Reetion
psych profiling science, in the Okal Rel Universe, presumes
that physical observation of cognitive behavior, given mild
(even subconscious) dreamlike experiences, can tell you a lot
about someone' s probably reactions in real life. Granted that
this represents an advanced technology relative to what we have
acheived to date in real life, I was encouraged by the article
in Discover on the research of Joshua Greene. A short synopsis
of that article's gist is given below. In a nutshell, it suggests
that something like Reetion psych profiling is at least based
on known science.
It might very well be possible, in other words, to gain a psych
profile of someone through direct observation of their brains.
Is that a good or a bad thing?
For a Reetion living on a rare and precious planet, or a vulnerable
space station, who depends on the services of reality skimming
pilots, it has to be a good thing. Here's the problem: you need
the pilots to fly, but any one pilot who turns terrorist (or
just psycopathic) could wipe out millions of people. Solution,
don't let any pilot who fails a psych profiling pre-flight screening
test get into a cockpit. Non-pilots control the docks in the
Reetion world. A pilot with dubious moral strength would simply
not be allowed to get into a ship. Since reality skimming induces
depression and physical damage, there is still the risk that
a pilot will "go bad" due to injury during a trip.
The best that can be done, there, is to do post-flight screening
and keep an eye out for when a pilot should be forcibly retired.
Like Gelacks, the last resort for Reetions is to sick a moral
pilot on an immoral one if a problem arrises. But in the Reetion
world this is a case of tracking down renegades who try to evade
management by the Reetion Space Service. Gelacks, of course,
with their larger population of tougher pilots to draw on, can
indulge in constant vigilance by station warders who keep an
eye out for possible trouble and are expected to stop crazies
from damaging their stations. Ordinarily, anyone who tresspasses
on a station's challenge sphere, while in skim, is pounced on
without question and destroyed. (Allowing and incoming pilot
to "skid-in" is a major act of trust in his or her
honor. It also saves the incoming pilot time taxiing to dock
at sub-light speed.)
So sure, if you have a bunch of necessary but potentially dangerous
pilots to manage, psych profiling them might make sense. What
about for the rest of us?
Personally, I would be firmly against psych profiling of just
anyone for any purpose. I am also aware of the potential for
abuse, which Alison and I dramatized in Far Arena, one
of the mainline series of Okal Rel Universe novels (ETA from
Edge ... sometime in 2005 or 2006?). But if you asked me whether
I would feel it was justified that world leaders with the potential
to push big red buttons of mass destruction ought to be psych
profiled in order to hold office ... well, yes. Damn it.
People who chose to occupy positions that oblige them
to hold the lives of millions in their hands should not retain
the right to be secret psychopaths if we had the technology
to test for that.
As with all tests, of course, one has to allow that the results
of Reetion psych profiling will never be perfect. The crux then
becomes a case of which side you err on. This might be familiar
to many as the question: "Is it better to jail one innocent
man or let one guilty one go free?" In the Okal Rel Universe,
it plays out as: "Would you rather ground one moral pilot
or have one immoral one fly." Like the Reetions, I would
err on the side of grounding the occational moral pilot, unjustly,
simply because the stakes are so huge.
Just for the record, by the way, the biggest scope for error
with psych profiling is the sheer complexity of human behavior.
How someone responds in well controlled, non-extreme conditions
may be different (but not completely unrelated!) to how he or
she responds under psych profiling.
Another FYI that I want to trot out under this heading is why
Lurol, in Courtesan Prince, is so dead certain about Amel's
morality. In large part, that's because the data the Reetions
have on Amel is much more profound than anything the average
psych profile would yield. Amel's ability to relive the past
so vividly made it almost like being there while some rather
extreme things were happening to him. The usual caveat about
psych profiling being based on responses to mild stimuli is
therefore eliminated. Lurol, of course, also has a lot of faith
in her science and understands it better than the average Reetion
stationer. Hence her certainty Amel would never in a million
years threaten a whole station is not incompatible with the
vote by the stationers to let him go rather than risk it. Whatever
the level of scientific knowledge about anything, people will
always -- and should always! -- have opinions about it.
related article: Reetion
Government, Reality
Skimming
MRI
Brain Scans, Being Hardwired for Morals and Pilot Profiling in the Okal
Rel Universe
Discover.
March 14 2004, Vol. 25, No. 4 (http://www.discover.com)