4 ms·

If that is wrong, what is right? Should the police instead do less efficient completely random searches? Should the taxpayers hire more police officers to make

by cthor 11y ago

If that is wrong, what is right? Should the police instead do less efficient completely random searches? Should the taxpayers hire more police officers to make up for this loss in efficiency? Should businesses accept losses from fraud to placate your feelings? While it may not feel very good to be sending signals that associate you with crime, that is a cost you have to accept of sending those signals. In the case of police searches, I think attention would be better spent on making them more humane, rather than less racist.

nitrogen 11y ago
It's wrong when those signals come from birth.
throwaway2048 11y ago
I feel there is something deeply wrong with this sort of over-statistically/analytically focused thought chain, allow me to try to elaborate. Many signals have absolutely nothing to do with wrongdoing whatsoever. Say that hypothetically every drug dealer makes large cash deposits, and this is marked in a database somewhere as a "very reliable indicator". Well what about taxi drivers? Street Vendors? other occupations that deal almost exclusively in cash, should they also be suspected? What happens if somebody otherwise innocent of anything in particular triggers multiple "flags" like this, do they deserve to be discriminated against? What if the flags are stuff like being black, being poor, having a friend that has been charged with a crime. What about living in the "wrong" neighbourhood, how about the wrong genetic markers. How about a family history of mental illness, what about if you dont own a cellphone? What if they are angry about the government and have publicly protested? What if you accidentally like ISIS on facebook, or your friend does it as a joke? are these acceptable "black flags" too? What about if one of your close friends trips one or more of these markers? What if several do? Are you just as untrustworthy? It gets much choppier when you introduce something like neural net learning into the equation. It will form links between activity that are basically impossible to decipher by a human at all, should we accept these utterly opaque judgments because "on average they are pretty reliable"?, what about the cases where they are 100% dead wrong, should they just be considered collateral damage? A huge class of people could end up going through life denied basic services like a bank account because of things ENTIRELY beyond their control, or even understanding, all they know is they managed to piss off some equation somewhere. It gets better, because on average people with bad scores on one system "reliably indicate" they will be bad faith in other contexts too... Lots of businesses will accept this as an acceptable cost to keep fraud rates/whatever down, I don't find it acceptable, its almost the definition of injustice, and has a grave potential to create a vast underclass of "poor social credit score" people (who being a member of, even by association will assuredly be another hit against your scores) How happy would you be, if via no fault of your own you were deemed an "unacceptable risk"? So yes, it is inhuman, and wrong. I guess that -100 Social Credits for me.
- asddddd 11y ago
  Intentionally or not, you seem to have done a solid job of describing existing AML/KYC legal requirements. Example - http://www.acamstoday.org/domestic-high-risk-geographies-emerging-challenge-aml-compliance/ http://www.acamstoday.org/domestic-high-risk-geographies-eme... https://www.fincen.gov/law_enforcement/hifca/ https://www.fincen.gov/law_enforcement/hifca/
- getpost 11y ago
  Agreed. This mentality doesn't only lead to being denied a bank account; it leads to murder, literally.[1] How is this any different from any number of discriminatory practices in the past, which are now (at least superficially) illegal, such as "red-lining" black neighborhoods to deny home loans? ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’ [1] http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based...
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    The scariest thing is my mind is the potential for this to become self-reinforcing. Marginal people are marginalized even further, and forced to turn to crime to survive, thus "justifying" it even more.
    - eru 11y ago
      Also, lots of chilling effects: you can't decide to be black, but you can decide whether to pay in cash, or drive the speed limit.
- cft 11y ago
  This new years, I made a large liquor store purchase (about $600) in Manhattan, not in my normal geographical area. The transaction was declined, but all I had to do was to answer "yes" a text that I got from the issuing bank, and then swipe again. Was I "profiled"? Yes. Did Visa do a good job protecting me and itself with my profiling? Yes. Try running a real business with this purist approach. You will exceed 1% chargeback threshold in the first year, and your payment processor will either shut you down or will require a huge collateral.
dogweather 11y ago
We actually already do accept less police efficiency in favor of personal liberty in many areas. This is an American tradition. E.g. The Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. No one doubts that we'd find more criminals and contraband if police could make impromptu home searches of anyone at any time. But that's how a police state functions. And we've decided to exchange efficiency in crime reduction for civil rights.
- ec109685 11y ago
  Are you sure? Do countries without a 4th amendment have more criminals in jail and lower crime rates than we do?
  - eru 11y ago
    America has the most `criminals' in jail. America likes to lock people up. (You'd have to find a different metric to figure out what effect the 4th amendment or similar equivalent in other countries has.)
- Houshalter 11y ago
  I think your missing his point. He was assuming that the cops were already doing unjustified random searches of every car on the road. Assuming they are already doing this, wouldn't it be preferable if they switch to a model that decreases the number of innocent people that are searched by 10x? Wouldn't that be a net good to society? Of course if your opinion is that they shouldn't be allowed to do random searches at all, this whole thread is really irrelevant.
logicallee 11y ago
>If that is wrong, what is right? easy. ignoring protected classes [1] - thereby losing part, but not all of your signal. i.e. don't see race. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
atemerev 11y ago
Security profiling doesn't work, as bad guys adapt very fast. Probably quite a lot of drugs are moved by white guys in shiny rented cars, because those are less likely to be profiled.
SerLava 11y ago
>Should the police instead do less efficient completely random searches? Should the taxpayers hire more police officers to make up for this loss in efficiency? Jesus, dude. Obviously they should. Who the fuck cares about efficiency if they're pulling over people because they're black... in sedans.

