Software 'No More Accurate Than Untrained Humans' At Predicting Recidivism (theguardian.com) 166
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The credibility of a computer program used for bail and sentencing decisions has been called into question after it was found to be no more accurate at predicting the risk of reoffending than people with no criminal justice experience provided with only the defendant's age, sex and criminal history. The algorithm, called Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), is used throughout the U.S. to weigh up whether defendants awaiting trial or sentencing are at too much risk of reoffending to be released on bail. Since being developed in 1998, the tool is reported to have been used to assess more than one million defendants. But a new paper has cast doubt on whether the software's predictions are sufficiently accurate to justify its use in potentially life-changing decisions.
The academics used a database of more than 7,000 pretrial defendants from Broward County, Florida, which included individual demographic information, age, sex, criminal history and arrest record in the two year period following the Compas scoring. The online workers were given short descriptions that included a defendant's sex, age, and previous criminal history and asked whether they thought they would reoffend. Using far less information than Compas (seven variables versus 137), when the results were pooled the humans were accurate in 67% of cases, compared to the 65% accuracy of Compas. In a second analysis, the paper found that Compas's accuracy at predicting recidivism could also be matched using a simple calculation involving only an offender's age and the number of prior convictions.
The academics used a database of more than 7,000 pretrial defendants from Broward County, Florida, which included individual demographic information, age, sex, criminal history and arrest record in the two year period following the Compas scoring. The online workers were given short descriptions that included a defendant's sex, age, and previous criminal history and asked whether they thought they would reoffend. Using far less information than Compas (seven variables versus 137), when the results were pooled the humans were accurate in 67% of cases, compared to the 65% accuracy of Compas. In a second analysis, the paper found that Compas's accuracy at predicting recidivism could also be matched using a simple calculation involving only an offender's age and the number of prior convictions.
Of course, no blockchain tech here (Score:1)
so what would you expect?
Add some blockchain goodies and everything will work perfectly....or at least the next round of funding...
No bad software (Score:4, Insightful)
Or bad metrics for your model (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Or bad metrics for your model (Score:1)
But 137 sounds better than 2 for marketing.
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It's a classic flim flam technique. Take a normally simple transaction and weave a complicated story around it with many steps and complicated procedures. Make sure the story involves many (fictional) people with their own idiosyncrasies. Keep them focused on the seeming logic of each individual step so they won't look at the overall situation and see the scam coming.
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It suggests that the additional variables are either unrelated to the outcome
Or their application was slapped together haphazardly in order to start bringing in those contract dollars as soon as possible. The other 135 variables could provide useful information, if their analysis of that information were better. Until this study, there was no incentive to perform well because the cost of poor performance is borne by convicts.
I am far more willing to believe that crapware is being shoveled into government computers at taxpayer expense.
Bear in mind that this system performs as well as
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Bear in mind that this system performs as well as untrained humans. If humans with correctional or psychological expertise perform better than untrained humans (which I assume is true), then this system is embarrassingly bad. It's doing a worse job than the people it's supposed to help.
With this software they'd need a handful of trained people to author the algorithm and then many more lesser trained people can apply this software without introducing personal bias. It's also a kind of double blind testing. The people writing the algorithm don't see the offenders, and the people applying the algorithm don't know the algorithm to introduce a bias to it. This is presumably more fair as personal biases cannot be applied to individual offenders. If someone involved in creating the algorith
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Well, there's bad (i.e., stupid) clients too. They're responsible for a lot of bad software.
If a customer wants to buy magic software without an understanding of what it does or proof that it even works, what are the programmers supposed to do about that? They just report to work and build what their boss tells them to build, and he tells them to build what the customer will buy.
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Question (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems obvious that someone with more relapses in the past will also be more likely to do it again. However, I will assume that at that point, a judge wont allow for bail anyway so if this is about people with three or less offenses on their record, I'd imagine that ONLY going by the criminal history is going to be inaccurate no matter who or what is looking at it.
Isn't this more a case of bad data as opposed to bad programming? Because "no more accurate than an untrained person" implies pure chance.
