Sam Harris is still going on and on about how we ought to racially profile airline passengers. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists
, he says, so it’s ridiculous that we’d give the same attention to someone who looks like Jerry Seinfeld that we would to someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden. Never mind that extremely few people who look vaguely Semitic are suicidal jihadists
; it’s an injustice to white people to subject them to the same indignities as brown people, but it’s not an injustice to falsely target brown people as terrorists because, well, they’ve committed the sin of looking like Osama Bin Laden.
We’ve been around and around on this subject. Bruce Schneier, the security expert, schooled him on the flaws in his idea, and really exposed the shallowness of his thinking. It’s bad security. It alienates people who are just as interested as we are in flying safely. It’s statistically naive, ignoring the problems with false positives.
I think it’s also a premise built on unquestioning bigotry. There is an assumption that people who look a certain way based on race will be less humane, more prone to violence, and a greater danger to law abiding citizens of White America, who would never ever harm anyone. The facts, of course, expose that for a sham.
Here’s an example from the streets of Ferguson.
Of those three men, who would Sam Harris thinks poses the greater threat to peace and stability in Ferguson? Clearly, it’s got to be the potential suicidal jihadist on the right, not the righteous Christian Oathkeepers who are patrolling the streets with deadly firepower in their hands.
The dismaying thing about this interview with Harris is that he hasn’t budged a bit — the facts explained to him by a security expert didn’t sway him at all from his bias that brown skin and Semitic features equates to fanatical jihadism. Science, how does it work?
Reminds me of an article I recently read about whether there was a risk of “IS terrorists infiltrating Europe” via the refugees. The answer of the security agencies was: Nope.
Not because there’s no risk of IS placing terrorists in Europe, but because they’re not stupid. Why should they risk the lives of their men in tiny boats or overfilled trucks, not knowing if they’ll make it and where they’ll end up when there are thousands of Europeans fighting for them already? They can just send those people back. They have the right passports, speak the language, know the place and can simply vanish in the mass of their fellow German, French, Brits etc.
Seriously, does Harris think Jihadists would send somebody who looks like the guy with the smartphone when they know exactly that he will be profiled and watched with extra scrunity? They probably would send him, as a distraction while the blue eyed guy with a Southern drawl walks and gets the deed done.
It’s almost like Harris hosted that guest post from Schneier instead of answering any of his arguments.
I wonder if Sam Harris has ever heard of Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols?
Does anyone have a link to his article where he suggests stopping and searching white men in Ferguson? I can’t seem to find it.
I don’t think this is a fair characterization of what Harris is saying.
If 80% of airline terrorists come from Group A, and 20% come from Group B, then it makes sense to devote more resources looking at Group A. This is not because everyone in Group A is a terrorist, but because the airline terrorists are mostly from Group A. It doesn’t mean you don’t look at Group B at all; it just means you pay extra attention to Group A. And, since we’re talking specifically about airline terror, Tim McVeigh and the Christian Oathkeepers are irrelevant to the conversation. When was the last time a Christian Oathkeeper tried to hijack a plane?
And the demographic group to concentrate on is not people with brown skin and Semitic features; the demographic group is young Muslim males traveling alone, especially if they bought a one-way ticket.
@1
Actually its interesting that Harris hasn’t written about the refugee crisis considering he previously argued that Europe’s crime problem was largely the result of immigration, and that due to birthrates France would be a Muslim country by 2030. He also called for more ‘sacrifices to freedoms’ be made to stop the ‘barbarians beyond the city walls’.
eeyore, #5:
How do you propose identifying them? It’s not like they’ve all got Muslim passports or something.
dereksmear
Yeah, but it would be unfair for us to ban US Americans from entering
eeyore, #5
I can’t disagree with that. It is a fact that certain types of violent attackers have certain demographic breakdowns. But that’s not the question. If all we were doing was acknowledging that, that’s fine [*].
The question is about actually implementing a practice of profiling. The question here is two-fold: Will profiling be effective, and will profiling make countless innocent people be treated unfairly? You’ll have to read those Schneier articles for the first question and I think you know the answer to the second one. I’m a brown-skinned person with a mild accent from a Muslim country (and a high risk country at that). So are all the members of my family. I don’t want us to face the indignity of being singled out in front of everyone. I don’t want my white acquaintances and people from work to see me getting searched with extra scrutiny at the airport. To you and the security agent, it’ll be just a one minute ordeal. To me, being seen like that will be something I won’t be able to shake off for a while. You call it “devote more resources looking at us”. We call it being humiliated and vilified in public. These practices breed hostility where none would have existed otherwise. You can’t treat innocent people as statistics and then expect them to just understand, especially when those statistics actually undermine your position (what percentage of Muslims passing through American airports are perfectly innocent?) Will you believe me that when I’m in the airport, I can’t help feeling nervous and try my best to act “proper”. I don’t even know what that means as I always act proper 24/7 but it’s always in the back of my mind that I need to be extra careful. If I’m with someone, I try not speaking in my native language too loud. I feel like I have to make just the right amount of eye contact with police and security.
Should predominantly black churches have full body scanners for white men to pass through? Should Jewish museums put up signs asking non-Jewish white men to keep a certain distance? Is that really a recipe for a good society?
If you even just browse those Schneier articles, you’ll see quickly that Harris has no compelling argument here. He’s just saying looking at little white ladies just as much as a Muslim man with a beard is a waste of resources. Here is a nice chunk of texts from him:
[*] But can we just acknowledge it once and move the hell on?
#5: Fake stats.
What fraction of Group A and Group B are actually terrorists? It’s vanishingly small in both cases. Throwing around “80%” and “20%” is simply misleading and lying with numbers — those aren’t anywhere near the percentages that need to be dealt with.
If 0.0008% of brown passengers and 0.0002% of white passengers are terrorists, does it justify treating 99.9992% of brown passengers like criminals?
eeyore
The argument, yours and Harris’ is absolutely DUMB. There are people you can exclude at a glance? Really? How? They are “obviously not Jihadists”? How the fuck do you know? What magic do you possess?
Also Jihadists are NOT mosquitos. You can’t just fool them by having stripes on your coat like a zebra. THey are people and they can react to your bullshit. They will obviously go for exactly the kind of person you just ruled out as “obviously not a Jihadist”.
Harris even kind of acknowledges this by saying “until those people start blowing up plains”.
@Saad
Of course not, silly, because they are white and inherently trust-worthy and they deserve dignity, plus the fraction of white people commiting crimes at black churches is infinitesimally small so that’s like…… totally…… different….
Saad
Which is of course exactly how you breed terrorists. Most of them have been born and raised in our countries, they have been isolated, discriminated against and generally been told they’re not like “us” and they don’t belong in the countries of their birth. They didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that instead of driving their nice middle class car to their nice office job where people treat them woth respect and value their expertise they’d rather go and blow up a plane.
Remember, Harris wrote a book on moral philosophy. He’s quite a sophistimacated philosophamizer.
Harris is an inexplicable, bizarre combination of smart and stupid. But actually a lot of people have trouble with Bayes theorem, which is basically what’s going on here. It’s contrary to our intuitions. But he really should know better.
@5: As I recall, the most recent successful hijacking of a plane was by an ethnic German man of uncertain religious inclinations but no indication of sympathy with IS or any other similar organization. Perhaps it is time to start profiling all young men of European extraction, especially if they have a pilot’s license.
eeyore@5: as someone who spent a lot of time studying statistics with a particular emphasis on medical screening tests, I can say that your scenario is woefully underdeveloped. If you want to work out if a screening test is worth implementing (and profiling air travellers is a type of screening test), then you need a lot more information than what percentage of a condition comes from one group. You need to know how common the condition is, how reliable the test is, what the cost of the test is, and so on. And it appears to me that Harris keeps trying to frame his thinking in terms of ultra simplistic reasoning (“a lot of terrorists seem to be Muslim, so let’s target Muslim travellers”) without engaging in any of the more complex technical issues around screening despite numerous people trying very hard to get him to acknowledge that these issues are important. And that’s not even touching on other concerns like racism, the fact that there are plenty of non-Muslim terrorists in the West, and so on.
dianne@16: and further to what you’ve already said, that particular hijacking succeeded because of poorly thought-out anti-terrorism measures.
