More on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system
Also, the origin of the word algebra is Arabic.
If not wanting to talk to your seatmate is suspicious, I’m going to get hauled off the plane any day now. I always bury my nose in my Kindle and give short answers to queries until I can get my headphones on and tune out the world.
The difficulty–not necessarily a problem, though it could be–with “see something, say something” initiatives is that they tend to have very poor specificity, and you get a lot of “false positives.” On the other hand, the benefit of catching “true positives” is high, so over-reporting is often encouraged. Many (most?) colleges and universities have behavioral intervention teams (BITs) these days that really encourage the “see something, say something” model for both homicidality and suicidality, although a vast, vast majority of their work ends up involving suicidality. The guidelines for BITs straight up encourage over-reporting, noting that it is important not to discourage any reporting, even if it is frivolous. One issue here is that BITs involve a lot of people from various departments on campus, so you may have a lot people suddenly knowing a student’s extremely personal information even when there is no true risk or real need for that involvement, and encouraging over-reporting has the real potential to hurt some students. Otoh, it also has the potential to catch students who really are at imminent risk and need immediate intervention and could really save some lives. So, what do you do?
Because hindsight is 20/20, we look back at every crisis and see signs that were missed. For example, I read an interview with the man who checked in some of the 9/11 hijackers and thought something like, “Man, if anyone looks like middle eastern terrorists it’s those guys” and then mentally reprimanded himself for profiling them. On one hand, that is profiling; otoh, in this one huge instance, he was right. We see this after every school shooting too–do you profile the autistic kids now? The depressed ones? The ones without a girlfriend? Do you profile every socially awkward kid in order to catch the one out of 5,000 who is violent, even if you’re profiling and restricting the freedom of 4,999 people who aren’t violent at all? People say “no” now, but read any thread after a crisis, and you’ll see people shaking their head over how no one “pre-caught” the perpetrator.
So, is 50 false reports worth preventing one real incident? 100 false reports? 1000 false reports? It’s really a value judgment we make as a society, and that judgment tends to shift depending on whether we’re reading about a “false positive” or a “false negative.”
I just don’t understand why the people running the plane wasted all this time. Writing in Arabic or code or doing math - none of those things are crimes. It’s a good thing that no one got suspicious of my husband during the period when he decided he should read the Koran.
“Personally, I find the idea that laypersons on airplanes should be able to recognize differential equations to be the height of arrogance.”
Personally i find it pathetic that someone in this day and age can’t tell the difference between a mathematical expression and written language, you don’t have to know how to do a differential equation to recognize it, to at least have been exposed to it. It isn’t like this is a mystical language known to only a few, people have seen differential calc in movies and tv shows for a long time, and pictures of historical figures like Einstein have shown pictures of equations of this sort. Even if you have been exposed only to algebra, you should be able to recognize differential calc as math. Arabic looks nothing like a mathematical expression of any kind, let along calc, even if he was doing advanced calc like variations on partial differential equations or tensor calc. To claim it is arrogance is to claim that is like knowing what kind of wine to have with pheasant under glass or some kind of knowledge reserved for those with a Phd, rather than something that is not exactly hidden knowledge,being exposed to what calculus looks like is all over, in popular media, and it is pretty sad if anyone can’t recognize something as math. Someone doesn’t have to identity it as differential calc,
Then again, we live in a world where the prime minister of Canada can talk intelligently about quantum computing and we have had many candidates for president of the US who seriously believe the earth is 6000 years old and science is nothing more than another belief system shrug.
^One could certainly write something in mathematical notation that had words coded into it.
Again:
A person writes in a notebook. Imagine it’s threatening stuff, coded. How does that affect the airplane? Therefore, how does that justify an intervention and removal from the plane?
Note the guy was Italian. In order words, dark-skinned with dark curly hair. THAT is what the lady found frightening. Even the fact he was wearing a brand-name polo shirt seemed threatening/suspicious to her!
Re #62
One problem with numerous false positives is that they can get politically inflammatory if they are unequally distributed by race, ethnicity, religion, etc… The well known phenomenon of “racial profiling of black people by police” that is the source of considerable annoyance may include a significant amount of “racial profiling of black people by people who call the police”.
