Recently I’ve been considering politics in terms of game theory, and an interesting idea occurred to me. The US Constitution was established with three branches of government each keeping the powers of the others in check. The system does not depend on altruism. All organizations naturally want to expand their power, and the law is set up so that an expansion of one branch’s power would result in a loss of another’s. It’s a pretty good system.

What this structure did not anticipate, however, is that over the past 50 years the traditional Executive/Legislative/Judicial and Federal/State power struggles have been replaced almost entirely by a Republican/Democrat power struggle. Examples of this can be seen everywhere from congress largely giving away its authority to declare war to the executive, to the party-line 2000 Supreme Court decision that ordered Florida to halt the ballot recount, to the current consensus that a Republican congress will not impeach Bush even for continued violations of federal law and judicial oversight regarding wiretaps.

The bad news is that game theory does not seem to indicate that a two-way Republican/Democrat power balance is stable. The most likely result is that one side wins completely and the game ends.

The other day, I was talking with some friends about the absurdity of the US No-Fly List. Simple statistics show how ridiculous the whole thing is.

Let’s use the following assumptions.

1. Government bureaucrats are 5x more accurate than random in creating a profile of the next airline terrorist. Actually, this is far too generous. Statistical profiling in other kinds of crime is not this good, and since there have been so few hijackings, it’s unlikely we will be able to build a better profile of hijackers than we are of say, drug users or armed robbers. The best profiles in these areas claim only about 2x or 3x random.

   In fact, considering that two Congressmen, a Senator, a 72-year-old nun and numerous children under five have already wound up on the list, 5x random is clearly ridiculous, but I want to show how poorly the list performs with even the most wildly optimistic assumptions.

2. There are 100 evil-doers that the police don’t know about lurking in American and planing to blow up airplanes. Again, I suspect this is a huge over-estimate.
3. The no-fly list has 80,000 names on it. No one knows the exact number, but this represents the upper range of what has been reported.
4. There are 300 million people in the United States.

Now, when a would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, what are the odds that his name is on the list? If the list were truly random, the chance would be

However, with the government’s improved profiling, the odds become 0.13%. In other words, even with our overly-optimistic assumptions, our future terrorist is 99.87% likely to be able to simply walk on the plane.

Let’s take a bit further. The odds of there being any future terrorists at all on the No-Fly List can be calculated as a simple binomial distribution

where

   n = The number of terrorists = 100
   p = probability that an individual terrorist is on the list = 0.0013

This equation reduces to n*p and we see that even using extremely optimistic assumptions there is only a 13% chance that the No-Fly List contains the name of even a single future terrorist.

There is a 87% chance that the list doesn’t contain even one terrorist!

But it gets worse still. Even if freedom-loving Americans are willing to give up some of their freedoms for a 0.13% increase in safety, the odds just aren’t that good.

For the No-Fly List to have any positive effect on our safety all of the following must be true:

1. The plot must involve purchasing a ticket.
2. The terrorist must buy the ticket using his real name.
3. Not only must this terrorist’s name be on the list (0.13% chance) but the name has to have been added after the last time this terrorist tried to board an airplane. Otherwise he would know he is on the no-fly list, and one of his buddies could take his place.
4. The plot must not be detected by any of the other safety measures in place. (Otherwise, it would not be the list that was responsible.)

These events are overwhelmingly improbable. Why are we wasting time and resources on something that is not only completely useless, but inconvenience tens of thousands of innocent Americans?

It’s not often I get called a Nazi and a liberal on the same day.

Although, I have to say it’s tragic that in America today the ideals of Jefferson and Locke are considered to be just as extreme as those of Gobbles and Himmler.

In both cases we were talking about the new gun control measure passed in San Francisco, or more accurately, we weren’t talking about it. I admit I know very little about the details of the measure that was passed. Interestingly, both of my acquaintances interpreted my pressing them for details as opposition to their views.

Then it hit me. Political discourse today is little more than asserting brand preference. Pro-life vs pro-choice, pro-war vs anti-war, development vs environmentalism. I know people think they are thinking, but in general all sides simply parrot the marketing message defined for them.

To me, discussing the implications of a gun-control law I know nothing about is pointless, but I have no brand loyalty on that issue. Interestingly, most discourse actually seems to take place at the abstract brand level, and the details of specific instances are ignored.

Asking someone “Do you support gun control” is nothing more than asking them to state their brand loyalty. A rational answer is “What specific proposal are you talking about? Banning all firearms? Not permitting the clinically insane to own machine guns? What?” But we rarely hear that. We are conditioned to answer such questions with the same mental processes we use to answer the question “Which is better Jack Daniels or Maker’s Mark?”