by cthor 11y ago

nitrogen 11y ago

It's wrong when those signals come from birth.

throwaway2048 11y ago

I feel there is something deeply wrong with this sort of over-statistically/analytically focused thought chain, allow me to try to elaborate. Many signals have absolutely nothing to do with wrongdoing whatsoever. Say that hypothetically every drug dealer makes large cash deposits, and this is marked in a database somewhere as a "very reliable indicator". Well what about taxi drivers? Street Vendors? other occupations that deal almost exclusively in cash, should they also be suspected? What happens if somebody otherwise innocent of anything in particular triggers multiple "flags" like this, do they deserve to be discriminated against? What if the flags are stuff like being black, being poor, having a friend that has been charged with a crime. What about living in the "wrong" neighbourhood, how about the wrong genetic markers. How about a family history of mental illness, what about if you dont own a cellphone? What if they are angry about the government and have publicly protested? What if you accidentally like ISIS on facebook, or your friend does it as a joke? are these acceptable "black flags" too? What about if one of your close friends trips one or more of these markers? What if several do? Are you just as untrustworthy? It gets much choppier when you introduce something like neural net learning into the equation. It will form links between activity that are basically impossible to decipher by a human at all, should we accept these utterly opaque judgments because "on average they are pretty reliable"?, what about the cases where they are 100% dead wrong, should they just be considered collateral damage? A huge class of people could end up going through life denied basic services like a bank account because of things ENTIRELY beyond their control, or even understanding, all they know is they managed to piss off some equation somewhere. It gets better, because on average people with bad scores on one system "reliably indicate" they will be bad faith in other contexts too... Lots of businesses will accept this as an acceptable cost to keep fraud rates/whatever down, I don't find it acceptable, its almost the definition of injustice, and has a grave potential to create a vast underclass of "poor social credit score" people (who being a member of, even by association will assuredly be another hit against your scores) How happy would you be, if via no fault of your own you were deemed an "unacceptable risk"? So yes, it is inhuman, and wrong. I guess that -100 Social Credits for me.

asddddd 11y ago
Intentionally or not, you seem to have done a solid job of describing existing AML/KYC legal requirements. Example - http://www.acamstoday.org/domestic-high-risk-geographies-emerging-challenge-aml-compliance/ http://www.acamstoday.org/domestic-high-risk-geographies-eme... https://www.fincen.gov/law_enforcement/hifca/ https://www.fincen.gov/law_enforcement/hifca/
getpost 11y ago
Agreed. This mentality doesn't only lead to being denied a bank account; it leads to murder, literally.[1] How is this any different from any number of discriminatory practices in the past, which are now (at least superficially) illegal, such as "red-lining" black neighborhoods to deny home loans? ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’ [1] http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based...
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  The scariest thing is my mind is the potential for this to become self-reinforcing. Marginal people are marginalized even further, and forced to turn to crime to survive, thus "justifying" it even more.
  - eru 11y ago
    Also, lots of chilling effects: you can't decide to be black, but you can decide whether to pay in cash, or drive the speed limit.
cft 11y ago
This new years, I made a large liquor store purchase (about $600) in Manhattan, not in my normal geographical area. The transaction was declined, but all I had to do was to answer "yes" a text that I got from the issuing bank, and then swipe again. Was I "profiled"? Yes. Did Visa do a good job protecting me and itself with my profiling? Yes. Try running a real business with this purist approach. You will exceed 1% chargeback threshold in the first year, and your payment processor will either shut you down or will require a huge collateral.

dogweather 11y ago

We actually already do accept less police efficiency in favor of personal liberty in many areas. This is an American tradition. E.g. The Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. No one doubts that we'd find more criminals and contraband if police could make impromptu home searches of anyone at any time. But that's how a police state functions. And we've decided to exchange efficiency in crime reduction for civil rights.

ec109685 11y ago
Are you sure? Do countries without a 4th amendment have more criminals in jail and lower crime rates than we do?
- eru 11y ago
  America has the most `criminals' in jail. America likes to lock people up. (You'd have to find a different metric to figure out what effect the 4th amendment or similar equivalent in other countries has.)
Houshalter 11y ago
I think your missing his point. He was assuming that the cops were already doing unjustified random searches of every car on the road. Assuming they are already doing this, wouldn't it be preferable if they switch to a model that decreases the number of innocent people that are searched by 10x? Wouldn't that be a net good to society? Of course if your opinion is that they shouldn't be allowed to do random searches at all, this whole thread is really irrelevant.

logicallee 11y ago

>If that is wrong, what is right? easy. ignoring protected classes [1] - thereby losing part, but not all of your signal. i.e. don't see race. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

atemerev 11y ago

Security profiling doesn't work, as bad guys adapt very fast. Probably quite a lot of drugs are moved by white guys in shiny rented cars, because those are less likely to be profiled.

SerLava 11y ago

>Should the police instead do less efficient completely random searches? Should the taxpayers hire more police officers to make up for this loss in efficiency? Jesus, dude. Obviously they should. Who the fuck cares about efficiency if they're pulling over people because they're black... in sedans.