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
An untrained person isn't pure chance. Pure chance is rolling a die. Untrained person is common sense.
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Since common sense is very rare, and untrained person is likely just a feeling ob being more or less threatened, with no connection to the actual threat.
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Common sense itself is common by definition. You might not think so, given all the things that people claim are common sense. However it is rare that an appeal to common sense refers to something that is actually common sense, because if that thing actually had been common sense, it would have been unlikely for a disagreement to have arisen around it, so there would have been no cause for making an appeal to common sense.
Obvious really. It's just common sense.
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On the other hand, this software is nothing but bias. Free will vs. determinism and they're siding with determinism. It might match the religious and racial bias of an average human.
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Bullshit. You have fallen for junk-science. There is no way to know when a person actually decides things and hence there is no reference point. The whole experimental set-up is fundamentally flawed.
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"There is no way to know when a person actually decides things"
You called bullshit on someone citing actual research with an unsupported, absolute statement.
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It doesn't count as "actual research" unless they post the actual research.
"I agree with this" != "this is factually correct"
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Sure it does. If you ask nicely, I'm sure someone would provide you a link. Or you could google it. I think it was even discussed on Slashdot.
He also described the results. The GGP's response was "that's impossible."
Not sure how that's relevant, but I agree!
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An untrained person isn't pure chance. Pure chance is rolling a die. Untrained person is common sense.
That would be a good point if common sense were common.
For every person who applies logic and reason to a case (I.E. shows remorse, now has steady job, impetus for theft no longer present) there are 2 or 3 people who apply batshit insane rules (I.E. He's Ginger, so he'll steal again).
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People are actually quite good at making judgements of people based on very little information, https://www.webmd.com/balance/... [webmd.com], it makes sense really, in the real world we have very little actual information about someone.
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Yes. And that process does better than what's actually being used.
Scary.
It would be interesting to see how actual experts perform.
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It seems obvious that someone with more relapses in the past will also be more likely to do it again.
Unless those relapses caused them to enter a programme or get additional support to avoid relapsing again. Or maybe their personal circumstances changed. It's very difficult to write software that can evaluate an individual's personal circumstances.
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If humans are no better than a machine then how can a machine programmed by humans do any better
This is a stupid, Luddite sentiment. Computers are already far better than humans at a wide range of tasks. This increases dramatically if your usage of "machine" include robots performing physical tasks.
Deep learning is opening the doors to new machine skills. Quantum computing will likely open a few more in the next few decades. It's anyone's guess what comes after that.
Humans were smart enough to make a machine that could do some things better than they could. We used those new capabilities to make bette
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If humans are no better than a machine then how can a machine programmed by humans do any better
This is a stupid, Luddite sentiment.
Only if you're the sort who immediately gets butt hurt and defensive when you see something you assume offends you.
A person who isn't that sort might look at the question with a greater philosophical viewpoint, e.g. "if the man who wrote the program is flawed, wouldn't it follow suit that the program may be flawed as well, in the same fashion?"
Gedankenexperiments tend to be wasted on plebs and the easily offended.
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One measure of intelligence is the speed at which one can make a decision. A very basic intelligence test is the speed at which a person can match patterns. A test like this run over perhaps 15 minutes will get a very high correlation to a pen and paper test run over an hour or two where one must perform mathematics problems or word comprehension.
So, if speed of making a decision is defined as intelligence then we can define the criteria for a decision, put that in a way a machine can compute quickly, the
Parameters (Score:1)
A big part of risk of reoffending lies in the person's relationships in their life after prison. If they are reconnected to normal society they will be less likely to reoffend than if they lack connections or connect with cother criminals.
Obvious Mistake (Score:2)
"Headlines no more accurate than stupid clickbait" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Alternatively: vendor oversells effectiveness of its proprietary, secret sauce methodology and doesn't like any independent evaluation of its products unless it's favorable. Customers, having a naive faith in technology, buy anyways, which produces exactly the results you mention: programs will be forever terrible at this task. Why should anyone bother to make a program good when customers will shell out good money for mediocre?
