This gives you some idea of the issue - for every 100 people screened by sniffer dogs, a large volume of people will be found to have drugs who don'thttps://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1004527525551173632 …
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In fact, even if sniffer dogs are right 80% of the time, because taking drugs is less common than not taking drugs, you'll catch more INNOCENT people than guilty ones
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But...what if the dogs aren't right that much? What if, as many people argue, the dogs are wrong 50% of the time? Or 75%?
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Here's where it gets really problematic. Here's the table where the dogs are right 80% of the timepic.twitter.com/6IB2Jpy4KW
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And here are the tables for 50% and 25% - both of which have been observed in real lifepic.twitter.com/yOYKVtyggW
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Health Nerd Retweeted Health Nerd
As you can see, the predictive power goes down significantly. Even with 50% accuracy, only 1 in 5 of the people stopped will actually have drugs on themhttps://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1004530137872809984 …
Health Nerd added,
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This is why when you are testing for an uncommon outcome, your test has to be REALLY GOOD Drug sniffing dogs, even by the best estimates, are not
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This goes doubly for screening large numbers of people. If you screen, say, everyone who goes into a music festival, you will likely catch few offenders but identify many totally innocent people
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So what should we do to prevent harm from drugs if we know sniffer dogs are ineffective? Tons of things. I'll make another thread about these options if anyone's interested
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Also P.S. I got a few pieces of terminology wrong - in particular, the first tweet should read "diagnostic test" not "intervention" - and also the "25% table" is slightly misleading as I've assumed that the negative predictive power is still 75% rather than 25%
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P.P.S TL:DR version is that drug sniffer dogs, even when they get it right 80% of the time, still make more mistakes than "hits" when not that many people have drugs
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