The incident in the linked article is an analogous example for Arab people with respect to airplane security in place of black people with respect to police (even though he was not Arab, the other passenger apparently thought he was and feared him for that)
This was in the comments section to one of the articles:
@ucbalumnus , of course prejudice is a huge issue in these “say something, see something” initiatives. Race (or perceived race), gender, disability (especially psychiatric disability), and religion, and combinations thereof are massive, disproportionate targets of these initiatives. Because they encourage largely “gut-based” reporting, they also play heavily to people’s prejudices. Otoh, people do the same things when they 20/20 hindsight profile the perpetrators of major crimes–“of course someone should have noticed–they were Muslim immigrants”; “of course someone should have noticed–he had autism”; “of course someone should have noticed–he was a socially awkward guy who couldn’t get a girlfriend.” every profile of a famous perpatrator is also the profile of thousands and thousands of innocent people who will never commit a crime. But we don’t notice the thousands and millions of people who live their lives without hurting others and so we have unearned confidence in our ability to accurately see those who will. For example, a vast, vast majority of people with mental illnesses will never engage in violence–and indeed aren’t more likely to–but we often talk about restricting the rights of those with mental illness because of a small minority of mentally ill people who do commit horrible, violent acts. Same thing with Muslims, black men, Japanese-Americans during WWII, etc.
^The probability that one would be involved in such an “actual” incident is vanishingly small. Faced with a potential issue, the actual person is likely to say "the probability that this is bad is vanishingly small. If I’m wrong I could be shredded in the media (as this woman is). Or I could be sued. One shouldn’t wonder that no one says anything and wouldn’t even if a perpetrator posted a giant sign on a flagpole in his yard.
Would even someone prejudiced enough to be automatically suspicious of Muslim immigrants necessarily suspect a couple of ordinary looking Caucasian guys (the Tsarnaev brothers) as bomb planters?
What about an ordinary looking white guy parking a rental truck in front of the BATF office?
“See something, say something” is definitely useful. Indeed, effective law enforcement depends on it. But it does give bigots a way to cause targets of their bigotry to be hassled by police (or airplane security, etc.).
Maybe I just have a better memory for visual things, or because my sister-in-law knows the language, but Arabic writing is pretty easy to recognize with all the fish hook and bass clef shapes with accent marks everywhere. Knowing Arabic might also be the reason my SIL took 2 1/2 hours to get through immigration last time she visited despite her French passport.
There was an awful lot of math in your one post, psych_. I’ve got my eye on you.
Remember the neighbor of the San Bernadino terrorists who said he saw suspicous activity in the garage, but was didn’t say anything for fear of being branded a racist.?
Psych makes interesting points. Is it better for a society to have a lot of over reporting versus the damage done by one terrorist attack?. Which is costlier in terms of money, quality of life, etc.? I see at least one suspicious package or white powder story in the news every day that police have to respond to, but then some are explosives or anthrax.
Well if you assume math is “suspicious” …I will repeat my original response.
It doesn’t look very good for us.
BTW I live a few miles away from Cal Tech. Should I be nervous?
Some are okay with the so-called over reporting…until it happens to them. It’s amusing to see people who have never been ethnically or racially profiled say they are okay with the practice. Kinda reminds me of the people who said waterboarding is ‘not torture’ - until they tried it. They don’t think so anymore.
Not only is it stupid and annoying to the people it happens to (or worse), it takes finite resources away from actual threats.
Surely anyone can see that there has to be a line drawn somewhere; that some reporting is utterly frivolous. Why defend the frivolous reporting? Someone scribbling ANYTHING while sitting on a plane is not equivalent to white powder, an unattended package, or a threat. It is what most of us do, at some point or another.
@InfinityMan you are absolutely right! Its no fun being profiled.
Count me as another who throws in a big “SO WHAT” if this young man actually had been writing in Arabic. We do have the right in this country to speak and write other languages. I’m truly appalled.
I read the police beat in our local newspaper for laughs. I can’t tell you how many times someone calls the police to report a suspicious looking person walking down people’s driveways (the UPS, or gas company agent) or gang of hoodlums up to no good in a park (birthday party for 10 year olds). There seem to be a group of people who just suspect the absolute worst in everyone and when combined with being a busy body - seem to keep the authorities awfully busy…