@chrislawson: You’re right. The positive predictive value of profiling “young Muslim males” (whatever that means–how do you tell someone’s religion by looking at them in a security line) is going to be ridiculously low. The negative predictive value, as indicated by recent hijackings (where “recent”=”the past decade”) is also going to be low as well.
OK, hovering over all of this is the fact that airport security is mostly theater that does little to actually make us safe, and so profiling probably wouldn’t add that much to it either. Which is why I disagree with Sam Harris’ bottom line.
However, my understanding of Harris’s point is that you concentrate resources where they are statistically most likely to do the most good, and that is not a facially unreasonable assumption. It’s a variation on actuarial tables; this is precisely how insurance companies assess risk. And candidly, it makes no sense to me, from a security standpoint, to treat an 85 year old retired nun (of any race) the same as a 20 year old Saudi male who is traveling alone on a one-way ticket. Their risk levels just aren’t the same.
And I also that there is a tipping point at which the stakes are high enough that whether something is fair is largely beside the point. My bad eyesight keeps me from being a pilot. That’s not fair to me; maybe I could safely fly a plane if I’m careful, but why should anyone else be required to assume that risk? Life isn’t always fair. Preventing an airline hijacking is pretty high stakes.
eeyore @20,
I think a big part of the problem is as Saad @9 explained, in that looking for people based on probabilities is great if those probabilities are constant or calculable. However, the terrorists are fairly smart and just keep screwing with the probabilities. I think it was Bruce Schneier, though it may have been someone else, who said that if they’ve got to the airport then your security’s failed anyway.
eeyore
Whichi s why “let’s profile people who look muslim” is a shitty policy. Terrorism isn’t an insurance claim. Terrorism is best prevented by preventing conditions that breed terrorists (and constant discrimination is a damn sure recipe) and you have intelligence look for actual terrorists. Everything else is a sideshow guaranteed toa cutally radicalise some people among the targeted population.
In the early days of the Unending War on Terra, I was fond of pointing out to people who advocated this position that the recent high-profile terror arrests were non-Semitic guys with names like John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla. If you spent less time paying attention to them and more time paying attention to random Mustafas, you were going to be endangering America.
Another thing; does Harris really think that a suicidal jihadist on a mission is going to turn up at an airport looking like bin Laden?
One of the things Harris ignored (and continues to ignore) is the pictures of the 9/11 attackers going through airport security. They are neatly groomed, dressed business casual, average-looking guys.
In other words the terrorist already understand the problem better than Sam Harris. Harris is simply concerned with his amour propre; he wants to be right, all the time, about everything, and is going to reject or deflect anything that contradicts that. To me, that makes Harris clearly untrustworthy – he’s more concerned with appearing to be right than actually being right.
PZ mischaracterizes what Harris said as, “it’s ridiculous that we’d give the same attention to someone who looks like Jerry Seinfeld that we would to someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden.” That is not what Harris said. If it was, Harris would not include himself among those whom security should take a close look at (i.e., he’s the same demographic as Seinfeld). What he said is if Jerry Seinfeld HIMSELF is going through security, he should not get much attention. These are his words: “I just want us to admit that certain people require less scrutiny. And, you know, Jerry Seinfeld is one. When you see a famous celebrity go through security treated as though he just may have become a jihadist, when no one was watching, it’s crazy-making. It is security theater.”
Perhaps Harris could have been more clear, but in any case, this is a serious mischaracterization by PZ of what Harris said, and should be corrected immediately. There are already other commentators (e.g., Glen Greenwald) making the same mistake, based on PZ’s post.
Which guy with the backpack is the terrorist?
http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20070407&t=2&i=576728&w=644&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=576728
The terrorists blended into the crowd because they were smart enough to not bring along a mariachi band.
These guys look like a couple of yuppies to me. Nearly groomed. No fanatical bugged out eyes. Not waving guns.
http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/07/22/n-airport,0.jpg
How would Harris recognize them as muslim? Force them to pet a dog?
PZ mischaracterizes what Harris said as, “it’s ridiculous that we’d give the same attention to someone who looks like Jerry Seinfeld that we would to someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden.”
The least likely person to be a terrorist would be the guy who looks like Osama Bin Laden. What Harris said presupposes that terrorists are as stupid as he is. Clearly, they are not.
Why did Harris choose Seinfeld?
The TV show ended in 1998 and Seinfeld hasn’t done anything notable since.
Does anyone outside of Las Vegas remember what he looks like?
There is an interesting conversation to have here. Unfortunate you’ve elected to go the dishonest route and misrepresent somebody’s views. That degrades the discussion to an unethical and pointless one.
The argument Harris made was, if Jerry Seinfeld–Jerry Seinfeld himself, NOT somebody that looks like him–walks in the airport, we can be reasonably sure he’s not a terrorist. The point isn’t that Jerry is white. The same applies for Chris Rock. Or Jackie Chan.
eeyore @20
You’re right. It’s not a facially unreasonable assumption. Unfortunately, statistics—especially the statistics of low-probability events with imperfect detection methods—is often counter-intuitive. If you follow your gut in this case, you will not be maximally lowering the risk of a terrorist attack. It turns out that the optimal strategy for detecting a terrorist is not to naively split your resources in the way you describe.
As chrislawson @17 notes, the math is the same as detecting a disease. If you’re interested in how this works, the wikipedia page on positive predictive value is pretty good.
One of the frustrating things about Harris is that he knows (or ought to know) how to do this kind of analysis. He could have an actual policy argument targeting his preferred positive predictive value and negative predictive value, but he basically refuses to engage people like Schneier on the numbers that actually matter for stopping attacks. Instead, he comes off like disingenuous pro-lifers who claim to want to stop abortions, but don’t actually pursue the policies that have been shown to do that.
I can’t believe we’re really talking about this.
It sure looks to me like more than 90% of terrorists are straight men. We can just have a bunch of dildos at the checkpoint, let the women and children through, then have some knowledgeable guys watch the men fellate the dildos. Perform well enough, you not only get through the screening, you might get a date.
The problem with profiling based on skin color, hair color, eye color, cheekbones, nose, beard, etc. is that none of those characteristics actually have anything to do with performing a hijacking or a bombing. You can, if you wish, after the fact determine what percentage of the terrorists were wearing boxers or briefs. That doesn’t mean that focusing your effort on men who wear boxers is justified or will be fruitful if the boxers-wearers turn out to be the majority.
Schneier has already identified characteristics that are observable that actually have something to do with conducting a hijacking or bombing. Yes, focus your efforts. No, don’t focus on the basis of things that are irrelevant to performing a hijacking or bombing.
The people who take Harris seriously on this – I’m looking at you eeyore – haven’t given any real thought to whether attention can be focused by using things that are more productive indicators than (apparent) race or (apparent) religion or (demonstrated) dildo-sucking ability.
While I, for one, welcome our new fellatio-judging overlords at the TSA as ushering in a new security theater that actually has significant entertainment value, those who want actual security can’t take Harris seriously for a moment.
Would it have applied to John Wilkes Booth?
“so it’s ridiculous that we’d give the same attention to someone who looks like Jerry Seinfeld than we would to someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden. ”
You could at least attempt to understand what he’s actually saying. He was stating that if Jerry Seinfeld (the man himself), for example, was going through security and we spent time patting him down, it would be “fair” but a complete waste of time. For somebody so passionate about being fair and reasonable, you aren’t when it comes to Sam Harris. Sam likes to say that people mischaracterize his statements (either consciously or subconsciously). I guess he’s not totally wrong.
What if The Terrists start recruiting celebrity look-alikes?
So should Muslim celebrities be profiled?
chigau @30:
The most likely explanation for why Harris chose Seinfeld is that Seinfeld is one of the most iconically famous people in the country, since that was Harris’ explicitly-stated point. In any case, I assume from your comment that you recognize that Harris was not using Seinfeld as a demographic example, but was speaking of Seinfeld himself, which was my point. How can you possibly object to PZ correcting this mischaracterization of what Harris said, unless you have an agenda and are twisting the facts to fit a pre-existing narrative?
