They literally named it Skynet. They have an evil sense of humor.
Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn't a terrible idea. But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world. Maybe only 50% of the people you detect are actually terrorists. Maybe it's even worse than that. We can't even test it because there is no validation set and unreliable labels.
The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial.
And the more I read the details, the more alarmed I am. The 50% figure I used above may have been way too high. The base rate of terrorists way too low and they have very little data to begin with.
A drone strike typically kills identified terrorist targets but also unidentified targets. The trick is that as long as bystanding casualities (also children yes - or as the drone operators call them "fun sized terrorists") have not been identified they're automatically counted as terrorists. (see also https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/)
I don't think now that the beast has been unleashed it can be controlled or harnessed with peaceful means (the tools of democracy). It will take more than a couple of middle-class people with billboards handing out flyers. America is fuelling its own terrorism and creating hate so they can continue their war on terror. Every terrorist act in the West will further drive the hate and justify surveillance. Pretty sure this is a downward spiral which ultimately has only losers.
Which steps can the average Joe take which aren't considered radical by the system? Do you know any please share because I don't.
Dr. King was considered a radical by the system but I will still leave this here:
>The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. ... Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967)
"The simple fact is that non-violent means do not work against Evil. Gandhi's non-violent resistance against the British occupiers had some effect because Britain was wrong, but not Evil. The same is true of the success of non-violent civil rights resistance against de jure racism. Most people, including those in power, knew that what was being done was wrong. But Evil is an entirely different beast. Gandhi would have gone to the ovens had he attempted non-violent resistance against the Nazis. When one encounters Evil, the only solution is violence, actual or threatened. That's all Evil understands."
>[President George W. Bush] has a vision which can be described with two other words: Manichaean paranoia... the notion that he is leading the forces of good against the empire of evil, that in that setting, the fact that we are morally superior justifies us committing immoral acts. And that is a very dangerous posture for the country that is the number one global power. ... The fact is he squandered our credibility, our legitimacy, and even respect for our power.
-Zbigniew Brzezinski, Former National Security Adviser, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, March 14, 2007
Cultural side note:
"For Hindu thought there is no Problem of Evil" -Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
There is great anxiety among the Western Judeo-Christian tradition about "Evil winning out over Good" that is not so much felt by far Eastern cultures (Hindu, Zen, Taoist etc.). For instance, the concept of Yin and Yang and how they define each other and rely on each other.
St. Thomas Aquinas actually paralleled this concept quite briefly in The Summa contra Gentiles, though such an idea is quite taboo among many fundamentalist Christian traditions today:
>There are in the world many good things which would have no place unless there were evils. Thus there would be no patience of the righteous, if there were no ill-will of the persecutors; nor would there be any place for a vindicating justice, were there no crimes; and even in the physical order there would be no generation of one thing, unless there were corruption of another. Consequently, if evil were entirely excluded from the universe by the divine providence, it would be necessary to less the great number of good things. This ought not to be, since good is more powerful in goodness than evil is in malice, as was shown above. Therefore evil should not be utterly excluded from things by the divine providence.
Could you provide some notable examples where violence has resolved issues in the long term and did not lead to more issues/violence? This thread is in relation to the religious wars currently going on in the middle east. The Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been trying to use violence to resolve their issues in the middle east for thousands of years now to no avail.
Which led to the perpetuation of slavery for another 90 years (which the British were in the process of abolishing throughout their holdings), among other "issues."
That's irrelevant, and massive hindsight bias. If the British still held the South, they might have kept slavery too. And if they did try to abolish it, the civil war/revolution probably would have happened anyway and they might have won.
Could you provide some notable examples where violence has resolved issues in the long term and did not lead to more issues/violence?
Was the original question. The point is that while it solved one conflict, it deferred and prolonged another (quite major) one -- which might well had been resolved had the colonies not seceded from the Crown.
90 years of slavery that very likely would have been severely restricted in 1807 and abolished outright in 1833 (based on certain major events relating to slavery in the British empire, which I'm sure you're aware of) might sound "vague" to you, but most likely it wasn't to those affected.
>> The primary reason Jews, Christians, and Muslims are having trouble solving their problems using violence is that they're not using enough violence.
The problem of those groups is that they can't prosper in peace. Violence is not a solution for that. Rather, violence is the essence of their problem.
