Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
Yours may have been but I don't think the others were. Though simply because someone uses good logic for bad reasons doesn't mean in other circumstances it isn't good logic.
Of course, the point being made is that it's not really "good logic".

You said that in response to my saying that I know to trust my instincts. Lesson number one in any management security training I've ever done is trust your judgement. If you have a feeling that something is wrong it's better to be on guard and wrong than complacent and right.
That may be lesson no. 1 in management security training, but it's poor advice in any context that requires a person to develop good, accurate, reliable judgement--such as in law enforcement, medicine, social work, etc. It causes selective perception and establishes a one-directional calibration mechanism that ultimately risks making your judgement grossly miscalibrated. In law enforcement, this attitude has severe consequences. When a person such as a police officer is "on guard", he perceives the world in a different way, and he perceives that which has caused him to be on guard in a different way. His wariness alters his perception of anything that may potentially be a threat, and lowers his threshold for acting on the perception of a threat. With time, the inclination to perceive threats--even where there is none--increases, accuracy decreases and the threshold for action is lowered with devastating outcomes for innocent people caught in the crosshairs of officers with systematically corrupted judgement. We see this clearly in the evidence from studies that find that police officers excessively and inappropriately target black and hispanic men, subject them to illegal or just unnecessary searches with a lower hit-rate than among white targets, subject them to greater levels of force even when inappropriate, etc. Lesson no. 1 in management security training needs to be modified if it is to be incorporated into police training.