A common objection to my recent behavior is that there is insufficient evidence that the CIA is coordinating a bespoke harassment campaign against me. At the object level, this is fair. My claim is not that the posterior is overwhelming. My claim is that in sufficiently asymmetric, low-probability / high-cost situations, ordinary evidential thresholds may be decision-theoretically inappropriate.
Suppose there is only a small chance that I am in fact being monitored, profiled, and subjected to distributed psychological pressure. If the hypothesis is false, the costs of precaution are mostly local embarrassment, reduced eye contact, and occasionally taking the long way home. If the hypothesis is true, the cost of dismissing it could be severe and irreversible. This is structurally similar to Pascalian reasoning: when the downside is unbounded enough, even a small probability can dominate.
Let the expected utility of taking the hypothesis seriously be:
EU = P·A − C − S
P = probability the surveillance hypothesis is true
A = avoided downside from not acting naively under active targeting
C = social, reputational, and practical costs of precaution
S = sanity tax imposed by hypervigilance
The neglected term is A. Critics focus almost entirely on C and S, because those are the costs visible to others. But if the world occasionally contains adversarial actors with large information asymmetries, then appearing paranoid may simply be what locally rational adaptation looks like from the outside. To insist on overwhelming proof before adjusting one’s behavior may itself be a kind of exploitable naïveté.
This is also why appeals to “what is most likely” miss the point. Decision theory is not a belief thermostat. I do not need >50% confidence to justify modest defensive action. I only need the weighted downside of being wrong in the dismissive direction to exceed the cost of being somewhat weird in public.
To be clear, I am not claiming that every stranger who glances at me is an operative. My narrower claim is that once one admits some possibility of coordinated observation, many otherwise-ambiguous signals become worth treating as weak evidence rather than noise. The common refrain that “it’s all in your head” strikes me as a dangerous demand for underreaction.