid risk we've been overreacting to all these years.

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