6 ms·

Algorithms Designed to Fight Poverty Can Actually Make It Worse

90 points by chablent 8y ago

tobyhinloopen 8y ago
Why do people post and upvote webpages that are behind a paywall? I wish there was a “no paywall or gdpr wall” rule for hackernews, or at least a [paywall] “flair”-like thing so I don’t have to waste time loading the page.
- OpenBSD-reich 8y ago
  Best idea is if someone who can read it copies and pastes it into several pastebin, dpaste, bpaste, etc. sites and links them in the comments. By the time DMCA hits the paste sites it'll be a few days later and everyone on HN will have read it.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > Why do people post and upvote webpages that are behind a paywall? because it's explicitly allowed by the rules. I like your flair idea though, seems like a nice middle ground.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- wanderingstan 8y ago
  1 point by wanderingstan 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [-] I concur. It's hard to have a discussion about an article that only a few people can read. The flair idea is a good one. We already require post titles on old articles to contain the year, seems natural to require disclaimers of paywalls.
- malandrew 8y ago
  What I want is the ability to screen out paywall content just like I can screen out shadowbanned people. If someone wants to see paywalled content, then they could just turn it on.
- alach11 8y ago
  Good journalism costs money.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Make your mind up HN, one minute it's "I hate all advertising and would be more than willing to pay for content if only I had the option" and the next it's "ban anything that's behind a paywall". ;)
  - CaptSpify 8y ago
    Those two are far from mutually exclusive
pjc50 8y ago
Paywalled, but the taster paragraph gives a strong hint: > Near the end of 2006 Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, announced a plan to give the state's “neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world of work and dignity.” He signed a $1.16-billion contract with a consortium of companies, including IBM, that would automate and privatize eligibility processes for Indiana's welfare programs. - Means testing frequently makes things worse, regardless of "algorithm" - If you want to relieve poverty, don't give huge amounts of money to multinational mediocre consulting firms
- noonespecial 8y ago
  I keep thinking eventually we'll run out of ancillary people to give gobs of money to and finally try giving it to the obvious...
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    We'll never run out of ancillary people who want to receive gobs of money.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim [to public welfare], will not always have the greatest success [to access it]. I think this is optimistic even. At some point one evolves into a society where what determines wealth is one's aptitude at obtaining social benefit. On the high end, say, a CEO of a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Airbus (or more disgustingly American Shipbuilding, which billed for ships it never built) and on the far end, say a veteran suffering from paranoia and PTSD that refuses to obtain government help for, understandable reasons.
- tareqak 8y ago
  The same goes for foreign aid. There is definitely immediate help warranted in the case natural disasters, and the outbreaks of war, and some longer-term help when displaced people are unable to return to their homes. However, a lot of foreign aid ends up being cases where taxpayers fund questionable projects spearheaded by politicians and run by multinationals, consultants, and contractors with dismal results. The main cause I see is that the local population being helped often has poor or skewed representation as a stakeholder in the decision-making process such that the outcome becomes unhelpful or doomed.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sbhn 8y ago
Next time the politician reminds you you’re are under attack from those on welfare, think about the problems of the highly profitable businesses that administer it. 1 for you, and, 2 for me.
noir-york 8y ago
The only "algorithm" proven to fight poverty was discovered a long time ago and its really simple: 1. good jobs paying living wages (so parents have economic security) 2. decent, free education (so the children can have a future) 3. Well funded social welfare (because shit happens and people get sick) Aka, "social mobility" $1.16 billion is a lot of money to give to companies when it could pay for a good number of other things.
- kharak 8y ago
  That's not all there is to it. Germany has the lowest social mobility of all Europe, despite having all three of your points.
  - Novashi 8y ago
    And America falls below Germany for social mobility, precisely because it doesn't have those things: https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/ https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    Truth be told, social mobility and poverty are two separate concepts.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Usually the ruling class wants the masses to be content with whatever their predicament is. That's why the focus is always on making subsisting at your present level bearable (social safety nets, minimum wage, etc) and not on mobility. Edit: I don't literally believe this. I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content.
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
darkerside 8y ago
> The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!” http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to...
- ericbrow 8y ago
  Thanks for the great article. Long read, but lots of great examples.
- neikos 8y ago
  That was quite amazing read. Thank you for that.
j_m_b 8y ago
It's almost as if good intentions can have unintended consequences.
niftich 8y ago
The author of this article is Virginia Eubanks [1], who has studied and written on this topic extensively, including a new book whose short title is 'Automating Inequality'. Although I can't be sure, I think it's reasonable to assume that the content in this article is along the lines expressed in this CityLab interview [2], and other media coverage the author highlights [3]. Eubanks presents the impact that rigid, opaque systems and processes can have on individuals, and does so by focusing on troubling policy implications, but also by highlighting the suffering experienced by named individuals whose unique personal circumstances are examined. This is not only an effective writing device, but also demonstrates the empathy gap of software, and how an impersonal process -- whether intentionally or not -- serves as a tool for bureaucrats and low-level decision-makers to offload difficult negative decisions to an amorphous entity like 'the process'. I feel that this is a key, if not always overt motivation of most bureaucracies, and has universal applicability. There's also the notion that when ML is fed with raw data, it picks up correlations present in the data regardless of whether their presence is due to a lurking variable. Later, making use of such a model for decision-making perpetuates the bias, and a haphazardly chained sequence of such processes increases the likelihood that a cohort's observed outcomes will self-fulfill in the future. Conversation on this matter in recent years has tended towards the social justice implications more so than the lack of intellectual rigor that allows this to be possible -- the former is a compelling point, but it's unfortunate that there's not enough coverage of about the harm of giving complex tools to those who don't understand them. [1] https://virginia-eubanks.com/ https://virginia-eubanks.com/ [2] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-of-digital-poorhouses/552161/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-of-digital-p... [3] https://virginia-eubanks.com/media/ https://virginia-eubanks.com/media/
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  This is a great summary, and that Citylab piece is well worth checking out. I'm sometimes skeptical of human-narrative analyses, because they make it easy to launch equally-vivid attacks on a plan that fails 10 people and a plan that fails 10,000. But with rigor behind them, there's a lot to be said for them as existence proofs - especially when we're talking about the margins of a plan instead of its core. Knowing what the edge cases look like matters, and for that it's hard to beat talking to individuals with problems that don't fit on a form. (As an aside, I think software often creates not only an empathy gap but a mechanical one. An analog system can often be forced to accommodate oddities like self-employment and unconventional address formats, but "the computer won't let me enter that address" is a brick wall. I've never found an investigation of this, but I suspect it's a major drawback of digitization.) Your final point about ML is a vital one, and one I'm endlessly frustrated by. We're increasingly aware of issues like racial bias in parole-predictions systems, but there's alarmingly little focus on the fact that a system which does that is flawed in general, and might be making the same assumptions about e.g. low-income neighborhoods without anyone noticing. Unlike human bias, a flawed algorithm is equally happy to abuse any strange correlation it can find.
jellicle 8y ago
Err, so, this paywalled article is about how a Republican governor who ran on a platform of cutting welfare in the state of Indiana brought in some "algorithms", some "computers" of some sort, that ended up giving a lot of money to private companies, slashing welfare, and making people more poor? And the premise here is that this was unintended? I think I found the problem: credulous writers.
esotericn 8y ago
Means testing is fundamentally broken as a concept. Another (related) example would be access to mental health resources. Waiting for someone to hit rock bottom before helping is obviously suboptimal.

