Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#51

Post by rmxt »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49
rmxt wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

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 carrie…

I understand the difference between a normative claim and a positive claim. You might not be taking a normative position explicitly, but your distaste is showing through: "allegedly come from," "obfuscate this point". I'd like to see where you go with this (both your distaste and positive statements) -- even if what you're saying is accurate/factual, what implications does that have for society at large? For the intersection of machine learning and society?

Appeals to authority and accomplishments aside, I don't need to have written such systems to understand, infer, and conclude things about aspects of their behavior. My point is this: something created by humans cannot be, by definition, inhuman. Two methodologies, the "human approach" and the "ML approach", might have radically different steps but come to the same conclusions. It would appear from your comments that you are OK with these conclusions ("An unbiased methodology produced these results, therefore, it's OK!"). Are you morally satisfied by the conclusions discussed above? Do the results of "such systems" influence your satisfaction?

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#52

Post by yummyfajitas »

rmxt wrote: post #51
yummyfajitas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 carrie…

I understand the difference between a normative claim and a positive claim. You might not be taking a normative position explicitly, but your distaste is showing through: "allegedly come from," "obfuscate this point". I'd like to see where you go with this (both your distaste and positive statements) -- even if what you're saying is accurate/factual, what implications does that have for society at large? For the inte…

I have distaste for the anti-intellectual behavior/ideology underlying the NYT/Salon articles, and which is also visible in this comment thread. Doubly so since it's so dominant in our culture and since it is being used as a rhetorical weapon against tech.

The implication for society (assuming these findings generalize) is that most likely, we cannot solve statistical disparities via unbiased processes - we can have fair treatment of individuals or statistically representative distribution of spoils, but not both. As noted above, I'm very individualistic, so I favor fair treatment of individual humans.

Appeals to authority and accomplishments aside, I don't need to have written such systems to understand, infer, and conclude things about aspects of their behavior. My point is this: something created by humans cannot be, by definition, inhuman.

I don't know what you mean by "inhuman". It sounds like you mean the term to be "never tainted by the ephemeral emanations of humanity". I merely mean "inhuman" as "thought processes so radically different that intuitions about a human mind are completely useless".

Concretely, do you believe a random forest can somehow infer that the variable x[27] represents gender, and that to make it's sexist creator happy it should reduce the objective function in order to screw some women over? If you look at the internals of sklearn, that's just not what random forests do.

Two methodologies, the "human approach" and the "ML approach", might have radically different steps but come to the same conclusions. It would appear from your comments that you are OK with these conclusions ("An unbiased methodology produced these results, therefore, it's OK!"). Are you morally satisfied by the conclusions discussed above? Do the results of "such systems" influence your satisfaction?

I don't know what you mean by "morally satisfied". A fact about the world is either true or false. In computer science terms, I believe "morally satisfied" has type `satisfied: HumanAction -> Boolean`. Your question consists of applying `satisfied` to a value of type `WorldState` - it's a type error. In human terms, your question doesn't make sense.

In terms of my own individual happiness (as distinguished from moral satisfaction), this fact reduces my happiness. Because I believe many of these facts to be true, I'm forced to either lie about my beliefs (which causes me disutility) or suffer social opprobrium from anti-intellectual types and lazy thinkers influenced by them.

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#54

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jMyles wrote: post #33
spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly and as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time this rankles and I did have at the time dissuade my one of my coworkers from "accidentally" putting the perp on the kiddie fiddlers regsister. And the landlord of the pub where this happened was very lucky a few of the lads didn't go down and make our displeasure known.

Are you a markov chain bot?

Might be someone who's first language is not English.

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#55

Post by AnimalMuppet »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
rmxt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the difference between a normative claim and a positive claim. You might not be taking a normative position explicitly, but your distaste is showing through: "allegedly come from," "obfuscate this point". I'd like to see where you go with this (both your distaste and positive statements) -- even if what you're saying is accurate/factual, what implications does that have for society at large? For the inte…

I have distaste for the anti-intellectual behavior/ideology underlying the NYT/Salon articles, and which is also visible in this comment thread. Doubly so since it's so dominant in our culture and since it is being used as a rhetorical weapon against tech. The implication for society (assuming these findings generalize) is that most likely, we cannot solve statistical disparities via unbiased processes - we can have…

But you can have distortions in the data, even if the algorithm is neutral, can't you? The data says "men are more likely to commit rape than women"; OK, that's probably not just that the data encodes a bias. But if your program says "blacks are more likely to be charged with violent crimes", say, is that because blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes, or because blacks are more likely to be charged with violent crimes because the justice system is (or historically has been) skewed?

