>It's predictive in the way that saying African Americans tend to get worse grades in school. The primary correlation is with poverty - African Americans tend to be poorer than average - not ethnicity. So, even if you think ethnicity is important, how do you know that other characteristics aren't even more important?

I wouldn't say that it's a primary/secondary correlation scenario with terrorism too. It's more a case of terrorism being a specific historical outlet for both domestic and international political grudges and issues that those people (in the middle east and the arab world) have had, and a common thread to those is ethnicity/religion.

So it's not like we're studying some abstract phenomenon and making blind guesses and accusations: we know the history of the area, and of such groups there, we know their composition, and ideology etc -- and in what we know religion and ethnicity plays a very large factor. They are neither many Icelanders nor many Catholics in those organizations (there might be a few "converts" -- but still insignificant). So, it's more a case of applying what we know as weight factors. So, if we know that "of known terrorists 90% are from X ethnicity area, and 10% from various others", then we should certainly take that into account as weights. And sure, you'll have false positives any way -- nobody suggests this would be the be all end all method of finding a terrorist, just a weighted factor.

>That's approaching a movie plot scenario. Either you have evidence or you don't. Hand-waving counter-examples is not evidence.

The counterexample comes from what we know historically about such cases. There's a thing called life experience, following the news and historical information, understanding how people behave in general etc -- and using that to tell what's more likely. Not everything has to come from some exhaustive official statistical study and "evidence" (and some things are also dead obvious to even need such a thing).

>For that matter, why do you keep picking race as the key predictive feature?

Because that's the very topic under discussion in this subthread.

>Why aren't you arguing for sex screening?

Who said I'm not? I've already said that multiple factors should be used and weighted.

>Why aren't you proposing that women should automatically be allowed to use the TSA Pre-Check lanes, so the TSA can put more resources on searching the men?

I'm not proposing it because this is something I've never implied I believe should be done -- and thus just a bizarro thing made up to make my arguments look stupid (as if this exaggerated suggestion directly stems from what I previously said).

I've used the term "weight" several times in this sub-thread. Did I ever give the impression that any of these weights (like "being an arab" or "being a woman") should be 1? Or that any weight should be 0 for that matter?

So, yeah, if they want to check for suspects I'd proposed they factor in "being male" among other things -- not to imply they shouldn't check women at all, but that they should check them less intensively, unless they have other red flags too.

The very notion of "profiling" means you use all available info about likely attributes -- not as a certainties, but as hints. In cases where ethnicity has historically tended to be skewed towards certain X or Y groups, that should totally be a factor too. Like age, sex, personal income, nationality, occupation, and several of other things.

>If we put racial screening in place, we can catch 2 of them. On the other hand, there's a 1-in-a-million chance that the added frustration, humiliation, and resentment will cause someone to snap, and decide to carry out a terrorist action. Congratulations, you now have 10 new terrorists to replace the 2 you caught.

Who is making "movie plots" now (ok, I see you address that later)? That's (the "frustration of a TSA check" or similar minor event) is not historically (from all known cases) what such people have in their background.

>Yes, this is also approaching a movie plot scenario. But since that's all you really have to back your views, then that's what I'll use too.

I'm really arguing either self-evident things or facts we can gather from history. I made no hypotheticals about individuals and their personal motives (which could be various -- just observations about people generally act and for reasons that hold for the majority, and can be backed by what we know from all publicly known cases).