Again, describe what the Muslim terrorist looks like, so only Muslim terrorists are patted down. And show why they aren’t smart enough, if that was the case, to enlist people not on the pat down profile. Harris reeks of paranoia and othering.
Parliament Hell @31
Alright, but you haven’t done Harris any favors, because this is a straw man. Jerry Seinfeld, or indeed anyone at all, can already get exactly the kind of reduced scrutiny Harris wants by signing up for TSA Pre-Check. The signs advertising this service are all over the airport. It’s hard to imagine that Harris doesn’t know about this given how much he’s traveled in the last decade.
@Parliament Hell & D L
The point is an absolutely stupid one to make. I mean, seriously? If a famous person whose ideology is known enters an airport, it doesn’t make sense to screen them as you would a potential terrorist? Really? No fucking shit…
Harris’ point is extremely disingenuous because he is not actually making the point that it doesn’t make sense to screen famous, well known people, he is making the case that it doesn’t make sense to screen someone that doesn’t look like a stereotypical version of what he thinks as a terrorist. Fuck him and his stupid-ass bigotry and fuck anyone who thinks he is being misrepresented, because he is not.
dereksmear, #37
Exactly what I was going to say.
Note that the celebrity examples given have been white, black and east Asian. Enough said.
Wow the Harris fanboys are already in full swing.
Parliament Hell
So if we filter out the 0,001% of the population who is a celeb, we can allocate our resources better to monitor the other 99,999% of the population? Are you arguing this is what Harris is trying to say? And this argument is better how? At least the interpretation of PZ doesn’t make Harris look like a complete fucking moron.
By the way, for anyone who thinks or claims that Harris doesn’t call for ethnic profiling:
“It is not enough for moderate Muslims to say “not in our name.” They must now police their own communities. They must offer unreserved assistance to western governments in locating the extremists in their midst. They must tolerate, advocate, and even practice ethnic profiling.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/bombing-our-illusions_b_8615.html
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia @41:
The first part of your comment indicates that you agree with the point Harris was making. That is, you agree that finite resources should not be wasted scrutinizing people who almost certainly pose no threat. The second part of your comment mischaracterizes Harris’ stance on profiling. He has said, again and again, that someone who LOOKS LIKE HARRIS should not be exempt from scrutiny by security. Does he look like “a stereotypical version” of a terrorist? Frankly, your comment reveals more about your idea of what a terrorist looks like than it does about anything Harris believes. Harris repeatedly has referred to white American jihhadists (e.g., John Walker Lindh, Adam Gadahn) in response to charges that his criticism of certain beliefs is racist.
No, his point was that famous people, like Seinfeld and himself, should not be subjected to any screening due to being famous. That is lost upon Harris’ defenders. Except Harris isn’t that famous. He is just another member of the common folk.
When Harris is using celebrity status as an indication that someone is not a threat, what he is really doing is saying that people “we know something about” need not be screened. And by that he means people like little, old ladies, toddlers, and you know, WHITE PEOPLE. People you can realibly exempt because “it doesn’t make sense” to target them. It’s the brown, foreign-looking people that you need to screen because you can’t trust them.
zenlike @43:
Whatever the merits of Harris’ argument, PZ clearly mischaracterized it in a fundamental way. The fact that you and others are dodging this point is telling (as Greenwald might say).
Wow, Harris’ little trick of not excluding himself has really worked on his fanboys…If you can’t see past it, you are an idiot.
And yet…who is he arguing that should be screened?
What I’ve heard of the Israeli equiv TSA, to “profile” passengers, while waiting for their airplane to board, sounds far more attractive (and effective), than what the USA-TSA is currently attempting. They actually will briefly talk to each person, to get a sense of their nervousness/anxiety of those who are attempting to pull a suicide mission. They focus not on racially profiling particular targets to interview, but greet each one, individually and assess their behavior, nervous ticks, avoiding eye contact, etc. (they also look for those who might be too extremely confident, with an assurance of being absolutely correct, etc). I understand, they have a much smaller pop of air travelers to assess there, and better training for the israeliTSA people, yet does not seem unachievable in ‘Murica. Better than the scrupulous screening of every item going onboard to the ridiculous lengths the US TSA goes; eg: 3 oz liquids per container with unlimited # of containers allowed? (ugh, recently there was a “dress code” kerfuffle where the TSA agent disallowed a teener from boarding due to her skirt being too mini. not to mention a case of forbidding a senior citizen from boarding due to colostomy bag attached,) ugh, getting off track
DL and Parliament Hell are right, and PZ is wrong.
For those actually paying attention, Sam Harris has repeatedly said that he is not proposing targeting brown skinned people and that he would include himself in the group to receive a higher level of scrutiny. He has also said (again, repeatedly) that he is really proposing anti-profiling, whereby TSA gives less attention (Note: less attention, not no attention) to the very old and very young (and, I suppose, well known celebrities), who are the least likely to be jihadists. This allows attention to be focused where it will do the most good.
If you’ve been to an airport lately, you might notice that several of Sam’s ideas have been adopted since he first proposed them several years ago. (Note: I am not saying that they were adopted because of Sam.) The very old and very young no longer need to take off shoes and jackets, for example. TSA Precheck, which ougaseon mentioned, is another recent change, also aimed at not squandering attention on those least likely to be jihadists. All of these things are positive developments, and are very much in line with Sam’s thinking on this subject.
The only honorable thing for PZ to do would be to post a retraction. I’m not naive enough to expect that he will.
Two comments:
El Al airlines reps have said in the past that they use profiling to avoid ever being hijacked. If it works for them, shouldn’t other airlines at least consider it?
Right after 9/11 Chris Rock (I think it was him) said on one of the late night shows that what he used to call racial profiling he now calls “damned good police work,” because, “we’re not being attacked by Swedes.” Though it was a joke, it does highlight that attacks are statistically more likely from a certain demographic, hence more security attention should be paid to that demographic. That much seems common sense. However small the extremist element is, NOT paying closer attention to that demographic could cost hundreds of lives. If one day, the majority of terrorist attacks come from white Christians, I would expect the profiling to change focus, but until then…
@sornord sornord
You mean the majority of terrorist attacks in the US except those that had nothing to do with the four airplanes, right? Just talking about the majority of those four? Yes. Yes, of course. Naturally just those four.
Because if you’re talking about the majority of terrorist attacks in the US period, you’ve already got that. And you never know when they’ll decide that hitting a plane while the attention is on the Muslims is just a great idea. You already had a white Christian guy fly a plane into a federal building as a murderous terrorist attack. That he didn’t have access to a bigger plane is more luck than anything.
slithey tove @50, I think you maybe don’t appreciate how far you’d have to scale up to get from Israel to the USA. Israel has ONE international airport, with fewer than 30 gates and fewer than 200 departures daily. I think you’d need to hire half of America to screen the other half in order to cover every US international airport.
Why are Harris’ supporters such dishonest people? It’s like they haven’t even watched the video in context and are just latching onto this Jerry Seinfeld example as if it’s the total context. It isn’t.
Harris says this “So we’ve all had this experience of going through security and seeing people who at a glance you can rule out as non-jihadists.”
Answer the question: Ruled out how?
Harris continues “We’re looking for people who are the functional equivalent of the 19 hijackers.”
Like this?
Harris continues again: “We’re not looking for 80 year old women from Okinawa…”
Because they’re Asian, women and old.
“We’re not looking for little girls from Norway…”
Because they’re young, white, and girls.
“If Jerry Seinfeld was going through the airport…”
Rich, white, famous, male.
What are we left for “functionally equivalent to the 19 hijackers” then?
Young brown men?
throwaway @55:
You are conflating two distinct ideas that Harris expressed. First, he suggests that certain demographics should virtually rule out people for additional scrutiny at security (e.g., old Asia women; young white girls). Second, he points out the absurdity of scrutinizing a well-known celebrity, without respect to what the celebrity’s demographic is (he has clarified this point by stating that his logic applies equally to Denzel Washington as it does to Seinfeld). He does not suggest applying additional scrutiny only to “young brown men,” and in fact explicitly includes his own demographic among those whom security should not exclude from scrutiny. He is very clear about this last point, so it simply is not possible to honestly interpret his ideas to suggest that what he means by “functionally equivalent to the 19 hijackers,” means “young brown men.” He is not a young brown man; he should be scrutinized at security.
throwaway @55 and confederates:
Please read my comment #51. The people who receive a higher level of scrutiny are those who do not fall into one of these categories:
1. Very old
2. Very young
3. Pre-screened via TSA Precheck
To repeat myself: this is no so much profiling as it is anti-profiling. Also to repeat myself: airports in the US are now doing this, and that is a new development since Sam Harris first commented on airport security several years ago. If you think Sam’s ideas are racist or stupid, you should think the same about what the TSA is doing now.