Basically, if you want to be realistic there can never be "enough violence". Reasonable people prosper because they understand this and seek to solve their problems in a peaceful manner rather than to escalate the violence until one side perishes.
>If we look into History we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings, and spreading their influence, 'till the whole Globe is subjected to their sway. When they have reach'd the summit of Grandeur, some minute and unsuspected Cause commonly effects their Ruin, and the Empire of the world is transferr'd to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant Village, inhabited only by a few abandoned Ruffins, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous Height, and excell'd in Arts and Arms all the Nations that praeceeded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think would have establish'd it in supream dominion) by removing all danger, suffer'd it to sink into debauchery, and made it att length an easy prey to Barbarians.—England Immediately, upon this began to increase (the particular, and minute causes of which I am not Historian enough to trace) in Power and magnificence, and is now the greatest Nation upon the globe.—Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into this new world for Concience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident, may transfer the great seat of Empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallicks, our People according to the exactest Computations, will in another Century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the Case, since we have (I may say) all the naval Stores of the Nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe, will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves, is to disunite Us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct Colonies, and then, some great men, in each Colony, desiring the Monarchy of the Whole, they will destroy each others influence and keep the Country in Equilibrio. [1]
-John Adams
So yes, empires do rise and rule for a time but in the end they grow weak from over reliance on luxuries and having no real competition to fight. In the end these empires based on war always collapse.
But let's take WW2 for example. WW2 led immediately into the Cold War, and the Cold War led into the War on Terror. It is also worth noting the arbitrary national lines drawn along tribal boundaties after WW1 and WW2 and their direct contributions to the enflamed tensions in the middle east today.
>The primary reason Jews, Christians, and Muslims are having trouble solving their problems using violence is that they're not using enough violence.
That is M.A.D.
What exactly is the issue here, what is the end goal that is achieved through violence? It's survival, right?
If we are to ensure survival amidst such increasingly rapid technological proliferation, mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
Do you really think that this violence will not come bite western world in the ass one day? West is allowing killing of innocents, including the "fun sized terrorists" kids. Thousands of them. Do you really think they will just grow up and forget about it?
Bernie definitely would, except -- I'm not too sure JFK wasn't an inside job w/ the CIA - I wouldn't put assinating a president past the NSA, heck I wouldn't put anything past them, the more I read--the more I feel like I woke up in 1984, and we're already in some post-apocalyptic world where Big brother controls everything but we just don't know it (yet).
JFK got done in because Lyndon Johnson was a much more palatable president. If the vice president is not on their side, they'd have to keep killing people down the line of succession until they got to somebody who was. After the vice president: Speaker of the House (currently Paul Ryan) > President pro tempore of the Senate (currently Orrin Hatch) > long line of officials serving at the pleasure of the president.
> A drone strike typically kills identified terrorist targets but also unidentified targets.
A drone strike typicall kills identified terrorists because they need to be able to say that. It's much better to be able to say "... and some collateral damage" than "We hit a wedding party."
We need a military. All states do -- its part of their duty to their citizenry.
The problem in the US is that our hippy-run academia are driving the smart people out of jobs in the military (and police force for that matter), and it's putting us in a terrible position.
The only way to fix it is for smart people to start joining the military again.
Academia doesn't drive anyone out of the military. It may dissuade some people from joining.
US military culture drives people out.
Either by being surrounded by lazy or coasting individuals who think of the military as just a job (discouraging to more ideologically minded people).
Or by being hammered by the ugly, jingoistic rhetoric and motivations of some peers and leadership.
Or by being too smart and standing too tall, upsetting the boat. The US military, large portions at least, strongly discourage some aspects of intellectualism and, certainly, individualism. Smart people suffer in this environment if they're not power-motivated, and the good ones usually aren't.
Oh that is why ROTC is such a big issue and many elite universities do not have it in their campuses.
Intellectualism is absent in military? Some of the best lectures I watched are from Naval War College. TOR comes from that part of the woods.
You do not have individualism in any armed forces, this is absolutely lunatic. Its like preaching individualism in Basketball team and telling Allen Iverson he is oh so special and do it all ( which he did and spectacularly failed). US Military just like other military is Socialist both in its creed and organization. That is no surprise and PG actually credit to Post-War equality in America to be by-product of Military service and GI bill.
