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August 28, 2007
Confused Americans for Truth - The Mathematics of Being Soft on Crime
The government of the Netherlands is starting a $38 million government program to combat extremism. Extremism in this case is defined as either right-wing nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
The new program is designed to combat the root causes of extremism by steering young folks away from extreme ideas.
[Interior Affairs Minister Guusje ter Horst] said the goal was not to combat extremist groups — a job for law enforcement and intelligence agencies — but to prevent them from forming.
"The point is that all organizations that deal with youth ... and that notice signs of radicalization ... share that information, and that something is done to stop it," [Interior Affairs Minister Guusje ter Horst] told reporters in the Amsterdam borough of Slotervaart, which has a large Muslim population and has been held up as a model for its efforts to help troubled youths.
She described a mix of "soft measures," like sponsoring multicultural debates and creating job internships, and "hard measures," including cracking down on truancy.
A teacher who notices students voicing racist or fundamentalist notions should be able to call a hotline for advice, for example, Ter Horst said.
Slotervaart may be a model, but it's a model of getting tough, not of soft measures. The sad truth is that an awful lot of people do whatever they think they can get away with. For example, there's the China poison-for-profit industry, runaway arson in Greece, download piracy, spam, fraud, spam, phishing, spam, cybervandalism and spam.
The solution to this problem is not teaching kids about tolerance, it's teaching them about mathematics. Consider, if you will, the following example, ripped from today's headlines.
Let us imagine that a United States Senator likes to perform sexual acts in airport restrooms. Each time he indulges in this obsession, there's a 5% chance he'll get caught. How many times will he have to repeat the act before he has a 90% chance of getting arrested for disorderly conduct?
To answer this question, you need to turn the problem around and ask What's the chance of not getting caught after a certain number of episodes? In this case, the chance of getting away with it is 95%. The probability of getting away with it n times in a row is 95% multiplied by itself n times. So, we want to solve
0.95n = (1 - 0.9)
This equation is easily solved as follows.
ln(0.95n = ln(0.1)
n*ln(0.95) = ln(0.1)
n = ln(0.1)/ln(0.95)
n ~= 44
This means that if the Senator gets his compulsion once a week, he's got a very good chance of getting caught at least once a year.
Soft measures don't affect this equation at all. You can tell somebody one hundred times that it's wrong to beat the wife, but it's a completely different story if wife-beating is illegal and you explain to him that eventually he'll get caught. The following graph can help. Just move the mouse over the light yellow rectangle beneath the blue line to choose the chance of getting caught for a single incident. You can see that as the number of incidents increases from left to right, the purple line moves with varying rapidity from no chance of getting caught to a very good chance of getting caught.
A change from a 1% chance of getting caught to a 2% chance makes for a big change in the shape of the graph. That would be the effect of-- for example-- spending taxpayer dollars on more police instead of multicultural debates. It's too bad Minister ter Horst didn't consider that.
Everything is clearer when you can do the math.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Tue 7:30 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags: conservative Guusje ter Horst humor Islam Larry Craig mathematics Netherlands probability Slotervaart
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