‘Although I don’t think I look like a jihadi, or like a man pretending not to be one, I do not mean to suggest that a person like me should be exempt from scrutiny.’
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/in-defense-of-profiling
Have to wonder why, given that Harris doesn’t actually think he fits the profile, he feels limited resources should wasted on him.
dereksmear @58:
I just told you why. Please read comments 57 and 51.
@Eric Ross:
And this is a position that we would be unlikely/unreasonable to take because law enforcement and public safety personnel in the USA have a history of being anti-racist and particularly brilliant?
Crip Dyke @60:
You need to work on your reading comprehension. I was referring specifically to recent changes in TSA policy regarding young children and the elderly; and TSA Precheck. The history of US law enforcement and public safety is irrelevant.
@57
Harris argued that ‘We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim’.
How is that not profiling?
One thing that bugs me to no end about these racial profiling discussions is that few people bother to sit down and look at the actual data. So I did exactly that a while ago, using numbers from a database of terrorist attacks.
Long story short: Sam Harris’ continued insistence on profiling is ridiculous. When confronted with that fact, all he did was flip from “we should increase screening of Muslims” to “we should decrease screening of certain people,” as if that was any different. It looks like he’s currently denying the existence of celebrity impersonators, and implying celebrities are more moral than other segments of society. Also, apparently grandparents (or people near the end of a lifetime filled with seeing injustice against their families) are less likely to be suicidal than young people.
Cripes, when did the atheist/skeptic community start worshipping pseudo-intellectuals who talk a good line but are impervious to reasoned counter-argument?
Eric Ross @57:
I do.
@Eric Ross, #61:
My reading comprehension is fine. You were using the practices of the TSA to cast doubt on accusations of racism and stupidity aimed at Harris. By associating Harris’ statements with TSA’s actions, you were hoping that Harris’ thoughts would take on a more respectable hue.
My response is that a hope that one will be seen as more respectable because of an alignment with a USA agency of law enforcement and public safety isn’t exactly a well-founded hope.
Whether the TSA agrees with Harris or Harris agrees with the TSA, neither of those formulations are in any way evidence for the intelligence or justice of Harris’ ideas and statements.
correct if I got this wrong, The idea being promoted given all the defense ( PZ’s characterization is at least wrong) that we should profile for the most likely suspects instead of the obviously innocent. The problem as given by security experts is the percent of real terrorists is very small even in the “suspect populations” and even more more so in the entire population but not really significantly so . That from actual recent events racial characterization is not predictive. That the most reliable way, it would appear, to find the correct profile would be after screening since those things that would be predictive are not externally observable.
Given the very small percent of terrorists the most reliable way to screen is to use a random procedure instead of an unreliable and basically unworkable method of profiling by belief.
and further as a side issue Harris in this is thinking like a stereotypical red neck
uncle frogy
El Al airlines reps have said in the past that they use profiling to avoid ever being hijacked. If it works for them, shouldn’t other airlines at least consider it?
El Al doesn’t fly nearly as many flights as American, or United. Personal interviews don’t scale.
Other airlines don’t consider it, because it’s an idiotic suggestion.
I believe Bruce explained that to Sam. But Sam isn’t listening because he’s decided he’s right and even having one of the security world’s best explainers-of-stuff explain it to him isn’t going to get through to him. Or, apparently, his fans.
The only reason old people, children, white christian people are excluded is because even though it’s certainly not impossible that one could conceivably be a terrorist or at least dangerous, the probability is perceived to be so utterly minuscule, that bothering, offending and humiliating these people is seen as a totally pointless allocation of resources, because really, what are the chances that one of them will be a dangerous killer? However, when it comes to brown, young men, even though the probability that one might be dangeorus is also utterly minuscule, in the eyes of these
racistsdefenders of the correct allocation of resources, it’s well worth bothering, offending, othering and humiliating anyone that fits the “brown, young and male” bill because that clearly is going to prevent all possible attacks.The same reasons why we don’t profile white, christian men, are the reasons why we shouldn’t profile brown men that “look like they might be muslim”. And yet…
If you think Sam’s ideas are racist or stupid, you should think the same about what the TSA is doing now
Is there anyone who doesn’t think what TSA is doing is stupid? Really?
For one thing, the precheck/safe-flight stuff is based on wealth. So only poor terrorists without frequent flier programs have to go through the basic check. How is that not stupid? It’s not racist, but it’s classist.
What if The Terrists start recruiting celebrity look-alikes?
This is something I believe Bruce has written about, someplace (I seem to recall reading it..) A smart terrorist would masquerade using the privileges of the wealthy – exactly what Harris is advocating. Getting TSA pre-check is a matter of flying a few segments on some airline with your frequent flier card, or buying miles on an airline (I get offers from United all the time) So the suggestion is to set up a system that’s easier to predictably game?
Also, the wealthy have privileges like being able to land in the civilian aviation area in a private plane and be inside the security perimeter. I was going to a conference up in Canada once, and a wealthy friend flew me and another guy up in his Piper VLJ. Because he thought it was amusing he suggested we bring guns, so we did. Guess what? When you land at an airport in a $2 million airplane, you don’t get patted down. You get forelock-tugging service, is what you get.
I think the most offensive part about Harris’ stupid argument is that he consistently assumes the terrorists are as stupid as he is, that they are unable to think, that they are unable to do basic research, or to learn. In all those respects, they are unlike Sam Harris.
What are Harris’ thoughts on gun control? Roughly 3 times as many people are murdered by guns/year than the death toll from 9/11 (on US soil anyway). That doesn’t include accidental shootings or suicides by the way. Nor does it include wounds.
So this what the fanboys have resorted to? Word-games?
Let’s divide society in roughly 10 groups. Anti-profiling is paying less attention to groups 1-5 in favour of groups 6-10. Profiling is paying more attention to groups 6-10 in favour of groups 1-5.
THEY ARE THE DAMN SAME THING.
Jesus fucking zombie christ. This is the state of the sceptical movement? Let it die. Please.
D L
So you are saying Harris is making the utterly moronic point you have made of it. Fantastic.
OK, watched the short (soft-balling) ‘interview’. Yeah, Harris is basically saying the same thing he was saying in the past.
For those who are swayed by his arguments, please, please go read Bruce Schneier’s rebuttal. Harris might be a smart guy on some topics, but here he is bloviating about a topic he barely knows anything about and disregarding the guy who is an expert on this. We are really in ‘creationist engineer disregarding the evo-biologists on the topic of evolution’ terrain here.
Heh, it’s exactly as I thought. Hitchens fanboiz are claiming Harris said nothing about P (the set of people who should be scrutinized) because he only mentioned !P.
What a fucking lark.
You know, were that I a burgeoning terrorist who knows the likes of Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t get inspected at the airport, I wouldn’t even need to board a plane anymore. Just get a chauffeur’s license and slip a bomb in his luggage when I drop him off at the airport. Then, because Harris has made a famous uberclass that doesn’t have to be inspected, they get used as unknowing mules. What solution do we have for possible terrorist limo drivers?
Also, exactly how famous does a person have to be? I’ve learned from years of exchanges which amount to “you’ve never seen ____? Really? How could you never see _____?” where the blank is anything from Twin Peaks to Star Wars. Literal grown adults who had never seen a movie with Harrison Ford in them. Exactly how much responsibility do the TSA screeners have for being suitably pop cultural aware to know who is famous enough to enjoy not getting a pat down? I’m a reasonably active member of the atheist movement, read Harris’s works, and I can tell you right now I couldn’t pick up out of a lineup. Jerry Seinfeld wearing a pair of unusual glasses and sporting anything other than that 90s haircut from his show, I wouldn’t recognize unless I was watching a show or something. Should special IDs be issued where they list the IMDB profile of the passenger?