Re ROTC: Which elite universities are you speaking of and why don't they have ROTC detachments? It appears, from a cursory glance, that MIT and Harvard don't have ROTC detachments, then those cadets would go to a detachment at a nearby university. This is typical for smaller schools that neighbor other universities (see universities and colleges in Atlanta, GA for this as well, several of them send or sent their cadets to GA Tech's detachments rather than hosting their own for a smaller cadet corps).
Re Individualism: You're taking the extreme position of individualism which is not what I intended. I meant those people who generally don't suffer from groupthink.
An example of groupthink, second-hand tale: During the second Iraq War, my father was responsible for a lot of CSAR mission planning for the USAF. He would not send helicopters into bad weather conditions (primarily sandstorms) that he knew (after 20+ years of experience) they couldn't handle. The Army CSAR guys would send in their own birds and crews. The USAF CSAR crews would then have two rescue missions once the weather cleared. There was a pressure to ignore reality and press forward despite the odds and regardless of the cost that put more personnel and materiel at risk than necessary. In some sense it's honorable, in another it's just stupid. A degree of individuality, the ability and willingness to risk saying "no" when everyone else is hell bent on something, is the sort of individualism that's needed.
Sometimes in combat situations like the above, but the majority of the time not. See the drone programs, surveillance programs, acquisitions programs, that are either unethical, ill-conceived, or just wasteful. Groupthink allows them to persist. Generals who let it slide because they know they're getting promoted in 18-24 months and it'll be someone else's problem allow them to persist.
Some degree of individualism is necessary in both the officer and enlisted corps to step in and alter the culture.
A squad of all individuals unable to act as a team, yeah, that'd be fucking stupid. Obviously that's not what I was talking about. If you thought it was, you took the worst possible interpretation of my words and ran with it. Great.
But an officer corps of all yes-men drones is useless, too. They need people that can break out of the mold at every rank, not just the top.
EDIT: And because it's not clear. Sometimes, the willingness to say "yes" when everyone else is saying no is also useful. The story above was about being more risk-averse than the group, and it being the better option. But sometimes the group is too risk-averse and someone willing to step in and risk failure is what's needed - see the example of the generals who let shit stand instead of changing them. The real leaders will step in and risk their career when something is broken but unchanging because of fear or cargo cult behavior or whatever else.
We, if you mean the U.S., once considered a large standing army a hallmark of tyranny: e.g. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_12s6.... is George Washington needing to argue "yet a few Troops, under certain circumstances, are not only safe, but indispensably necessary".
How we got from there to over a third of the total world military spending, well, it's a long story, and I don't know what to do, but I don't think encouraging more smart people to join up will help the most.
>In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
that is the kind of talk that left US exposed in 1812 War and the West Point, Naval academy were a product of realities post-1812 war. You can quote all Madison you want, but the need for professional army was evident through out the world and worked like a charm in 1845 When US wrested massive land from Mexico.
I don't mean to argue against the logic behind the negative-feedback cycle of the security dilemma.
The Madison quote was meant to indicate the historic precedent for over extending oneself on the war front and the ways it has left the civil front critically vulnerable.
However, today, in the electric age, there is no distinction between civil and military fronts.
This is absolute bullshit. The problem is that we need a military that is actually going to man the fuck up when an O-5+ decides to push some unconstitutional program on the people.
What has happened isnt that hippy academia is jacking up the military, but rather that the military has been kicking out the kind of people who arent afraid to tell truth to power, and are increasingly making choices and then only hiring people who tell them those choices are good and what they want to hear.
I have spent the majority of my free time since I got out trying to understand what the fuck is going on here, and the reality is that our generals failed our military by allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons. Thats even counting the real reasons no one talks about, such as upcoming resource wars and a return to a tripolar world.
No, the real problem is that we have barely had a real president since the new world order bunch assassinated JFK (and RFK), because that was a very clear message to any POTUS willing to actually stand up. (Dont get me wrong, JFK was far from perfect...)
We now have institutional corruption from the top down in every single branch of government, including the famed fourth estate which has been turned into stenographers weekly. Corruption and incompetence are running rampant, and are acting as a cover for the malicious string pullers (Hanlons razor is a logical fallacy!)
So no, its not that the goddamn hippies have fucked up the military, its much closer to the military and its propoganda programs have so far infiltrated academia that its a lifeless shell of what it could and should be in this internet age.
