There is a thisamericanlife show (Crime Pays) about cops paying kids to give up (or avoid) a life of crime. It is quite amazing how little it takes to prevent someone from costing society $40K a year in jail.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/555/t...
Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
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Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#42There is a thisamericanlife show (Crime Pays) about cops paying kids to give up (or avoid) a life of crime. It is quite amazing how little it takes to prevent someone from costing society $40K a year in jail. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/555/t...
End of the day, it's cheaper to pay people to do nothing, than it is to lock them up when they become desperate and commit crimes.
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#43This should be handled by something like social services, not police. Prevention is not their game.
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#44The picture illustrating the article seems to enforce racist stereotypes.
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Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#45https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia Given the problems in police departments (which have fortunately started to appearing in the news), giving the police a system that will essentially let them see what you want to see is a terrible idea. Police work is already full of "forensic tools" that don't actually work (like idea that fingerprints actually identify someone uniquely, or the various techniques that are exam…
Apophenia is the _human_ tendency to see patterns in random _data_. Predictive _analytics_ is a machine that pulls non-random patterns out of data and presents this as _information_.
To say that other tools have a bad track record may count as a valid argument, but to me, it is a weak and fatalistic one. Judge each tool on its own merit or discard all tools as useless seems like an easy choice.
Predicting crime works in practice and theory. These models are not black boxes, they can be introspected. Bias can be detected and removed.
COINTELPRO was a program to infiltrate and disturb organizations that the state viewed as unwelcome. Monitoring social media activity is common detective work. The modern equivalent of an officer peeking over the fence in your back garden to see a stolen motorbike. Now they can use Google Maps for that. This is public information: The criminals feel free and safe enough to post and brag about their crimes on Facebook.
Removing or combating criminal elements in any community will improve that community, regardless of skin color. Black youth is helped, not suppressed, when gang recruiters are identified and punished.
Predictive tools are already used as probable cause. Prisoners in Guantanamo Bay can get a brain-wave reader test. This device will tell you what someone is thinking about and may reveal the plans of future terrorist attack.
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>An automated justice system wouldn't be biased by human prejudice, ignorance or fear An automated system is written by people and those prejudices can still sneak in... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/upshot/when-algorithms-dis... http://www.salon.com/2013/02/04/online_advertisings_racism_m...
Those articles show that a completely inhuman intelligence, with no intrinsic biases of it's own, reproduces the conclusions that allegedly come from human bias. I.e., it turns out that (sometimes) racism and sexism are useful and predictive heuristics. Of course, being in the NYTimes and Salon, they need to obfuscate this point and appeal to standard mood affiliation.
No, they show that a completely inhuman intelligence, designed to learn to show humans what they want to see, can successfully cater to human bias. For example, the Salon article talks about Google AdSense showing ads for arrest records when someone searches for black-sounding names but not white-sounding ones. Google are quite open about the fact that they choose the ads they think are most likely to be clicked. So if people are more likely to click on ads for arrest records when looking for information on a black person, that completely inhuman intelligence, with no intrinsic biases, will happily cater to their racism. That you argue this somehow means racism is a useful, predictive heuristic of anything other than how racists act says a lot.
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you claim that "racism and sexism are useful and predictive heuristics," does that mean mainstream society should accept/tolerate/promote such belief systems? Who is it exactly that you think would find these heuristics useful? Also, describing the results of any code/program written by a human as a "completely inhuman intelligence" is a tenuous claim at best.
Just fyi, several people have tried engaging this person in similar discussions before... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8613711
Now is this an example of predictive analytics or of human prejudice? :)
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those articles show that a completely inhuman intelligence, with no intrinsic biases of it's own, reproduces the conclusions that allegedly come from human bias. I.e., it turns out that (sometimes) racism and sexism are useful and predictive heuristics. Of course, being in the NYTimes and Salon, they need to obfuscate this point and appeal to standard mood affiliation.
No, they show that a completely inhuman intelligence, designed to learn to show humans what they want to see, can successfully cater to human bias. For example, the Salon article talks about Google AdSense showing ads for arrest records when someone searches for black-sounding names but not white-sounding ones. Google are quite open about the fact that they choose the ads they think are most likely to be clicked. So…
Another example from the article shows that men are more likely than women to click on an ad for a high income job, or that low income people are going to click on ads for high interest loans. These are stereotypes that seem to be confirmed by the algorithm.
The core question - do you believe the problem will be fixed by better machine learning algorithms? Going back to the current example, do you believe that a Bayes-optimal machine learning algorithm for predicting criminal behavior will be "unbiased" (in the sense of social justice, not in the sense of statistics)?
Or, more concretely, do you believe that the only problem that mtgx and smtddr are complaining about is that our ML algorithms aren't good enough and that maybe we need deep learning instead of random forests?
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those articles show that a completely inhuman intelligence, with no intrinsic biases of it's own, reproduces the conclusions that allegedly come from human bias. I.e., it turns out that (sometimes) racism and sexism are useful and predictive heuristics. Of course, being in the NYTimes and Salon, they need to obfuscate this point and appeal to standard mood affiliation.
Since you claim that "racism and sexism are useful and predictive heuristics," does that mean mainstream society should accept/tolerate/promote such belief systems? Who is it exactly that you think would find these heuristics useful? Also, describing the results of any code/program written by a human as a "completely inhuman intelligence" is a tenuous claim at best.
I'm not taking any normative position. I'm simply pointing out that the implicit assumption underlying lots of modern beliefs - that racism/other evil beliefs lead to factually wrong beliefs - is being challenged by "racist" and "sexist" machine learning algorithms.
If you want to make normative arguments, go ahead. My first principles tend to be very individualistic (I view individual humans as being the sole carriers of moral consideration), so our normative claims will likely disagree.
Also, describing the results of any code/program written by a human as a "completely inhuman intelligence" is a tenuous claim at best.
Clearly you've never written such systems. If they behaved remotely the way humans think my job (building them and making them usable by humans) would be vastly easier.
Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
#50https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia Given the problems in police departments (which have fortunately started to appearing in the news), giving the police a system that will essentially let them see what you want to see is a terrible idea. Police work is already full of "forensic tools" that don't actually work (like idea that fingerprints actually identify someone uniquely, or the various techniques that are exam…
Apophenia is the _human_ tendency to see patterns in random _data_. Predictive _analytics_ is a machine that pulls non-random patterns out of data and presents this as _information_. To say that other tools have a bad track record may count as a valid argument, but to me, it is a weak and fatalistic one. Judge each tool on its own merit or discard all tools as useless seems like an easy choice. Predicting crime works…
> Apophenia is the _human_ tendency to see patterns in random _data_. Predictive _analytics_ is a machine that pulls non-random patterns out of data and presents this as _information_.
Yes. I know that. Apophenia is the correct term. Your fancy machine that predicts crime is only as good as the data it is fed and is made worse by the person who interprets the results. Both of these are easily biased.
> Bias can be detected and removed.
Just like how they removed the numerous biases, assumptions, and bad methodology that are well-known problems with breathalysers? Even if the model was theoretically accurate, the implementation can (and will) be wrong. You seem to be using a just-world assumption that doesn't have lazy, incompetent or malicious people.
> Monitoring social media is common detective work
It can be both. While these methods may be useful for going after stupid criminals, you're ignoring that it is also useful when targeting activists, political dissidents, etc. If you think this doesn't happen, you haven't been paying attention.
You're problem is that you are assuming it is only "criminals" that are targeted, but you live in a world where, to use an obvious example, some people assume that any black person is a "criminal".