I’m still wondering why we should be looking for someone who looks like Osama bin Laden.
1) He’S dead. You killed him. You can stop looking for him
2) If he were not dead he would not try to board a regular plane in the USA
3) If he boarded a plane in the USA you could be damn sure that this would be a really safe plane because it didn’t look like he planned to do any of the dying himself.
So what’s the thing with looking for somebody who “looks like Osama bin Laden”? What does that even mean? Yeah, I know, Harris says that he himself should be included, but
1) He probably gets that reduced security check already
2) He isn’t subjected to day to day discrimination outside of airports
CD
Did I recently tell you that I love you? Do you think we could develop a fellatometre and sell it to TSA?
It’s just a bonus dollop of racism that this whole thing is (among other things) based on the assumption that terrorists are comically stupid. However, in reality, and particularly ISIS, they have demonstrated that many of them are well educated, technologically savvy and really quite capable of developing a plan more sophisticated than entering an airport wearing a turban, a beard and carrying a bomb in a suitcase.
@Giliell:
I’m willing to do the hard development work.
There are two problems here:
1. Harris is bloviating on something he knows little about but has strong opinions on. Like a lot of intelligent, educated people (I’m looking at you, Richard Dawkins) Harris thinks he’s smarter and more informed than he actually is.
2. Harris is disregarding what experts like Bruce Schneier are saying because Harris thinks he knows better than people who actually do know better than Harris.
So does ‘someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden’ means Arab?
Ah, I wondered how many comments it would take to find some mindless pro-Harris troll who tries to excuse the inexcusable. Eeyore @#5. Single digits. Impressive.
Vicar, No. 81, I explicitly said I disagreed with Harris’ bottom line, but thank you for sharing.
@dereksmear
It means Sam Harris himself, can’t you read???
Also, this crowd of good men.
@83
And his new disciple Dave Rubin.
I just watched a clip of his talk with Rubin and Harris actually comes up with this.
‘It’s not that I want certain people profiled’
https://twitter.com/NataliasDad/status/643897655358267392
You couldn’t make it up.
Well, this has been fun. Here is some of the wisdom I have picked up from the PZ sycophants on this blog:
1. It doesn’t matter that PZ has misrepresented Sam Harris’ views, because Sam is a stupid racist and is getting what he deserves.
2. When Sam insists that he is not calling for the profiling of brown skinned people, he’s lying. We know this because he’s a stupid racist.
3. My 2-year-old daughter and my wife’s 88-year-old grandmother (who walks with difficulty) is just as likely as anyone else to pull off a terrorist attack aboard an airliner. Only stupid racists think otherwise.
4. Having your ideas adopted as policy by the TSA lends them no credence whatsoever, because this just shows that stupid racists think alike.
5. Profiling and anti-profiling are obviously the same thing. Profiling select a small group for greater scrutiny, leaving the bulk of the population with lesser scrutiny; anti-profiling does the opposite; but only stupid racists think that distinction is important.
6. It’s perfectly plausible that a terrorist organization could recruit a celebrity lookalike without running the risk of that lookalike reporting the group to the FBI. The lookalike could then easily pass as the actual celebrity at an airport because the TSA would make an exception and not check that person’s ID. Also, he/she would be exempt from luggage screening.
7. Despite what the TSA says about Precheck, you don’t really have to submit to prescreening, just buy some frequent flyer miles and you’re all set. Also, it’s only available to the rich, and probably racist also.
8. The lengthy conversation between Bruce Schneier and Sam Harris , in which Schneier finds that he agrees with Harris to a significant degree, is not worth reading, because it’s too long, and besides we all know Schneier schooled Harris anyway.
Sam Harris did not say somebody who looks like Jerry Seinfeld, he said Seinfeld himself as a celebrity. He was arguing that famous people should not be treated with the same scrutiny as anonymous people.
here is a link to the part of the interview where he said this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQqxlzHJrU0&feature=youtu.be&t=28m45s
“jerry seinfeld is one, when you see a famous celebrity going through security treated as though he has become a jihadist with nobody noticing is crazy making”
Didn’t manage to read all comments so my apologies if I’m being redundant.
If you divide passengers in group A (less likely) and group B (more likely) and subject the latter to a more accurate search, you automatically subject group A to a LESS accurate search.
Which means: you actually make things EASIER for the would-be terror organization.
They just need someone who looks like group A, and suddenly their plot becomes much more solid.
Because, contrary to our perception, it’s really hard to cut the line between two groups of humans.
Eric Ross
Really? You got “agrees to a significant degree” from that? Reading comprehension? Heard of it?
Also, you linked to a piece in which Harris DOES advocate for racial profiling, so you are proving YOURSELF that your “anti-profiling” talking point is just a red herring.
But yeah, WE are the sycophants. The sceptical community truly is fucked if people like Harris are the people to look up to and idiots like you wait in line to fall hook line and sinker for it.
We should scrutinize everybody BECAUSE it slows up the boarding procedure.
If we care enough about “safety” to scrutinize some subsection of the flying public, then we ought to make the entire flying public pay an equivalent price. Including the “pre-screened” elites.
1- Because they’re not misrepresented, only stated in a way that makes the racism blatant.
2- Profile the muslims!….. which most people in the country think of as middle-eastern…. which are generally viewed as brown…. Neverminding the plenty of NOT-brown muslims who look like exactly the sort of people that would be treated as ‘less likely’ to be terrorists. So yeah, go profile muslims (the majority of whom are NOT terrorists)… somehow… I’m sure you can tell me exactly how to pick a muslim out of the crowd, and how to tell a non-muslim middle-eastern person from a muslim one, right?
3- Sure, why not? If you yourself were a terrorist willing to go on a suicide mission why wouldn’t you use your daughter or aged mother in law as a way to avoid scrutiny?
4- The TSA accomplishes shit all, and most if not all of their policies are beyond idiotic. So having your ideas adopted by a group known for gross incompetence and pointlessness makes your ideas rather suspect.
5- Yeah! Because…. anti-profiling means you look at everyone equally, thus no profiling! Oh wait, no, that’s not what’s meant here… Anti-profiling means not looking hard at most people… and instead looking harder… at a very small group…. Which is TOTALLY DIFFERENT GUYS from profiling!
6- wtf are you on?
7- Well, it DOES cost $85, which is good however for 5 years apparently. And it says “No need to remove:
Shoes
Laptops
3-1-1 liquids
Belts
Light jackets”
And you provide finger prints and a passport… which would not deter a suicidal terrorist. What’s to stop someone like me, white, young, female from doing this and sneaking nasty liquids onto the plane? I’m suddenly ‘trusted’! (neverminding that my actual job already has required I be fingerprinted and background checked considering I work with CII substances daily).
8- Okay, I read the whole damn 13,000 words. No, he does NOT agree with Harris to a significant degree and holy fuck did I EVER find a SHIT TON of quotes from Harris that are just one degree shy of saying “profile young brown men”.
All emphasis added is mine:
The kind of people who are going to “look Muslim” while committing a terrorist attack in North America are people like these geniuses: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/john-nuttall-amanda-korody-found-guilty-in-b-c-legislature-bomb-plot-1.3094670 A pair of white, former heroin addicts who somehow got the idea into their head to become “al-Qaeda Canada.” But even they, with a little bit of thinking, could have decided to dress more like they used to and perhaps miss scrutiny as they acted. Fortunately for everyone they were being duped by undercover cops from the start.
In regards to the point about children being a threat:
Harris fan:
Rowan rebut:
Hmm, let’s see what Sam Harris himself has to say. From the piece linked by aforementioned Harris fan:
Welp, that sure seems to suggest Harris does think that children are a potential threat. In light of his recent “clarification” that he doesn’t want extra screening on children, it makes him a liar. Or at least Harris is the one misrepresenting Harris’ views, not PZ. That piece is also full of Harris saying why Muslims are the threat. He’s not suggesting a small portion of Muslims, he’s using language suggesting a vast community of Muslims working together to commit suicide attacks. His recent defense, when you read that piece, is bullshit.
I reiterate:
The only person misrepresenting Sam Harris’ views on profiling is Sam Harris.
“Anti-profiling” my ass.
Another point Bruce Schneier made years ago is that anything like TSA Pre-check is a gift to the hypothetical well-funded terrorist group: they can have a few dozen of their members apply for Pre-check. Most of them are turned down, but the terrorist group now knows which half dozen members to send on the next suicide mission.
Statistically, most terrorists are male, but a policy of always waving women through isn’t safe*, because a lot of people, of any gender, will let a spouse or other close relative put something in their luggage. Since Lockerbie, the security people ask whether your luggage has been outside of your control since you packed it, but if I tell them that the shuttle driver put it in the back of the bus, or I had my hotel store it for three hours after I checked out, they say that’s not what they meant.
*or, at least, no safer than just letting everyone through: as long as we have huge quantities of uninspected air ca
Sorry, I accidentally typed “return” too soon:
fixing the footnote: no safer than just letting everyone through. As long as we have huge quantities of uninspected air cargo traveling on passenger jets, inspecting passenger bags is plugging the smaller of two holes.
Eric Ross @57:
It doesn’t get any less idiotic with repetition.
“I reject these accusations that our hiring has become more racially discriminatory. Why, we hire just as many blacks today as we did when our company was 1/10th its current size; it’s just that we hire ten times more white people now. But that’s not anti-black, it’s pro-white!”
Trying to get terrorists on a plane is probably a dead tactic at this point in any case. If you want to attack aircraft you’ll do something different. Or more likely try some other target, like commuter trains or city buses.
@timgueguen:
Which has been done.
You know that, right?
Because no one should think Islamist terrorism is somehow uniquely fixated on aircraft.
I mean, duh.
I’m not saying aircraft security isn’t important. We’ve learned over the years that it is. But the level of predictability Harris implies exists that …
a) Islamist terrorists are still primarily after passenger aircraft,
and b) other kinds of terrorists are not targeting passenger aircraft
and thus c) we should be focusing aircraft security on threats from muslims (not even “Islamists”)
…simply isn’t there.
I could see (but not agree with; I like my liberty) ignoring the problems with false positives. The *real* issue is false negatives, especially when they can be crafted. If white, female nuns, never get scrutinized, they are the perfect agent.
What I took away from Schneier’s takedown the first time around was that you get greater benefit from truly random screening because it makes the system less gameable. All I’m seeing from Harris’ defenders this time is a straw man of that argument. Searching grannies and children do not make the system safer because you might catch on of them with a bomb, no one is saying that. Searching them means that the terrorists have no boundary conditions to work with when they select their operatives.
So how about some of you fine defenders address the actual rebuttals to Harris’ assertions rather than strawmanning, and arguing from personal incredulity.
Hell, even I can game the system. On my last holiday I noticed that every time we went through security Ms. Fishy got her bags swabbed for explosives. Our school usually travels with Ms. in front, then the Small Fry, and me at the rear.* I started paying attention and noticed that in groups travelling together it was always the first person through the metal detector that got swabbed. So I tested it, and sure enough, when I was first through I got swabbed. Now, my sample size isn’t enough to conclusively say that this is how they always do it, I realise that, but had I been trying to get explosives on a plane during that trip I would have been successful.
Don’t give the terrorists patterns to work with and as a bonus you end the racism inherent in Harris’ proposed system. Win/win.
*That’s just how we roll. I do it because they’re both short enough that I can see over their heads in a line. I suspect Ms. Fishy does it because she doesn’t trust me to know where I’m going…. ;)
Could someone clarify what the threshold for fame is for not performing terrorist acts? Do you have to have a top award in your field, like an Oscar or Grammy? Does it apply to foreign celebrities, or just US ones? Or just English speaking ones? Howabout sports stars? If your sports team is famous, do you get a pass if you just signed on? What if you’re famous in a fairly narrow field, like the world’s Backgammon Grandmaster, or the best Hollywood pyrotechnical effects guru? What if you’re famous but quirky – would Hemingway have gotten a free pass on the assumption he’d never kill himself?
Or how about this question: as famous celebrities and suicidal terrorists are both vanishingly small groups, could the lack of overlap be less about category exclusivity and more about probability?
Sam Harris probably doesn’t take public transport or cruise ships, he just wants to share his plane trips with less smelly brown people,
Oh come off it. Either you know full well you are misrepresenting Sam’s position for the sake of cheap smearing, or you are incompetent at understanding the basic math of any risk calculation. Let’s address your misakes:
#1. Sam has not said we need to racially profile. He has clearly said he’s talking about anti-profiling, letting through low risk people easier. He has even very clearly included himself and all individual males traveling alone in the higher risk categories. And even if he were just referring to Muslims, that’s not a race. Would looking for communists be racial profiling? The risky ones are the ones with ideologies in their heads to do harm, and statistically correlative risk factors, and let through the statistically unlikely. It is a mathematical argument, not a racial one.
#2 He didn’t say somebody who *looks* like Jerry Seinfeld. He said Jerry Seinfeld, and that is exactly who he meant. What are the statistical odds that Jerry Seinfeld has suddenly turned into a terrorist? Again, making use of *all* available information and risk factors is mathematically more optimal than ignorning them. We have information about Jerry Seinfeld that we don’t have about the random public, and such information allows us to put him in a low-risk category and spend more time on people in higher risk categories.
#3 Your whole white vs brown thing is your own racism. Sam never said any such thing and you know it.
#4. Regarding Bruce Schneier didn’t school him on this. If you actually read their discussion, Schneier completely agreed with Harris’ position on the risk calculations. Where Schneier disagreed wasn’t on Harris’ principles here, but on the efficacy and cost/benefit of implementing the system. Further, Schneier is very likely wrong about that because he failed to actually address the calculations of the costs and benefits, as outlined here: http://adnausi.ca/post/24007290276
Note that the same link shows where both (including Harris) may be wrong, but that Harris is more likely correct, and both agree he is on principle.
#5 Harris’ suggestion doesn’t “ignore the problem of false positives”. It reduces them. Right now, screening everyone means everybody is a false positive, except for the rare terrorist caught in these checks, which I believe right now totals zero. So everybody is a false positive. Harris’ suggestion reduces that, and is correct in that as the above link demonstrates.
#6 If you think its built on bigotry then you are a horrible cynic. Harris lays out his exact reasons and they are exactly mathematical and are correctly mathematical. This is exactly how risk caclulations and security are done every day and he has simply applied it to airport screening. That you simply ignore all of that and inject your own unsubstantiated belief that this is some sort of effort based on bigotry just says you are incapable of rational argumentation on its own merits. It’s cheap cynicism, not an argument. You have pre-judged that any argument of this nature must be based on bigotry, and that prejudicial assertion is, itself, your bigotry. This is a math problem, not a racial issue. (What race are we even talking about?)
#7 You state “There is an assumption that people who look a certain way based on race will be less humane, more prone to violence, and a greater danger to law abiding citizens of White America, who would never ever harm anyone” That is complete garbage and your own creation. Harris has not said a think like that at all.
Let me try to make this simpler for you. Suppose seagulls are harmful to us. All seagulls are birds, but very few birds are seagulls. To identify the seagulls we need to look at animals closely. Given finite resources, it reduces our ability to find seagulls if we spend our time looking at lions and tigers and bears. The odds of them being seagulls in disguise is low to zero. So spending very little time to dismiss lions and tigers and bears, and more time on birds, maximizes our ability to find seagulls with those finite resources. That is pure mathematical probability. I’m not bigoted against birds in saying this. It’s math.
Airport screening is looking for people who are a greater risk to the airplane and passengers. All people are not equal risks. Yes, all people are capable, but capability is not the same as probability or risk.
Now if it makes you feel all good inside to smear other people making perfectly valid mathematical (and philosophical) arguments by trying to turn it into some racial issue, that makes you a very small person. Grow up.
And FYI, by Harris’ arguments, if you bothered to actually listen to them, is that all of the men in the photo are riskier than a little old lady in a wheelchair. And he’s right.
