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Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

politico.eu

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Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#151

Post by mrep »

em500 wrote: post #98
Kaotique wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood me. I am not saying they don't deserve support. I am saying that the government can support people in a way that is not so bureaucratic. Pay the institutions like schools, daycare, etc directly and don't burden the parents with requesting benefits and sending around enormous amounts of money. The institutions can apply for government money for each child they have to take care of. And the pa…

There are a few more reasons that I don't have time to delve into right now. But the main practical reason is that government assistance for daycare is very income dependent, so government paying directly to the daycare would require giving them parental income information, which is a big privacy no-no.

I'm guessing he means have the government pay for all daycare for everyone fully and just pay for it from tax revenue generated by a progressive income tax.

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#152

Post by danamit »

croes wrote: post #92
chekibreki wrote: post #14

I hate how the correlation between income/country of origin and fraud probability is discarded as „racist“ by at least Amnesty International. Maybe we should first do a correlation and causality analysis and see what it yields instead of closing our eyes because of PC?

So what could cause a causality between income/country of origin and fraud probability? Is fraud genetic? I don't think so, so it's only a correlation at most.

Income and social mobility might corralled with fraud.

Country of origin might cause low income and low social mobility.

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#154

Post by short_sells_poo »

sfifs wrote: post #133
Kaotique wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand one of the main triggers for this whole operation was the mass fraud by people from Bulgaria who netted a lot of benefits by gaming the system. They traveled to the Netherlands, applied for benefits and then went back to Bulgaria and used Dutch bank accounts and debit cards to get the cash. The tax office never wanted that to happen again and started this program to find fraudsters but ended up clas…

Perhaps the problem is setting the wrong incentives. The way to deter fraud is not necessarily to make the benefits administration overly strict but to directly dis-incetivize fraud through stiff penalties. For instace if benefits fraud had a penalty of say 10 to 20 years imprisonment if convicted, the number of people trying to commit fraud would very likely go dramatically down.

Are you seriously suggesting a 20 year sentence for benefits fraud?

Ignoring the fact that such a system would be ripe for abuse and retaliatory behavior, just accidentally convicting an innocent person would absolutely ruin their life.

Getting wrongly convicted is already a huge tragedy. Now you'd be handing out life sentences basically.

Let's be real, it's not the rich people who tend to engage in benefits fraud and I'd argue most people who do this are in desperate situations.

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#155

Post by Dracophoenix »

account42 wrote: post #112
Dracophoenix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic agency is not corruption. It's no different from negotiating tax breaks with local governments here in the United States.

You're right, it's no different: both are corruption.

Can you prove how it's corruption?

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#157

Post by hef19898 »

logifail wrote: post #149
hef19898 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they now? By no means those dual nationalities are centrally managed. And therw is no obligation to state a second cotizenship on any papers. Disclaimer: Dual citizenship kids in Europe.

> And therw is no obligation to state a second cotizenship on any papers You're probably right re: citizenship but this is about language, how could one "hide" being bilingual, especially if we're talking about a young child? (Even in kindergarten all my daughter's friends are 100% aware that she and I speak a language when we're communicating solely with each other that isn't the language my daughter uses the rest o…

Being bilingual is impossible to hide, that's true. My son had intensified German lessons as well, being bilingual with German as one of those. He was not amused, it was free private German lessons so us as parents didn't complain.

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#158

Post by samhw »

rocqua wrote: post #129
samhw wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that even if it was backed by data, it would still be wrong. Is it? This is the big question, as far as I can see. If my country has green people and blue people, and green people are overwhelmingly more likely to commit fraud, is it wrong to require additional fraud checks on the basis of being green? Note that this isn't a conviction. It's accepted that the standard is not so exacting that no one innocent mu…

This is getting off-topic. But it still is. I'll stipulate that in this scenario the data themselves are not actually biased. Whilst in reality these data often are biased by things like disproportionate policing and heavy punishhment. Even then, discriminating by government based on race is bad even when a statistical basis for such discrimination exists. What makes "race" problematic to discriminate on is how easy…

Yeah, I agree. That's fair. I've thought about this before - I worked at a bank a couple of years ago, and our CCO (Chief Credit Officer in this instance) wanted to implement a rule, in our credit decisioning models, to decline people whose surnames had 5 or more vowels. It was a naked (and admitted) proxy for Africans, and probably some other 'ethnic' people too[0].

And it made me think: I suspect lots of our ML/NN models function like that. They pick race, or they pick a proxy for race. In situations where the 'ground truth' metric genuinely is racially skewed, it can be hard to tell, and it's just not realistic to demand that people make their models inaccurate for the sake of racial equity.

But it highlights, for me, the unavoidable danger of black-box models. I don't mean some logistic regression or decision tree, because those - while not literally explaining themselves - can be figured out if you have some domain knowledge of the parameters. But the overfitting machines that we call neural nets, well, I suspect this is happening everywhere, at a cost in both equity and also accuracy/reliability. (The probably-apocryphal story of the computer vision model for estimating density of people in a train station, but which ended up just looking at the clock on the wall, comes to mind.)

[0] I remember it exactly because it also would have captured me, incidentally, with my plummy double-barrelled surname - though that's beside the point here.

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#159

Post by sAbakumoff »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

This scandal and the issues at the dutch tax office runs much deeper than just this one set of issues, they also maintained illegal lists of 'potential fraudulent people' on which 100's of thousands of people that had done nothing wrong, such as having the 'wrong' surname. It's rotten to the core and to date there have been zero consequences for the perps and the damage continues to pile up. Our government has fallen…

D66 who I would argue was the true winner of the election does not consist of "exact same players".

The next election, given that we don't have the new pandemic or war in Europe, will be the last one for Rutte, I believe.

Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

#160

Post by pessimizer »

em500 wrote: post #98
Kaotique wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood me. I am not saying they don't deserve support. I am saying that the government can support people in a way that is not so bureaucratic. Pay the institutions like schools, daycare, etc directly and don't burden the parents with requesting benefits and sending around enormous amounts of money. The institutions can apply for government money for each child they have to take care of. And the pa…

There are a few more reasons that I don't have time to delve into right now. But the main practical reason is that government assistance for daycare is very income dependent, so government paying directly to the daycare would require giving them parental income information, which is a big privacy no-no.

> the main practical reason is that government assistance for daycare is very income dependent

They should stop doing that. The wealthy pay more taxes, so refund them as free childcare. If you think the wealthy are getting away with something under a universal entitlement, raise their taxes.

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