Keep in mind though, its the military who has pushed this though. While the three letters have carried out operations similar to mockingbird (thank you church comittee), its the globalist new world order group who have pushed it on their controlled government puppets. (Read up on what Norman Dodd found during the Reese Committee for more info)
Yes, you are correct we need a smarter military, but just having "smart people" join up wont do it. You need change from the POTUS down, because beleive you me, we have turned mental deconstruction and reconstruction into an art form.
New world order? The Democrat establishment is doing everything it can to keep the primary from being taken from their anointed disciple. And the Republican primary barely even contains an establishment runner. The GOP power brokers can't decide if they should spend more effort attacking Trump or Cruz, but their man Rubio is trailing a distant third, and their real choice, Bush, is lost in the noise.
If there is a world order, it was never very powerful or orderly.
Don't be fooled by the circus. The string pullers have had a plan the whole time. While Trump and Sanders have slightly thrown a wrench in my predictions, they still factor in to the plan.
First, you have to look at who the original runners were: Jeb and Hillary. Jeb is connected to the action arm of the dark arts, through his father, brother, and his time in Florida, and Hillary is connected to the Rhodesian group for Anglo-Saxon dominance through her Oxford husband.
My prediction was that they would drop the dirt on Hillary mid-late cycle, while dropping the GOP forerunner (right now Trump) and suddenly shifting his votes into Bush. Suddenly we have a potential Bush vs Sanders/Hillary election, and the reason the world order group are fighting so hard to get Hillary the nomination is because Sanders is a wildcard in their plans. If they keep Hillary in, it's a globalist in office either way.
Incompetence is rampant, it's true, but don't let it smokescreen the hidden machinations, or else you will never be able to grasp the bigger geopolitical picture.
allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons
It seems to me that it was some group other than neocons that got us inveigled in war in Libya and Syria - thereby creating the fertile spawning ground for ISIS.
Not sure what you're getting at, but ISIS command consists mostly of former Iraqi officials that were sidelined after Saddam Hussein was ousted. The soil was initially fertilized by burning down Iraq.
The "fertile ground" that allows moderates to become radicalized eventually boils down to polarization. It doesn't really matter whether the rhetoric is coming from Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Turkey, Indonesia, Libya, Israel, Europe or the US; as long as the discourse goes in terms of "us vs them", many people will identify (and act) as victims.
I was careful in my wording. I do grant that the initial war in Iraq catalyzed the creation of ISIS. What I was saying here is that the power vacuum we caused in Syria and especially Libya created a place where that seed could grow and thrive.
But anyway, that wasn't the main point. The real point was to show that it wasn't a neocon that started our wars in Libya and Syria - it was today's iconic Progressive who did that, and without any sort of Congressional approval at all. Those wars can't be attributed to neocons, they are the Progressives' to own.
> It seems to me that it was some group other than neocons that got us inveigled in war in Libya and Syria - thereby creating the fertile spawning ground for ISIS.
The group now calling itself "the Islamic State" was a comparatively minor Islamist group in Saddam's Iraq that hit the big time with the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, when it leveraged the disruption of that invasion and the currency of the al-Qaeda brand to rebrand itself as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" -- it was so successful -- seizing weapons and territory and becoming a substantial force that, particularly with the rest of the global al-Qaeda brand in decline, that it found it best to rebrand itself subsequently as "the Islamic State in Iraq".
Sure, when the Syrian Civil War escalated, it sent fighters there, who eventually remerged with ISI leading to its next rebrand as what is usually translated by official sources "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" (but(alternatively translated as "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria", which is where the "ISIS" label comes from), and the group later rebranded to simply "the Islamic State".
But it was the invasion of Iraq -- not the conflict in Syria -- that formed the "fertile spawning ground" which catapulted the previously-minor group to become a significant threat.
Neocons are just a front for the Leo Straussian Chicago school of globalism, with players like Kissinger and Brezenski.
note: too late to edit original comment, but I meant to say "it's not the military", eg the military is being played in this global chessboard by other entities.
I understand this response but I think it is the wrong one. Yes, there are many crazy and outlandish conspiracy theories out there that make it easy for the intellectually lazy to dismiss all theories out of hand, but the globalist conspiracy is one that is less and less hidden to the point that you aren't really paying attention if you don't see it. Now, thats not to say there is a single, grand, overarching conspiracy (a common fallacy in the realm), but rather there are many different parties all with their own self interests, sometimes aligned, sometimes not.
The conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one. Your attitude is one of sticking ones head in the sand and pretending these things don't exist.
The conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one.
Not when said conspiracies are dumped, explanation-free, into the middle of a post without any backing what so ever.
Buzzwords like "new world order" are both loaded and uninteresting, and that goes double when most people who've have examined the "evidence" have found it wanting. If globalization is meant, say "globalization".
Deapite the most strong public sentiment connotations, the phrase correctly distinguishes a sect of the globalist group, and is just used as such by me. Hence the phrase was "new world order globalists". Its a loaded term, granted and I could probably find a more descriptive way to articulate it, but focusing on that as criticism is nothing more than grammatical group think as a strawman for the much more importance issues being put forward. Its the lazy way out, eg, "that dude said "nwo", all his point are moot and hes a crazy conspiracy theorist." That essentially the position you took.
Also, are you even in the same thread as me? Theres plenty of context, within my comment and out, thats gives an indicator about why such a comment is relevant to the discussion.
What you have done is perform a knee jerk reaction and now you are backpedalling.
Use of buzz phrases is generally the mark of "crazy conspiracy theorists" (your words, not mine) or: people who generally have a tenuous grip on concepts like burden of proof and recognition of confirmation bias.
I have yet to see a single thing in this thread that suggests my initial read was incorrect, or indeed anything to indicate your rant contributed anything to the conversation. (Hence: uninteresting)
Like a single link to support your assertions, for instance.
I thought the problem is that, 25 years after its only serious opponent in the world disappeared, the US spends as much on the military as the next 7 countries - five of which are US allies - combined.
Luckily through expert (sarcasm) US negotiations and a 3d chess policy, Russia just declared a new cold war and has warned of WWIII over Sryia. Eastern European countries are begging for US soldiers to be stationed there while they ramp up their own military spending to dissuade Russian aggression. So it looks like all that military spending will be needed after all.
Correction: Costa Rica has no standing army. They have a gendarmarie and other paramilitary forces organized under the Fuerza Pública (Public Force). To say they have no military is not accurate.
There's a definition nuance I don't follow. When https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Costa_Rica says "Costa Rica does not officially have a military" and "abolished the military of Costa Rica", that makes me think it has no military.
When http://www.coha.org/costa-rica-an-army-less-nation-in-a-prob... says "Without a formal military force, Costa Rica had no need to regularly invest in naval vessels, warplanes, or tanks, which typically make up the heavy equipment of any traditional armed forces." and "It is important to consider that a state that has no military is by nature nonviolent.", that makes me think it has no military.
I don't understand why I should believe it has a military. At best we have different ideas of what a "military" means.
You mention "gendarmarie and other paramilitary forces" as a type of military. SWAT team are paramilitary forces, no? Would it be fair to say that Los Angeles has its own military? What about paramilitary support for anti-poaching and other conservation efforts?
The essay at https://medium.com/war-is-boring/costa-rica-doesnt-have-a-mi... attempts to convince me that the UEI is a "small military force in all but name", and that "the distinction between police and military work in Central America is a lot fuzzier than it might seem". I am not convinced by their comparison of how the police in Costa Rica have a drug interdiction role which is done by the military in other Central American countries - after all, in the US there is both military and police involvement in the same role.
Perhaps I can resolve the topic with two questions: 1) did Costa Rica have a military in 1990 (which is before the gendarmarie and the UEI)? and 2) what would Costa Rica need to abolish in order to say it doesn't have a military? Just the 70 people in the UEI?
> But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world. ... The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further
It is even worse than that. Due to the base rate fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) the 'machine' is going to have a huge false positive rate, so without that additional surveillance, most will not be guilty of what they are accused. But that surveillance takes money and resources, just the thing the 'machine' system is designed to save...
Yes. I feel like anyone considering such a system should be forced to read "The Base-Rate Fallacy and its Implications for the Difficulty of Intrusion Detection":
People interested in these issues should read the position paper written by Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper in 2006, "Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining".
The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial.
This appears to be what they do?
The National Security Agency reportedly tracked phone calls between the courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's relatives in the Persian Gulf to all numbers in Pakistan, and NSA surveillance eventually tracked Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's location in Pakistan via one such phone call.... In August 2010 they tracked al-Kuwaiti as he drove from Peshawar to a residence in Abbottabad – and as analysts inventoried the compound's striking security features they became convinced that it housed a high-level al-Qaeda figure... In September 2010, the CIA concluded that the compound was "custom built to hide someone of significance" and that it was very likely that Osama bin Laden was residing there[1]
As it turned out, that was where bin Laden was killed, so that process seemed to have worked.