Nope, Sam is a racist. A carefully spoken one, but his implications are bright neon signs. Especially since he offers NO alternative that makes sense. His let people through is bullshit from a security standpoint. When in doubt, ask the experts, not a pseudo-know-it-all.
Any evidence to back up that assertion? Any terrorist could hide explosives in the tubes on a wheelchair. Not a good argument for letting anybody through without a search, as the experts would tell you. Why are you so resistant to listening to real experts in the field?
I’m starting to believe that humanity can be divided into two distinct categories: People who understand what Sam Harris is saying and people who don’t. I know PZ is intelligent, I know many of the commenters on here are as well… but I can’t reconcile that with their apparent inability to understand the simple points Harris is making. It genuinely seems to me almost as though they’re deliberately misunderstanding him, but obviously that’s not true. Maybe this is a blue-black dress vs white-gold dress situation.
Corwyn:
If white, female nuns, never get scrutinized, they are the perfect agent.
Shit, a habit and a hijab do perform the same function. Hmm, looks like Schneier has a point about over complicated plans.
SW,
Harris is not trying to make a point. He said something stupid and bigoted a few years ago. He can’t let it die, because every time someone calls him on it, he tries to rephrase what he meant. He was for profiling Muslims, he even used the word “profiling”, but now he says he was supporting some bullshit he calls “anti-profiling”.
And his personality cult is lapping it the fuck up.
It’s amazing so many atheists hero worship that asshole, and yet think religion is the main source of credulity and authoritarianism. Wait… It’s not that amazing.
It isn’t that hard at all to deliberately dress up like a little old lady in a wheelchair, to make fools of people like you and Harris who like to make assumptions about risks.
As is often the case with these kind of threads I find it odd we suddenly have a group of Sam Harris defenders show up. I don’t remember seeing any of these people here before.
gmacs
You must understand that when he said “children”, he didn’t actually mean children as in “human beings under the age of 18”, which is the official definition, or even “human beings under the age of 12”, which would be more colloquial, but “human beings under the age of 12 who lookl ike they’re out of a Ralph Lauren add, at least until those bastards hire brown children”.
Yeah, apart from the sickening accusation that millions of muslims would happily blow up their own children.
ad NAusica
So, how do you identify everybody who is “muslim” in a security check. PLease pay attention to the word everybody. Because it’s trivially easy to identify the woman with a hijab as muslim with high probability, but for this system to work you need a very safe method to identify everybody who is muslim.
Fossilfishy
Our flock* travels the other way round: Mr, #1, little one, me. that’s due to me usually being the language savy when abrouad (until we travel to the strange and wonderful land of Exel) so I can deal with problems should anybody get stuck behind the underground barrier or such.
What’S the English word for a group of hippos, btw?
#110 Timguegen — indeed, it’s very obvious. And obvious that none of them read Schneier and appreciated his basic point.
This continuous outpouring of “don’t profile ME, profile HIM!” is hilarious (and a bit 1984 Orwellian): it makes me realise that not only did the terrorists achieve exactly what they set out to do, they must also be laughing heartily while we continue their work and fight each other over who gets to be anti-profiled first.
The screening problem:
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/3/140216#sec-10
Figure 1.
A fairly major part of the problem.
Louis. /relurks
Wheelchair-user here. The last few times I’ve flown, I’ve been subject to the full pat-down as well as inspection and swabbing of the chair. They even made me take my shoes off.
I can’t complain about being treated just like everybody else in line, even if it is a complete pain in the ass to go through security.
If you look at who has actually hijacked a plane in the 2010s (so far), exactly the same number were young Saudi men and 85 year old retired nuns. (Caveat: I’m relying on Wikipedia for my list of hijackings in the 2010s, so could have missed some.)
Ah, anti-profiling, the new Harrisite buzz word.
@FossilFishy #100
Of course, as you’re casing the security under the pretense of flying casually with family, you’re also establishing yourself and your family as “safe” travelers.
Ad Nausica @ 103:
Sorry to ohmu on your parade, but…
“It’s not that we’re giving Group A less pie, we’re just giving Group B more pie! The fact that this means Group A ends up with less pie is some sort of strange and completely unforeseeable coincidence.”
“Ok, guys, new tactic…” Holds up two tickets.
First of all, in the minds of many in the western world, “Muslim” is synonymous with a pretty specific racially-based stereotype. You can pretend you don’t know that, but you just come off looking kinda dumb when you do.
Secondly, how do you (or he) propose to profile for Muslims without using racially-based visual cues? I’m asking seriously here.
Only if “Communist” was heavily correlated in the public mind with a pretty specific racially-based stereotype. Then the answer would be “yes.”
I missed the part where he talked about his plan to profile in an airport security line for ideology in people’s heads.
Could you repost that bit?
…unless one actually makes the apparent mistake of taking it seriously and tries to apply it to the real world, in which case it becomes obviously racial.
So long as we’re assuming spherical cows, though, we’re fine.
…and that’s just your Point #1.
There is no such thing as “anti-profiling”. It makes no sense! Profiling involves sorting people into two groups: those you don’t trust, those you do. Announcing that you’re not profiling, you’re anti-profiling, because you’re sorting people into those you do trust, and those you don’t, is exactly the same thing.
I’m just kind of stunned at the gullibility of Sam Harris fanatics.
It’s a bad mathematical argument that only someone ignorant of the basic statistical concepts of sensitivity and specificity versus false positive/false negative rates in a low risk population would make.
Also, Harris’ claim that he himself shget out of jaiould also be profiled is, of course, a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card. it’s like the millionaire politicians telling the population that we will all have to make painful sacrifices. Everybody knows that pain doesn’t travel that far.
What is the most probable scenario for Harris being identified as “there’s this slightly semitic looking man travelling alone”? Run his data, see he’s Sam Harris, see his travel history, wave him through. Yeah, he’ll be treated just like Muhamed Özdemir who’s also a bit nervous because it’s his first trip by plane…
It’s telling that his fans think that this is actually an argument that gets him off the hook.
+++
BAck to the airport theatre: As others have pointed out, planes are not the only medium of mass transportation that can be bombed, but maybe London and Madrid don’t coun’t cause they’re not on US territory. And everybody knows that you cannot even attempt to install security remotely close to regular airport security for the millions and millions of people using public transport on their way to work every day. So how do you prevent attacks there? By stopping the terrorists long before they finish their bombs. Good old-fashioned intelligence that doesn’t simply harass people for “looking muslim”, but goes with information, watches and then identifies actual terrorists, like with the German Sauerlandgruppe. You’ll notice that two of them were ethnic Germans and did not look “vaguely semitic” at all…
sornord sornord (#52)
Did you ever stop to wonder if maybe this could already be the case but doesn’t get acknowledged because terrorism is so strongly linked to being non-white and non-Christian in most people’s heads that even when white Christians (like Oath Keepers, Operation Rescue, the KKK, and Cilven Bundy’s pals) engage in explicit terrorist attacks, their acts are written off as something else—or even lauded as patriotism or heroism?
And I swear I had not read about Ahmed MOhamed when I wrote about Muhamed Özdemir…
@121
Indeed, in 2010 he wrote
‘even a liberal like myself, enamored as I am of thinking in terms of harm and fairness, can readily see that my vision of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years.’ (The Moral Landscape ,90)
Because of course, Sam Harris will have to make sooooo many sacrifices. He’ soooo brave.
The more I hear from Harris, the worse it gets. I have to admit that – of the four horsemen – the only two I was really aware of for a long time were Dawkins and Hitchens. Today, I’m not at all sorry to have “missed out” on Harris for so long.
dereksmear
And as I wrote way above, it would be really unfair to ban all US Americans from entering other countries….
PZ,
I’m a little stunned at your inability to admit that you mischaracterized Harris’ point about Seinfeld. You are doing a disservice to society by muddying the public record, clearly because you have a pre-existing view that you are bending the evidence to support. Surely you can see that. And your point about profiling vs. anti-profiling is obtuse or disingenuous. Selecting one more more minority subsets of people (e.g., people who had leading roles on the sitcom Seinfeld) to exclude from extra scrutiny at security is not the same as selecting one or more subsets to subject to extra scrutiny. It insults your own intelligence to pretend you don’t understand the difference.
