Humans are a thousand times worse than algorithms. Unattractive defendants get prison sentences twice as long as attractive ones. Judges give significantly hars

Humans are a thousand times worse than algorithms. Unattractive defendants get prison sentences twice as long as attractive ones. Judges give significantly harsher sentences just before lunch, when they are hungry. And of course the classic biases against race and gender and other protected classes. I bet there are many other biases that we haven't even discovered yet. Some studies have shown that job interviews are worse than just looking at resumes. Humans should never ever be in charge of sentencing decisions, or anything else you want to be "fair". There's nothing remotely fair about human judgement. One particularly weird bias humans have, is we strongly distrust machines. Psychologists have studied this and named it "Algorithm Aversion": http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-AlgorthimAversion-Dietvorst-Simmons-Massey.pdf http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-Algort... Even when we know machines do better than humans, we are much more distrustful of them. We can watch humans make mistakes and an algorithm make many fewer mistakes, and still end up trusting the human far more. And it's weird, because in almost every domain that's been studied, algorithms do vastly better than humans. For any statistical problem where there are a few features available to predict the outcome, even simple linear regression typically beats human experts. We suck at probabilistic and statistical problems. Often the predictions of experts are barely better than chance. And this has been known for a long time. The earliest reference I found was from 1928! Where an incredibly crude statistical model (hand trained!) beat a group of prison psychologists, at predicting recidivism of convicts. Even the sources that inspired this game have been shown to be fraudulent. That is the propublica study they cite. See https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.... Propublica claimed their results were "almost statistically significant." I.e., they not statistically significant. And why would it be so? Algorithms have no particular reason to hate a minority group. They try to make the most accurate predictions possible given the data.