Even an unbiased analysis system can reach bad conclusions from bad data, and a biased justice system can produce bad data. So the conclusions can be biased even if the program is unbiased.

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#56

Post by jMyles »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #54
jMyles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a markov chain bot?

Might be someone who's first language is not English.

Perhaps. I just read it again, and I still can't put together the meaning, even trying to read less-than-literally. It reads just like a comment from SubredditSimulator.

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#57

Post by DanBC »

jMyles wrote: post #56
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be someone who's first language is not English.

Perhaps. I just read it again, and I still can't put together the meaning, even trying to read less-than-literally. It reads just like a comment from SubredditSimulator.

The comment is in reply to one talking about police monitoring the victims of crime who might be more likely to take revenge. The police then catch those victims (now perpetrators) of crime.

> Exactly and as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time this rankles and I did have at the time dissuade my one of my coworkers from "accidentally" putting the perp on the kiddie fiddlers regsister.

I've been a victim of crime - I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It rankles - I wanted revenge.

At the time I dissuaded a colleague from deliberately putting the name perpetrator of the crime on the sex offender register.

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#58

Post by mentat »

riskneural wrote: post #28
mentat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of protecting and helping victims, expect them to retaliate and be waiting when they do... Awesome.

In the insurance industry, if you are the victim of a crash you may lose your no claims bonus. The situation is not just as simple as a victim of attack being a victim. Wouldn't it be the case that, for example, those in the drug business are far more likely to harm their competition than their market?

For what types of attacks is it OK to "take away the no claims bonus" for fair and equal protection (and scrutiny) by the law?

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#59

Post by Baghard »

pdkl95 wrote: post #50
Baghard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

> Both of these are easily biased.

Indeed. But remedies exist. Statisticians can examine the validity of the data, analysts and detectives can be trained to interpret the results correctly, and social scientists can point out the dangers of relying solely on computer systems.

I have no strong view for or against breathalysers. I'll concede that there may be some errors in those tests. Does that completely invalidate these tools in judging if someone is too drunk to drive and may cause harm to self or others? Should we only opt for rigorous methods like drawing blood samples? My view is: no, we should not. These are valuable tools that work for the large majority of times and help save lives (at the inevitable cost of some errors and inconvenience).

In my world I believe in just intentions. Breathalysers are not introduced to imprison sober drivers, they are to combat drunk ("lazy, incompetent or malicious") drivers on our roads.

These methods are useful for catching the savvy criminals too. I am not ignoring that these systems are also useful to target activists and political dissidents. That's basically what they were build for in the first place (well, that and the terrorists, see DARPA LifeLog). It's just now that these tools are adopted by local Police departments.

A weapon stick can be used to subdue a suspect through non-lethal force, and it can be used to choke a peaceful protester. It will succeed in both tasks. It's not a stupid ineffective tool we should take away, because it can be used in bad ways. We should make sure to avoid the bad usage, and provide police with the best weapon stick possible for the good usage.

You assume that this system will be used to justify police brutality and that this system will be used by people who think that any black person is a "criminal". I have a higher opinion of the people who join the police. I rather reserve such judgment to the criminals themselves.

Re: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

#60

Post by yummyfajitas »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55
yummyfajitas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have distaste for the anti-intellectual behavior/ideology underlying the NYT/Salon articles, and which is also visible in this comment thread. Doubly so since it's so dominant in our culture and since it is being used as a rhetorical weapon against tech. The implication for society (assuming these findings generalize) is that most likely, we cannot solve statistical disparities via unbiased processes - we can have…

But you can have distortions in the data , even if the algorithm is neutral, can't you? The data says "men are more likely to commit rape than women"; OK, that's probably not just that the data encodes a bias. But if your program says "blacks are more likely to be charged with violent crimes", say, is that because blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes, or because blacks are more likely to be charged with vi…

Yes, I agree that not all learning algorithms are perfect.

Is it your belief that we can cook up better algos/data collection methods/etc and all the people complaining about "bias" in algorithms will be satisfied? I don't believe that is the case, given that no one is actually complaining that the algorithms are getting the (factually) wrong answer.

Post reply on HN