Nope, the argument of itself is disingenuous. It is a form of profiling, and only those hiding the truth will say otherwise. Besides, who does on listen to about security? Security experts, or a man who can never admit they made a mistake? SH is such a man.
@127
So if we give a pass to celebrities, blonde little girls, old grandmas, scandinavians, “asian” people, anyone who “clearly doesn’t look muslim”, etc, etc….where the fuck do you thing this is going?
Jesus fucking christ, you are stunned about mischaracterisation and obtuseness? Seriously?
D L #127
Now you are just trolling.
It’s tiresome.
D L, if you are making one group have *less* scrutiny, that means their level of scrutiny is the bare minimum, the baseline. That means anyone NOT in that group is experiencing *more* scrutiny as compared to that baseline group. And when the baseline group that Harris suggests is fucking huge, that means that it is a small group (young, middle-eastern men) that is getting the greater level of scrutiny…. which is the SAME DAMN THING as profiling!
Profiling: One group gets more scrutiny.
Your Anti-profiling: The base level of scrutiny is lowered, so one group gets more scrutiny
Actual anti-profiling: everyone gets the same level of scrutiny.
Good grief. Fucking set theory, how does it work?
Now, since the argument seems to boil down to “we’re possibly missing suicidal jihadists* because we’re wasting too many security resources on Jerry Seifeld and Betty White”, how much do these folks travel?
*other suicidal terrorists are fine
Is “wrong about Seinfeld” going to be the new “wrong about Hitman?” A seriously weak argument that at best is pedantic without detracting from the main argument, yet is brought up relentlessly as if doing so invalidates everything?
I’m so excited.
sornord sornord @52:
Did you know that since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, there have been over 100 right-wing terror plots, conspiracies, and rampages within the United States?
And did you also know that since 9/11/01, homegrown terrorists have taken more USAmerican lives than Islamic extremists?
Right-wing extremists and sovereign citizens pose a greater domestic threat than Islamic extremists. I wonder when Sam Harris will get around to suggesting we profile them. And how would such a profile work anyway? Perhaps he can answer that after he answers how you can visually profile Muslims. After all, Muslims don’t all look alike. In fact, many Muslims aren’t of Arab descent. Some are white or black.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/what-i-really-think-about-profiling
Sam Harris replies to this in a podcast, but given how hard everyone seems to have been working to misunderstand him, I don’t expect that this will clear anything up.
@D L:
PZ is actually assuming Harris is not making the stupidest argument in the face of the Earth. “Let’s exclude sufficiently well-known people from the security theatre because we know them to be safe” is something that does not help concentrate resources at all, because celebrities are a vanishingly small part of the people who walk through airport security.
.
That, of course, is the extremely charitable, context-free version of Harris’ argument, one that merely makes him look like a moron as opposed to a racist moron.
.
Since he also said they SHOULD be profiling Sam Harris himself if the last terrorist looked like him, then his actual argument is “Let’s exclude people who don’t look like the last terrorist from the security theatre”. That is also dumb, because not only it targets the last terrorist as opposed to the next one, it tells terrorists exactly what they need to look like to avoid detection.
Brown people? When did Harris say we should subject non-whites to more scrutiny than white people? I’m not a Harris lackey, and I grow more and more tired of hearing him complain about people mischaracterizing his views. But to his credit, it seems to be true. And that has got to be annoying.
lemurcatta
Probably when he said that you should be looking for people who “look like Osama bin Laden”?
Or all the other incidences listed.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked all other people who willfully shut their ears to Harris’ not very subtle dogwhistles:
How do you reliably identify all muslims at the airport. Please pay attention to “all”.
Lemurcatta…. How about, right here, blatantly, in these quotes? I will bold and italicize for you, just so you can see.
#139, Harris has answered already answered your question. He is not suggestion we look for Muslims. He is suggesting we exclude from high scrutiny people who are reliably are not jihadists. See below.
#140: except many old ranchers and their wives in Texas are Mexican, and thus “brown.” Also, Harris has acknowledged that ISIS is now inspiring young white men to take up Islamism. In Harris’ view, I as a 26 year old white male would need to be subjected to scrutiny at the airport, where as hopefully my 89 year old Mexico born grandfather would not. Re: your Ralph Lauren quote, one of the first ads I stumbled across when I googled “Ralph Lauren fashion ad” was a black women with a labrador retriever.
I personally have reservations about profiling of any kind, including Harris’ “anti-profiling.” But both of you are plainly misrepresenting the author’s views.
lemurcatta,
Please take a look at the “long debate” in which Harris was participant. You can find the link at 86, ironically linked to by a Harris fanboy. Please tell me how we are misrepresenting his views.
You explicitly ignored the part where he singled out middle-eastern young men.
As a young WHITE male (no wonder you’re acting like this, honestly) you would NOT be subject to this extra scrutiny. I mean, shit, you could probably blow up a plane and you’d be labelled a ‘lone wolf’ instead of a terrorist. Rather like another young, white man who has blatant white supremacist ties that shot a bunch of black people in a church… and all sorts of people came out of the woodwork to say that the attack wasn’t racially motivated.
By trying to say that Sam Harris is not singling out middle-eastern (one of many ‘brown’ peoples in the world, and the ones being referenced by ‘brown’ in this conversation), even when he straight says that middle-eastern young men are the prime suspects, you sound JUST LIKE those people saying that the church shooter wasn’t racist and didn’t shoot them because of racism.
You honestly look just as blatantly, desperately stupid.
Problem 1: How do you fucking know who’s reliably not a jihadist?
Problem 2: Jihadists are not the only people willing to commit terrorist acts in a plane.
Problem 3: Harris explicitly singled out “people who look like Osama bin Laden”, “young, Middle-Eastern men” and “women wearing a niqab and the men travelling with them” as people worthy of extra scrutiny.
vaiyt
Don’t use sense, logic or arguments, they’re lost. AFAIKT, they don’t work on them ‘Cause they’Re wearing the Sam Harristrade&; Teflon anti-argument suit.
Harris critic: Harris wants to profile people of a certain ethnicity
Harris Fanboy: Nooooo, you’re missrepresenting him, he never said that, you’re racist!
HC: Here’s a bunch of quotes from Harris
HF: Here, he said something else, too!
HC: That doesn’tnegate the other stuff. Also it doesn’t make sense
HF: Nooooo, you’re missrepresenting him, he never said that, you’re racist!
HC: Please, tell me how his proposals would work in reality. Also, tell me how not looking for people who are not young middle eastern men is different from looking only at young middle eastern men.
HF: Nooooo, you’re missrepresenting him, he never said that, you’re racist!
Repeat ad nauseum
I’m not talking about the consonants. I’m just saying skip the vowels.
Stop misrepresenting me!
Kind of a side issue, but what’s with the ageism? We should not scrutinize 80 year olds because they can’t possibly be terrorists? Older people completely lose their passion and interest in politics when they hit retirement? No one over 70 ever thought a cause worth dying for? I suppose you could argue that anyone who has made it to 70 has demonstrated at least some impulse control by not yet being a suicide bomber, but that’s an awfully small margin to risk a plane on. Also, it is not unknown for people to be tricked into carrying dangerous or illegal substances with them. Or is it impossible for an 89 year old to carry a suitcase as a favor to his 26 year old grandson–which just happens to contain a bomb (or, far more often, drugs or other illegal substances)?
dianne
Also, an 89 year old person might think their life is over anyway, so why not make an impression when you leave it?
sw, #136
1. We can ignore the famous celebrity thing (including PZ’s mischaracterization of it) altogether. Let’s get rid of that. The profiling or not profiling of celebrities is not an issue at all. The Jerry Seinfeld issue does nothing to address the issue of profiling.
2. So just who should be profiled? He’s only saying who shouldn’t be scrutinized (old Okinawan lady, little girls, etc). This immediately requires an answer to the question, “Then who should be scrutinized?” To this he just says I fall in the category of people who should be scrutinized. So… men? Is that his answer to profiling? Profile all men? What about 25-year old Okinawan men? And are we letting women go altogether?
3. He has previously said more than once that we need to profile Muslims or people who might be Muslims. He has said this explicitly. So this now needs an explicit retraction. He hasn’t done that.