90 points by chablent 8y ago

Why do people post and upvote webpages that are behind a paywall? I wish there was a “no paywall or gdpr wall” rule for hackernews, or at least a [paywall] “flair”-like thing so I don’t have to waste time loading the page.

OpenBSD-reich 8y ago
Best idea is if someone who can read it copies and pastes it into several pastebin, dpaste, bpaste, etc. sites and links them in the comments. By the time DMCA hits the paste sites it'll be a few days later and everyone on HN will have read it.
leetcrew 8y ago
> Why do people post and upvote webpages that are behind a paywall? because it's explicitly allowed by the rules. I like your flair idea though, seems like a nice middle ground.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wanderingstan 8y ago
1 point by wanderingstan 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [-] I concur. It's hard to have a discussion about an article that only a few people can read. The flair idea is a good one. We already require post titles on old articles to contain the year, seems natural to require disclaimers of paywalls.
malandrew 8y ago
What I want is the ability to screen out paywall content just like I can screen out shadowbanned people. If someone wants to see paywalled content, then they could just turn it on.
alach11 8y ago
Good journalism costs money.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Make your mind up HN, one minute it's "I hate all advertising and would be more than willing to pay for content if only I had the option" and the next it's "ban anything that's behind a paywall". ;)
- CaptSpify 8y ago
  Those two are far from mutually exclusive

pjc50 8y ago

Paywalled, but the taster paragraph gives a strong hint: > Near the end of 2006 Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, announced a plan to give the state's “neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world of work and dignity.” He signed a $1.16-billion contract with a consortium of companies, including IBM, that would automate and privatize eligibility processes for Indiana's welfare programs. - Means testing frequently makes things worse, regardless of "algorithm" - If you want to relieve poverty, don't give huge amounts of money to multinational mediocre consulting firms

noonespecial 8y ago
I keep thinking eventually we'll run out of ancillary people to give gobs of money to and finally try giving it to the obvious...
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  We'll never run out of ancillary people who want to receive gobs of money.
- dnautics 8y ago
  The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim [to public welfare], will not always have the greatest success [to access it]. I think this is optimistic even. At some point one evolves into a society where what determines wealth is one's aptitude at obtaining social benefit. On the high end, say, a CEO of a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Airbus (or more disgustingly American Shipbuilding, which billed for ships it never built) and on the far end, say a veteran suffering from paranoia and PTSD that refuses to obtain government help for, understandable reasons.
tareqak 8y ago
The same goes for foreign aid. There is definitely immediate help warranted in the case natural disasters, and the outbreaks of war, and some longer-term help when displaced people are unable to return to their homes. However, a lot of foreign aid ends up being cases where taxpayers fund questionable projects spearheaded by politicians and run by multinationals, consultants, and contractors with dismal results. The main cause I see is that the local population being helped often has poor or skewed representation as a stakeholder in the decision-making process such that the outcome becomes unhelpful or doomed.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sbhn 8y ago

