(if I were the) King of the Forest

If this only mattered for screening on airliners it would probably amount to no more than an inconvenience and a small incremental danger to a few passengers. But it seems to represent a more general trend: increased control and centralized security measures superseding distributed security measures; more trust in authorities to keep everyone safe and less trust in individuals to shoulder some responsibility (and to be allowed the tools to implement that responsibility) for their own security – security in the broadest sense, including not only personal safety but financial, social, and interpersonal security as well. It is consistent with much of modern political and social practice: we will cede our responsibility along with our freedom to some authority, which will promise in return to keep us safe and happy.

At one point during the Bush/Kerry presidential campaign, well after it was clear we would not find any significant stash of chemical or biological or nuclear agents in Iraq, The Boston Globe published an editorial in which they opined that what we needed to know about John Kerry was what he would have done about Iraq “knowing what he knows now”. I thought the suggestion was rather stupid: no one ever gets to go back and redo their important decisions based on what he learns later. The question we really needed answered was how John Kerry would make decisions in the face of inevitable ambiguity, not how he would re-think those decisions in the clarity of hindsight.

In all the criticism I have heard about the analysis and use of the Iraq intelligence, and especially about the political decisions based on that intelligence, the one thing that never seems to be mentioned is the context in which that analysis and decision-making was taking place. We talk about it as if the analysis and decision-making process were a matter only of political consequence, or as if the option to do nothing implied zero cost so the only question to answer was whether doing something – that is whether going to war – would make things better or worse. But that is not the environment in which events unfolded.

Yet another story (from The Boston Globe) in which some mathematical or statistical analysis is reported with no critical evaluation. And yet again I register my protest…