I'd note that the arstechnica article gives no evidence at all that this particular program is used to generate kill lists. As you note, identifying possible couriers and just killing them without further investigation is a dumb idea. Fortunately I don't see any evidence in this or other articles that this is what happens.
The evidence is that the head of the NSA literally said, "we use metadata to kill people". It doesn't get more direct than that. Signature strikes are a well documented phenomenon by now.
Also there's no way the CIA drone program can sustain the kind of long term kill rates they've been having without routinely killing innocent people. Terrorists just aren't that common (although if you define anyone who tries to seek revenge thanks to an errant drone strike as a terrorist, that "problem" can eventually solve itself).
If you are going to put surveillance on potential terrorists, you should also be putting surveillance on people not suspected of being terrorists, so you can judge the rate at which your surveillance personnel falsely accuse people being terrorists based on having been selected for surveillance.
That would be true if you were genuinely interested in avoiding innocent deaths. If you placed very little or no value on non-Western lives, then there would be no incentive to take that kind of extra care.
Reading discussions on drone strikes makes you wonder what ever happened to pacifism. This whole idea that you can just go around other countries killing people -- even if they intend on killing you, and even if you would be able to hit the right target 100% of the time-- it's just old. It's primitive. And that is not to blame the USA. At this point in history humanity, as a collective, has the maturity of an 11 year old. Maybe it's time to evolve a bit.
Couldn't agree more......just reading the front page of /r/all these days makes me want to drop out of society and move deep into the forest. I mean just take one example, the Flint water crisis - this is so unimaginably corrupt (is that even the right word) that it blows my mind. How do people knowingly do such things, how do we have no checks and balances in the system, how can we justify not sending several people to jail for a very long time?
I don't see why pacifism is "more evolved." Violence is one of the most fundamental interactions between organisms, right up there with eating and sexual reproduction. Is eating "primitive?" Are you looking forward to a future where humans "evolve" out of needing to eat? Throughout history, prosperous and successful societies have been built on the back of military power (Egypt, Rome, Great Britain).
We, as a human species, are supposed to evolve beyond our basic immediate needs.
We created societies, because we need to eat, reproduce, survive, without reverting to base violence. We created medicine, technology to improve our quality of life and reduce the chances that biological evolutionary pressure destroys us. The black plague came close to killing 60% of the European population. It is now eradicated.
What is the next step in our evolution as a species? Right now the biggest danger to the survival of humankind is... humankind itself. If we are to survive, not for a hundred years, but for a hundred thousand years into the future, we must learn how to cooperate without annihilating each other in the process.
Does our technology and development "evolve [us] beyond our basic immediate needs" or do we use it to serve needs we've always had? We spend an enormous amount of our effort making both food and sex easier and more abundant (there's an app for that!).
Violence isn't a vice that could be eliminated if only people had more virtue. It serves a practical function. It's the ultimate dispute resolution mechanism for people who either have too little in common or too much at stake to resolve their issues in any other way. Prosperity, abundance, and homogeneity makes it less necessary over time, but so long as conflict is possible between people, violence will be the final resort for resolving it.
I am grateful for the processes of cooking and cleaning and other daily maintenance in my life. I'm reminded of a zen proverb: "Before enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water."
"Are you looking forward to a future where humans "evolve" out of needing to eat? " Actually yes, absolutely!
Don't get me wrong, I love eating as well as cooking, but I have to agree that a stupid amount of time is spent on doing those things. If I could switch to a solution where I take a pill and it provides my body with all possible nutrition then I would in an instant.
Yeah I spend ~40 minutes making dinner and then another 40 minutes later in the evening making lunch for myself and my partner for the following day. Then there's cleaning up time as well. I like having home made food at work the next day but it's time I could be using for programming and other things really.
>It baffled me to no end to spend that much time just to sate hunger.
Clearly he wasn't trying to sate hunger. Cooking is as much of a hobby as hacking or being a "maker." Plus eating food is way more than just satiating hunger. I don't like cooking but I loving eating and drinking.
> The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial.