Next time the politician reminds you you’re are under attack from those on welfare, think about the problems of the highly profitable businesses that administer it. 1 for you, and, 2 for me.

noir-york 8y ago

The only "algorithm" proven to fight poverty was discovered a long time ago and its really simple: 1. good jobs paying living wages (so parents have economic security) 2. decent, free education (so the children can have a future) 3. Well funded social welfare (because shit happens and people get sick) Aka, "social mobility" $1.16 billion is a lot of money to give to companies when it could pay for a good number of other things.

kharak 8y ago
That's not all there is to it. Germany has the lowest social mobility of all Europe, despite having all three of your points.
- Novashi 8y ago
  And America falls below Germany for social mobility, precisely because it doesn't have those things: https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/ https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
- geezerjay 8y ago
  Truth be told, social mobility and poverty are two separate concepts.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Usually the ruling class wants the masses to be content with whatever their predicament is. That's why the focus is always on making subsisting at your present level bearable (social safety nets, minimum wage, etc) and not on mobility. Edit: I don't literally believe this. I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

darkerside 8y ago

> The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!” http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to...

ericbrow 8y ago
Thanks for the great article. Long read, but lots of great examples.
neikos 8y ago
That was quite amazing read. Thank you for that.

j_m_b 8y ago

It's almost as if good intentions can have unintended consequences.

niftich 8y ago

The author of this article is Virginia Eubanks [1], who has studied and written on this topic extensively, including a new book whose short title is 'Automating Inequality'. Although I can't be sure, I think it's reasonable to assume that the content in this article is along the lines expressed in this CityLab interview [2], and other media coverage the author highlights [3]. Eubanks presents the impact that rigid, opaque systems and processes can have on individuals, and does so by focusing on troubling policy implications, but also by highlighting the suffering experienced by named individuals whose unique personal circumstances are examined. This is not only an effective writing device, but also demonstrates the empathy gap of software, and how an impersonal process -- whether intentionally or not -- serves as a tool for bureaucrats and low-level decision-makers to offload difficult negative decisions to an amorphous entity like 'the process'. I feel that this is a key, if not always overt motivation of most bureaucracies, and has universal applicability. There's also the notion that when ML is fed with raw data, it picks up correlations present in the data regardless of whether their presence is due to a lurking variable. Later, making use of such a model for decision-making perpetuates the bias, and a haphazardly chained sequence of such processes increases the likelihood that a cohort's observed outcomes will self-fulfill in the future. Conversation on this matter in recent years has tended towards the social justice implications more so than the lack of intellectual rigor that allows this to be possible -- the former is a compelling point, but it's unfortunate that there's not enough coverage of about the harm of giving complex tools to those who don't understand them. [1] https://virginia-eubanks.com/ https://virginia-eubanks.com/ [2] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-of-digital-poorhouses/552161/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-of-digital-p... [3] https://virginia-eubanks.com/media/ https://virginia-eubanks.com/media/

Bartweiss 8y ago
This is a great summary, and that Citylab piece is well worth checking out. I'm sometimes skeptical of human-narrative analyses, because they make it easy to launch equally-vivid attacks on a plan that fails 10 people and a plan that fails 10,000. But with rigor behind them, there's a lot to be said for them as existence proofs - especially when we're talking about the margins of a plan instead of its core. Knowing what the edge cases look like matters, and for that it's hard to beat talking to individuals with problems that don't fit on a form. (As an aside, I think software often creates not only an empathy gap but a mechanical one. An analog system can often be forced to accommodate oddities like self-employment and unconventional address formats, but "the computer won't let me enter that address" is a brick wall. I've never found an investigation of this, but I suspect it's a major drawback of digitization.) Your final point about ML is a vital one, and one I'm endlessly frustrated by. We're increasingly aware of issues like racial bias in parole-predictions systems, but there's alarmingly little focus on the fact that a system which does that is flawed in general, and might be making the same assumptions about e.g. low-income neighborhoods without anyone noticing. Unlike human bias, a flawed algorithm is equally happy to abuse any strange correlation it can find.

jellicle 8y ago

Err, so, this paywalled article is about how a Republican governor who ran on a platform of cutting welfare in the state of Indiana brought in some "algorithms", some "computers" of some sort, that ended up giving a lot of money to private companies, slashing welfare, and making people more poor? And the premise here is that this was unintended? I think I found the problem: credulous writers.

esotericn 8y ago

Means testing is fundamentally broken as a concept. Another (related) example would be access to mental health resources. Waiting for someone to hit rock bottom before helping is obviously suboptimal.