Re:"Headlines no more accurate than stupid clickba (Score:4, Insightful)
No. The problem is that people have realized the software is racist. What happens is this:
Black citizens tend to get more minor criminal issues than white ones because of institutional racism. Then this software sees that a black man has two citations for, say crossing the street away from a crosswalk, while the white man does not. So it gives him a higher risk of recidivism, which means more bail/longer jail time.
Then the software guys complain and say they aren't racist, they are just applying the algorithm.
This article is trying to shut them up by saying their algorithm, in addition to being racist, doesn't work any better than simple common sense.
It is not an attack on the business model, just of the current state of the art.
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I disagree with what you say on multiple levels. I did NOT claim that criminal history is a proxy for race. Instead I claimed that blacks are disproportionately likely to have a criminal history. I also do not agree that race predicts recidivism independently, your blatantly racist belief that certain races commit more crimes. One study (or two or three) does not confirm your racist beliefs.
There are multitude other studies that contradict yours - and they have major holes in them. One of the big hol
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Maybe there's no better algorithm (Score:3)
So. Is there any better algorithm? You'd think that if there were a consensus among people studying this, they'd code in the consensus. Maybe the interesting thing here is that age and priors are the only useful information for predicting recidivism. This doesn't seem like rocket science. We've got decades of data. We ought to be able to run some other algorithms over it--something that takes into account a 3rd variable, and see if it helps. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't.
Re:Maybe there's no better algorithm (Score:4, Insightful)
They are trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than trying to quantify people, the solution to people reoffending is to provide better support to everyone. Stop wasting money on software and start investing in programmes that help reform offenders.
Reform programmes are also a much better way to evaluate people, because their progress in the programme is much easier to measure and requires them to meet goals that change their behaviour and future life chances. That's why sensible systems hand out a sentence which can then be reduced through participation and good behaviour.
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They are trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than trying to quantify people, the solution to people reoffending is to provide better support to everyone. Stop wasting money on software and start investing in programmes that help reform offenders.
Reform programmes are also a much better way to evaluate people, because their progress in the programme is much easier to measure and requires them to meet goals that change their behaviour and future life chances. That's why sensible systems hand out a sentence which can then be reduced through participation and good behaviour.
They are trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than trying to quantify people, the solution to people reoffending is to provide better support to everyone. Stop wasting money on software and start investing in programmes that help reform offenders.
Support does work. California's Folsom Prison is an example. At one point it had low recidivism numbers, and a lot of prisoner support. The we got "tough on crime" overcrowded the place, eliminated help for the prisoners, and now the place is a holding area between crimes.
Reform programmes are also a much better way to evaluate people, because their progress in the programme is much easier to measure and requires them to meet goals that change their behaviour and future life chances.
There are some more physical factors that are obvious. Age is one. Given that most prisoners are men, testosterone level will lower as they age. But I think there is one issue that is really important - impulse control.
Impulse control
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Is the citizen married?
Did the citizen have a job?
The decades of data shows who is doing crime, what part of the USA and who the victims are.
The data sets exist but the virtue signalling politics and optics around them are not good for inner city party politics.
Political correctness is holding the correct use of the inner city crime data sets back.
Decades of huge new amounts of education support from the gov, private sector did not change parts of th
Doesn't matter (Score:3)
The software works for free 24 hours a day, 7 times a week, doesn't need sick days, vacation, maternity leave nor does it want a pension when it ill be replaced by a much better AI version.
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The software works for free 24 hours a day, 7 times a week, doesn't need sick days, vacation, maternity leave nor does it want a pension when it ill be replaced by a much better AI version.
137 variables within an algorithm has been running untouched for twenty years now. Had this study not taken place, it would have gone untouched for another twenty years, regardless of AI advancement, because everyone would be sitting back just assuming that it's doing a "good" job.
The most valuable question in the world is Why. Repeat it as many times as necessary until you get stupid people to stop saying "Because we've always done it this way."
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137 variables within an algorithm has been running untouched for twenty years now. Had this study not taken place, it would have gone untouched for another twenty years, regardless of AI advancement, because everyone would be sitting back just assuming that it's doing a "good" job.