Which seems to be exactly the case. Ahmad Zaidan, for example, wasn't assassinated. In fact even if the algorithm was 100% correct - it makes no sense to assassinate people solely based on whether they are terrorists or not. A lot more can be gained from surveilling some of them, etc'.
So there is really nothing at all to suggest that those algorithms alone are used to create kill lists.
> So there is really nothing at all to suggest that those algorithms alone are used to create kill lists.
The first line of the article actually suggests this:
'In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata."'
Also, even if something does not make sense does not mean that it does not seem to make sense to a particular person or organization.
Yeah but nothing going on in the national security state makes much sense. The CIA drone program needs targets. It devours them. When they ran out of real intelligence they started killing people they didn't even know the name of because they "looked like terrorists", check out signature strikes.
Those drones are going to be tasked no matter what. If the quality of the input intelligence is crap, well, good thing it's all top secret right!
Wait wait wait. So they're killing people based on a model that fails Statistics 101!? No accounting for base rates? No cross-validation!?
God fucking damnit, why the fuck does our government think killing should be cheaper and easier than healing!? We put new medical treatments through decades of difficult scientific tests, but have none at all for strictly invalid ways to kill people?
The models as described in the article do seem to have glaring flaws. However, the article did not show that anyone has been killed based on the models alone.
I'm pretty sure I did. Random Decision Forest with no regularization, no probabilistic accounting for the base rate of the target class, and with the test and train sets mixed rather than performing proper cross-validation. They've almost definitely overfit, and almost definitely killed someone who wasn't actually a terrorist.
Barely perceptible changes to an image cause it to be misclassified by neural networks which never saw the image before (this is important, because it rules out simple overfitting). As a non-expert, this suggests to me that, at least for some algorithms, the reasoning "statistical algorithm estimates 99.999% probability of guilt" implies "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" is unreliable at best.
There is great potential here for safe, effective government if machine learning output is only ever input for humans with common sense, life experience and the ability to interact with the world.
With respect to adversarial examples for random forests, that link states:
Myth: Deep learning is more vulnerable to adversarial examples than other kind of machine learning.
Fact: So far we have been able to generate adversarial examples for every model we have tested, including simple traditional machine learning models like nearest neighbor. Deep learning with adversarial training is the most resistant technique we have studied so far.
But the larger point is that adversarial examples are just one demonstration that algorithms are still quite primitive. Nobody should be killed on the basis of a statistical algorithm alone (and to be fair, the article does not show that anyone has been).
It would be difficult to create such persuasive adversarial examples in this case. Humans can recognize images well, so it's obvious for us that those adversarial examples are nowhere near what neural net thinks they are. It would not be as obvious with a list of phone calls.
Given that there are very little real terrorists in the data, any sensitive detection mechanism will need insane specificity or it will give you an enormous amount of false positives.
> But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world.
They're clearly not implementing a minimum-error rate classifier. Which isn't to defend their choice of loss function (it's not 0-1, but beyond that I have no idea); just to point out the inanity of some of the comments claiming the NSA isn't aware of base rates.
For something around a ten of thousand people, at a minimum 80% of them will be innocent, just by sheer lack of actual terrorists to fill that many slots. And that's assuming a perfect fitting algorithm, with absolutely no false positives.
did you post this on the corresponding reddit thread as well? if not then someone literally copy pasted your comment, which I have been noting a lot more lately on there.
Disingenuous title: NSA only collects data (SIGINT) and secures transmissions and identity of friendlies (SIGSEC). What others do with the data is not done by NSA.
>The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them.
That is in no way a reasonable thing to do if you're only 50% confident in your results. A reasonable thing to do would be scrap the whole system and make something more reliable than a coin flip.
Characterizing it as a coin flip is unfair I think. If this system can promote individuals to attention out of millions of targets, telling us that this person out of all the millions has a 50/50 chance of being a terrorist, then that is hugely valuable information that deserves further inquiry.
Now, of course we don't know how good the rate is or what other evidence they already have or what exactly a terrorist is for that matter. But in principle, you'd be throwing out a huge amount of evidence if got rid of a system that changed a target's chance from 1 in a million to 1 in 2.
Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn't a terrible idea. But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world. Maybe only 50% of the people you detect are actually terrorists. Maybe it's even worse than that. We can't even test it because there is no validation set and unreliable labels.
The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial.
And the more I read the details, the more alarmed I am. The 50% figure I used above may have been way too high. The base rate of terrorists way too low and they have very little data to begin with.