Marcus, This is the perfect example of where privacy and self-determination collide. To avoid arguing about the brain in particular, lets assume it was a whole body scan, and that somehow it could pick up on whatever variables someone cares to bring into the discussion. Still, it would not be able to tell you with perfect accuracy who was going to be violent. At best it would be able to tell you "This person will be violent if they find themselves in the following quite specific conditions....."
The problem is that this still doesn't tell us what to do. Do we "treat the person" or "treat the condition"? What if the person is already successfully treating the conditions? For example, how long did Bruce Banner go without incident before S.H.I.E.L.D. sent Black Widow to pull him back in? Who's the monster now? Well, Nick (Fury), who's the monster now? That is somewhat serious. If we find out that someone will become violent in a very particular situation, and the person is aware of their problem and has successfully avoided those situations for quite a while... on what basis could we claim the right to force them into some sort of treatment... no matter how successful it is. There are quite a wide varieties of lives that people can live, this includes lives spent as a hermit, lives spent smoking pot, etc. There will never be a way to use a body scan to determine with certainty that there will be future violence in a particular person's particular life.* I f a person has not publicly displayed a violent tendency, it seems to me that they have a right to keep the so-called tendency private, and that this has potentially quite important consequences for their ability to pursue a chosen path as they see fit. Eric *Unless of course we can scan them in the middle of a violent act, while we have some knowledge of how their environment will continue in the immediate future. But that is a special and not particularly interesting case. -------- Eric Charles Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State, Altoona ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <mar...@snoutfarm.com> To: friam@redfish.com Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:36:08 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data On 1/15/13 10:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Who do we become when we do not respect the boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things. When a person visits the doctor, information shared is privileged. If the doctor does not treat it as such, the doctor's career is put at risk. It's a good incentive to keep quiet. So imagine a world in which brain scans become much more sophisticated, and that certain dangerous mental health problems could be diagnosed with high accuracy, and also treated. Because of fear of mass shootings, etc., Americans make it law that scans be done on all, and that appropriate treatments be employed. For the sake of argument, suppose it's all handled methodically and in a secure fashion. Should we expect that the therapists and psychiatrists involved in this hypothetical process would suffer themselves for not respecting boundaries of individuals' psychological spaces? In current practice they would be invited inside the boundary by the patient and so presumably that's different. I think it is an adjustment health providers would make without much trouble. It would be a professional analytical activity. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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