Even setting aside advances in machine learning, the assumption that the data sample used to train the algorithm would be equally valid 20 years later is stunningly foolish.
Any such tool should regularly be updated and revalidated to establish its performance.
I wonder how well this program was ever vetted and validated. Like the Liebold voting machines sold at about this same time that were proprietary pieces of security-hole ridden garbage, I suspect this product was sold simply through connections and the
How about trained humans (Score:4, Interesting)
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the problem with ALL "AI" systems.... (Score:2)
... the problem with ALL "artificial" intelligence systems (and it is pure arrogance on the part of humans to declare intelligence to be "artificial" in the first place) is that you *cannot ask them how they arrived at a decision*.
only when humanity is ready to create *conscious* computers (and not torture them so that they are perfectly justified to start the "Skynet" scenario), will it be possible to actually ask them, "so what's the logic behind that decision, please can you explain it to me, computer-to
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I've seen neuroscience articles (and I will admit I don't know how solid they are) that indicate that via MRI studies, people make decisions before they are conscious of this, and appear to post hoc build a rationale to agree with what their subconscious decided. So, you may actually have an easier time at getting the AI to spit out its parameters than a human.
I've listened to a radio program on the same subject. This jibes with the concept of impulse control. I suppose a good example might be heterosexual men. If a man sees a woman he finds attractive, in most cases he will think about having sexual intercourse with her. A fleeting thought. But sensible impulse control will have him not do that. In relation to other crimes, a person might see a laptop sitting unattended and yes, there might be a thought of "Hey, I could grab this and walk off. Again, a thought
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I would imagine that it seems like we have more free will than we do, but agree that we have at least some.
Humans will certainly come with a preset number of likely responses. I look at psychotic breaks and schizophrenia as what happens when expected actions and reactions don't happen. And heaven help us if we were to all act on our impulses. I know I would have been killed by hundreds of people at this point (I'm what they call an irritating bastard)
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I've seen neuroscience articles (and I will admit I don't know how solid they are) that indicate that via MRI studies, people make decisions before they are conscious of this, and appear to post hoc build a rationale to agree with what their subconscious decided. So, you may actually have an easier time at getting the AI to spit out its parameters than a human.
That is a very questionable interpretation of the experiments. Is there actual data showing that the "post hoc rationale" is not actually retrieving the information used to make the decision "subconsciously"? Or this just a guess that it does not?
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Prevention (Score:2)
The paper shows no such thing (Score:2)
The accuracy of COMPASS is what it is. That it can be matched by untrained humans, or by a simpler calculation, does not make it any less accurate. If age and number of priors between them cover all the predictive factors among the 137 variables, no algorithm can do better than using just them.
Way to miss the point (Score:2)
Most of the comments here are studiously examining the tree bark with a microscope while not noticing they're in a forest.
The courts are supposed to be filled with wisdom and thoughtfulness. The popularity of this software and the court's failure to notice that it's nearly useless is more indicative of a bunch of people thoughtlessly going through the motions.
Keeping in mind that anyone can be suspected if they're in the wrong place at the wrong time, is this the system you want deciding your fate?
137 variables? (Score:2)
Someone obviously did not understand Multivariate Analysis.
vengeance gradient tunnel vision (Score:2)
When the Bible says God made man in his image, it doesn't draw special attention to how God configured the more primitive elements of the human brain such that man was predestined to make our punitive system Old Testament primitive.
There's a memforyless version of justice: do the crime, do the time, get kicked back out into society with no lingering black marks, to sin again or not. This is a nice version of justice because no process treads overtly on free will.
Of course, when a previously convicted sex o
Re: More data does not always mean more accurate (Score:1)
Well if you spend a couple decades arresting a significant portion of the adult male population of a certain group, and then don't give their schools funding because the higher funded schools are in suburbs, it isn't a big surprise when the kids grow up to have a low IQ or are criminals.
Has nothing to do with their ethnicity other than people of certain ethnicities live in certain areas and smoke certain plants which are different than the other plants the other ethnicities smoked.
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Studies will show that IQ correlates highly with genetics. Some studies will show IQ is 50% genetic, others will show it's 90% genetic. If criminal behavior is highly correlated to IQ, and it seems that it is, then better funded schools will not significantly change the criminal tendencies of a population.
People will point to the Flynn Effect to claim that IQ is highly correlated to education. Here's an interesting fact, the same Dr. Flynn that found this effect will admit to a genetic component to intel
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And the part of IQ that isn't genetics is probably correlated with nutrition (which would be the main difference between populations). However, IQ tests don't just test IQ - they test reading comprehension and literacy.
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It also correlates with fetal alcohol syndrome. Here in Canada, a large part of the prison population has fetal alcohol syndrome, which not only lowers IQ, but makes people more compulsive.
Another question is whether people with low IQ are more likely to be criminals or just more likely to be caught.
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And the part of IQ that isn't genetics is probably correlated with nutrition (which would be the main difference between populations).
Claiming that malnutrition is a cause of poor intelligence among certain populations in the USA is going to be difficult to prove. With all the programs now on making sure no one goes hungry there is really no excuse for any significant intelligence deficiency from a lack of nutrition. I'm sure that there's still people in the USA with severe malnutrition but that's not going to show up on any major scale.
However, IQ tests don't just test IQ - they test reading comprehension and literacy.
Have you taken an intelligence test? Reading comprehension and literacy is a portion of any intellig
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"making sure no one goes hungry" != getting proper nutrition. There are a lot of ways to get your calorie requirements met without getting your brain development nutrient requirements met. School programs make sure kids get at least one meal a day (if the problem is financial need rather than neglect), but beyond that you have to have parents that care. These other programs do not reach into your household and make you not eat and feed your kids junk food.
Most of the gains in IQ (readjustment, technica
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It's a measure of education. If you only barely know how to read, it's going to affect how well you understand the question being presented. IQ is intended to measure strictly raw capability rather than training/knowledge.
A reading comprehension test involves the one examined to read a paragraph or three and then answer questions based on the information contained within. The words used are very basic and in the language the person presumably already knows. So, yes, there is a basic level of prior knowledge of the language in which the test was written to take this test but the questions will be based not on anything known prior but was in the text given.
I remember some of these tests I've taken in the past, one involved a
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Keep lying, Bucko. School funding has been demonstrated for a century to have no impact on education. We spend more than 50% more per pupil than the countries in the top 5.
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They said the software used 137 data points on determining the probability of re-offending but they were no better than if someone use just 2, age and prior convictions. Perhaps I've had more statistics training than most but this seems highly probable. This is pretty basic data analysis, or so I thought. If you take a bunch of data points and correlate them to re-offend rate there will be some data points that correlate more than others. If one doing the analysis tossed out the data points that had little to no correlation then the accuracy of the predictive value will still be effectively unchanged.
I don't think pure statistics is the proper approach as much as machine learning. To be honest the problem sounds like something that could be tackled in an undergraduate course, "here's your variables, there's your outcomes, run a classifier, and submit your results".
Perhaps there's something fundamentally difficult about getting above 2/3 accuracy, but it seems you should REALLY be able to beat untrained workers on a problem like this.
I suspect this is just a case of a product built in the late 90's on we
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Those with an IQ around 85 or 90 (depending on who you ask) will be most likely to be criminals. Above that IQ there is greater profit in getting a job.
Above that IQ, they will perform better as criminals. Those without scruples make more money - true sociopaths become CEOs. Sometimes the crime is under the guise of working for a corporation - sometimes its solo work. IQ just means being more capable - both of achieving and of covering up your tracks.
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Next question. Does a low IQ correlate with more crime or getting caught more often?
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Next question. Does a low IQ correlate with more crime or getting caught more often?
I'm sure you were being rhetorical, but here goes: That's not an answerable question. You can't, with any certainty, measure the crime rate among people you haven't identified as criminals ("caught" by another word).
Sure, you could ask everyone if they were a criminal, but you'd get false positives and false negatives from (among others) people who feel guilty about something legal, people who never feel guilty about anything, people who are actually insane, and people who feel they have something to gain b
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I wouldn't call you a racist for mentioning indisputable facts. On the other hand, claiming things are indisputable facts and then not citing any sources probably means you are full of shit. I can't find a citation for that, so it's just an opinion. I would call you a racist for using faulty logic and made-up statistics to perpetuate racist myths.
Also, your arguments aren't just "controversial to the SJW's," they are controversial to anybody who doesn't believe that any particular group of people are "likel
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When it comes to homicides, most of them (about 90%) are perpetrated by yourself, your close relatives (spouse, parents, children) or your acquaintances.
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60% of all homicides are suicides
most of them (about 90%) are perpetrated by yourself
Neither of which are relevant to the racial disparity question.
Looking at Wikipedia, [wikipedia.org] 52% of the USA's murders (i.e. not including suicides) are committed by black murderers.
Our AC troll presumably thinks that this proves that black people are naturally violent, or some such nonsense. Nope. The USA is very far from a colour-blind society, so the figures aren't all that surprising. Black Americans are far more likely to have the misfortune of growing up around violent gangs, etc.
Steven Pinker spoke about exa [youtube.com]
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Is it really important for a potential murder victim whether the potential perpetrator is "naturally" or "culturally" violent?
What? Of course not.
Do courts accept that as a defense in a murder case?
What? Of course not.
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Is it really important for a potential murder victim whether the potential perpetrator is "naturally" or "culturally" violent?
No, but it may be important to a society that has a desire to reduce the murder rate.
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Our AC troll presumably thinks that this proves that black people are naturally violent, or some such nonsense. Nope. The USA is very far from a colour-blind society, so the figures aren't all that surprising. Black Americans are far more likely to have the misfortune of growing up around violent gangs, etc.
The root causes are interesting and important to improving our society. They're not important when deciding the disposition of a prisoner. The only thing that matters in that case if if they'll re-offend, not why they'll re-offend. The likelihood of recidivism is biased by all kinds of "unfair" metrics like gender and race. I personally don't think metrics like race should be used in the determination, but it would be more accurate if they were.
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The only thing that matters in that case if if they'll re-offend, not why they'll re-offend.
I personally don't think metrics like race should be used in the determination, but it would be more accurate if they were.
You've contradicted yourself.
If you believe that racial data should be excluded from the calculation of how likely the convict is to re-offend, that means you value something else alongside whether they'll re-offend.
That's my position, too. Discarding racial data really does diminish the accuracy of the odds-of-re-offending calculation, but we should do it anyway.
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You've contradicted yourself.
I don't think I did. I said that including "unfair" metrics like race help get the most accurate prediction. They do. I didn't say that getting the most accurate prediction was the most important thing to do. I pointed out that the "why" is unimportant to the "if". This is true for any "why" that isn't included in the metrics. The "why" is interesting for other reasons.
Discarding racial data really does diminish the accuracy of the odds-of-re-offending calculation, but we should do it anyway.
Yes.
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the "why" is unimportant to the "if"
But that's just it - the 'why' does matter; we're discussing deliberately discarding certain 'whys' from our estimator, in the name of not being racist.
If the reason a convict is denied parole is because he's black (i.e. were he not black then his estimated odds of re-offending would have been below the threshold), then the 'if' behind his denial surely matters.
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You left out:
This is true for any "why" that isn't included in the metrics.
Being black is a useful metric for making an accurate prediction. We agree on that and agree that it should be ignored. The social inequality that causes blacks to have higher recidivism rates is interesting, but not part of the equation. The fact that blacks are searched more often is interesting, but we don't factor that in either. What's important when guessing whether a person will re-offend is whether he's black, not why blacks are more likely to re-offend. The reasons why black offender
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Some reasons are important. For example if the crime is say drug possession, and black people are searched more, then the black person is more likely to be caught even if both white and black people have exactly the same rate of redoing the crime. We only count residivism if the person is caught.
I assume the goal is to reduce the actual offending not the reduce the caught offenders.
We could reduce residivism to 0 instantly if just got rid of all law enforcement. In case of drug possession maybe not a bad id
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Either I'm misreading you, or you're not making sense.
We're using the word 'why' to refer to the dimensions of the machine-learning data-set, right? So 'blackness' is a dimension, and is a 'why' (i.e. it's something the machine can factor into its decision to permit/deny parole).
Obviously the machine learning machine isn't going to comprehend the nuance of societal racism. That isn't the point. The point is that we're agreed we shouldn't input race data into the system.
the only thing important to factor into the prediction is if he's black.
But we just agreed that we shouldn't f
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I assume the goal is to reduce the actual offending not the reduce the caught offenders.
A sensible distinction, but there's more to it: we don't want to implement a racist system even if it's more effective at reducing offending rates.
In other words, we need to treat political correctness as an engineering goal.
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Race is likely a surrogate for other factors, as the OP pointed out. Yes, putting it in your model may make your model more accurate, but it's demonstrably not a great surrogate (it doesn't perfectly represent the actual causative factors). So you might improve your model, but you'll improve it MORE by using the proper variables.
It's even more dangerous when you apply group level surrogates to individuals. It's quite possible that part of the reason the random internetters are outperforming the computer
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You forgot that the poorer someone is, the harsher the sentencing will be. In most areas, a public defender will ask for a plea bargain, then not take the case unless the defendant agrees to this. If you have your own lawyer who knows where to punch holes in a case, even one that would be normally open and shut, the DA likely will drop the charges because they will be wasting time with a case that they know they will lose, as opposed to an indigent case where they can "serve Justice" and run roughshod ove
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In addition to having the misfortune of growing up around gangs there are other factors
Yes, of course. One could do a PhD on those other factors. The 'etc' I used covers all sorts of things.
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When it comes to homicides, most of them (about 90%) are perpetrated by yourself, your close relatives (spouse, parents, children) or your acquaintances.
Seems like we should do "something" about this person and their spouse, parents, children and acquaintances.
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So what you're saying is 60% of the time somebody kills another person, they killed themselves.
I agree and so do I. Now get out of my head; it's crowded enough.
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| So what you're saying is 60% of the time somebody kills another person, they killed themselves.
I agree and so do I. Now get out of my head; it's crowded enough.
I'm spartacus! And so am I!
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Not in the US. In the US black men commit murder at a greater rate than other demographics, but their total is still less than the white male total.
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Interesting)
It has been shown that COMPASS overestimates the recidivism of black people by a factor of about two, while it underestimates the recidivism of white people at about the same rate -- while at the same time not even including race in the list of variables.
So it will rather deny bail to a black person which never commits a crime again. But it will let a white person go free on bail who later will become a repeat offender. As the exact inner workings of COMPASS are regarded as business secret, there were some experiments to find out why it is so bad at estimating the recidivism rate of people, and it seems that it totally overweighs social factors (stable/unstable family background, unemployment rate, debts etc.pp.), because there are many of them in the list of factors it considers. On the other hand, there are not many variables for the type of crime committed, and thus it does constantly underestimates those in the total. It would thus grant bail to a sexual offender who comes from a stable family background with steady income, though the recidivism rate of those is 70%, but it is only a single factor weighing against the offender. On the other hand it would deny bail to a petty thief, who does not have a stable family life, is indebted, has only short periods of employment and moves often.
Basicly: COMPASS is biased against people in poverty.
Re: Ha! (Score:2)
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The hardship you mention is felt to a greater extent by someone who has a life and identity that they would lose or lose access to and who would be forced into a future where they would have little stability, no contact with family, would probably not be able to hold down decent jobs or even poorer jobs for any length of time and may end up resorting to petty crime to get by.
Given that the person in the GPs example is already living that kind of life, I think you are overestimating the disincentive that bei
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Basicly: COMPASS is biased against people in poverty.
Well then, it sounds like it's functioning as designed, just like the legal system in its current state.
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It tried to be fair and actually failed, because it uses a methodology that clearly wasn't designed by a statistician.
The program uses over a hundred factors in its classification scheme, but statisticians and data scientists make a point of pruning factors because long experience has shown that introducing many irrelevant factors actually reduces predictive accuracy. And just because race is not an explicit factor doesn't mean that the algorithm is race blind either. It's entirely feasible to given the hu
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