How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane. If we’re only looking at the numbers, that’s a pantomime show.
In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified.
> How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane.
Experts have widely decried airport security procedures as nonsense, including the penetration testers who are charged with proving whether or not these measures are effective. An evidence-based examination has therefore proven these measures are, if not lunacy, at least not practical.
Intelligence officers, on the other hand, wrote up detailed explanations of how airplanes could be hijacked and turned into missiles. These people were experts in their field, and their hypotheticals were all reasonable. They were ignored, essentially, because people didn't want to deal with it.
When it comes to the dangers posed by hurricanes, it's fairly easy to determine if someone is coming from an evidence-based perspective, or a lunacy-based perspective. Are they engineers? Do they understand weather patterns and hydrology? Are they talking about how likely the events they're talking about are likely to occur over the next five, ten, one-hundred years? Or are they screaming about how God is going to level the city because he doesn't like it when two men kiss?
> In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified
But that's blurring the picture by mixing two orthogonal concerns. Assuming your studies are correct, the pantomime shows are still not effective in preventing terrorism, no matter how much false sense of security they provide.
That the false sense of security may have its own positive effect is a different aspect that doesn't have to do anything with the original purpose of the measures or the soundness of the studies.
As an analogy, if a startup sucessfully executed a pivot, this doesn't magically redeem their original business case.
If someone before the pivot predicted that the startup would fail because of their unconvincing business case then yes, at a high level, their prediction is wrong (the startup did not fail) but the reasons behind their prediction (the original business model was unsustainable) are still valid.
In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified.