At least in the TSA case, you have to consider that your adversity may be optimizing against you. Maybe you don’t get very many attempted attacks precisely because you’re putting effort into security. This isn’t to say the current level of effort is optimal, just that you need more than simple cost-benefit calculation if your intervention decisions feed back into the event distribution.
my current estimate is that if the government were doing adversarial reasoning, they would have allocated the money much differently; they probably heavily over-reacted to the very specific attack that was observed
even under adversarial reasoning, a strategy isn’t much good if it costs more than what it prevents
It’s practically impossible to objectively assess the cost-effectiveness of the TSA, since we have no idea what the alternate universe with no TSA looks like. But we can subjectively assess.
While I fully agree with your general point that you have to compare your costs not with the current situation, but the counterfactual where you would not have incured those costs, in the TSA case, I wonder whether more regulation might also have an effect of increasing attacks chances by signaling that you care about attacks, therefore that attacks are efficient at hurting you.
At least in the TSA case, you have to consider that your adversity may be optimizing against you. Maybe you don’t get very many attempted attacks precisely because you’re putting effort into security. This isn’t to say the current level of effort is optimal, just that you need more than simple cost-benefit calculation if your intervention decisions feed back into the event distribution.
Agreed. Something something infrabayes.
But,
my current estimate is that if the government were doing adversarial reasoning, they would have allocated the money much differently; they probably heavily over-reacted to the very specific attack that was observed
even under adversarial reasoning, a strategy isn’t much good if it costs more than what it prevents
It’s practically impossible to objectively assess the cost-effectiveness of the TSA, since we have no idea what the alternate universe with no TSA looks like. But we can subjectively assess.
While I fully agree with your general point that you have to compare your costs not with the current situation, but the counterfactual where you would not have incured those costs, in the TSA case, I wonder whether more regulation might also have an effect of increasing attacks chances by signaling that you care about attacks, therefore that attacks are efficient at hurting you.