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"Algorithmic justice" reminded me of a study where researchers predicted the risk of a crime better than judges:[1] > Millions of times each year, judges must

"Algorithmic justice" reminded me of a study where researchers predicted the risk of a crime better than judges:[1] > Millions of times each year, judges must decide where defendants will await trial—at home or in jail. By law, this decision hinges on the judge’s prediction of what the defendant would do if released. This is a promising machine learning application because it is a concrete prediction task for which there is a large volume of data available. Yet comparing the algorithm to the judge proves complicated. First, the data are themselves generated by prior judge decisions. We only observe crime outcomes for released defendants, not for those judges detained. This makes it hard to evaluate counterfactual decision rules based on algorithmic predictions. Second, judges may have a broader set of preferences than the single variable that the algorithm focuses on; for instance, judges may care about racial inequities or about specific crimes (such as violent crimes) rather than just overall crime risk. We deal with these problems using different econometric strategies, such as quasi-random assignment of cases to judges. Even accounting for these concerns, our results suggest potentially large welfare gains: a policy simulation shows crime can be reduced by up to 24.8% with no change in jailing rates, or jail populations can be reduced by 42.0% with no increase in crime rates. [1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/w23180.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/w23180.pdf

ulucs 8y ago
Until the populace learns how to improve their chances of getting released and starts to game the system, introducing endogeneity. (Also noticed the nice coincidence of a professor with user name klienber having a NBER Working Paper)
- dagw 8y ago
  Until the populace learns how to improve their chances of getting released As long as that correlates with behavior we want to see from the populace; https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- candiodari 8y ago
  Which is totally not possible with judges, right ? I feel like a lot of arguments being made here fail the A vs B test. Any argument that purports to provide help with choosing Judges vs Algorithms needs to apply differently to Judges, and differently to Algorithms. How about: with Judges we simply won't know (for sure) what influences them. Are they racist ? Who knows. Do they prefere to let people with jobs out (realistically: yes, but we don't know for sure). Do they ... With algorithm we can literally test, by presenting them with artificial cases, lots of them, and see how they judge. With a judge, you can't.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    > I feel like a lot of arguments being made here fail the A vs B test. Any argument that purports to provide help with choosing Judges vs Algorithms needs to apply differently to Judges, and differently to Algorithms. Out of curiosity, is there a name for this "fallacy", if it is one, since to me it mostly seems like the other party is failing at some basic level of critical thought. I've been dealing a lot with arguments of this nature at work, and it'd be great to have a name to it. Pointing it out in the verbatim sense ("ok, but that's true of <your counter position> as well") becomes tiring quickly, and honestly, just causes the person to move on to the next fallacious claim.
  - ulucs 8y ago
    Well, humans are already capable of dealing with it. The judges know that prisoners know what is expected of a good prisoner. The decisions are already being made with that in mind. Contrast this with evaluating a programmer's performance. Everyone knows that lines of code written, number of tickets closed, number of fixed bugs or lines of documentation written do correlate well with performance. But the minute they are revealed to impact performance reviews, those metrics becone trash. Until you can find viable instruments, you shouldn't ever put those into a model and expect to have good predictions. If your model is not explicitly equipped to deal with endogeneity (like structural equation models), it will fail when faced with it. If you think a judge is influenced by things that are unrelated to the case, you should appeal to the court above (which you can readily do in Continental Europe, but I don't know about Common Law).
gbrown 8y ago
The authors note that judges may care explicitly about racial bias, but based on a quick read they're making a really, really big mistake in the language they're using: they confuse arrests with crime. Arrests and convictions are simply a measurement mechanism for crime, which is known to have severe biases.
- reader5000 8y ago
  There is no convincing evidence that arrest rates "severely" overestimate offense rates; if anything it is just as likely arrest rates underestimate offense rates.
  - moosey 8y ago
    While what you say specifically is true, using arrest rates to determine criminal activity by race (and the subsequent conviction rate, etc.) has been shown to have strong relationship to race; at least in the United States. There are entire books on the subject. You can't tie racial arrest rates to the underlying crime rate, as POC get arrested far more often for the same crimes.
    - 47gfnm8sgf7m 8y ago
      I'm not sure I understand that correctly. Are you saying that POC are acquitted or have charges dropped far more often for the same crimes (i.e. have a far lower conviction rate)?
      - ddulaney 8y ago
        In general, POC are more likely to be arrested for committing a crime. The parent's point isn't about whether they are acquitted, it's that if you were to commit a crime as a POC, you are more likely to be arrested than if you had committed that same crime as a non-POC. In both scenarios you committed a crime, but in one of them the system never has a record of it. This is why arrest rates and crime rates are different: if a POC is more likely to get arrested for committing a crime, the arrest rates by race (POCs get arrested more) will not reflect the crime rates by race (differences are generally smaller).
will_brown 8y ago
>By law, this decision hinges on the judge’s prediction of what the defendant would do if released. That isn’t the legal standard for release pending trial. Thus is may look like an algorithm “predicts” crime better than judges, but judges can’t withhold bail/bond because they “predict” a certain defendant will commit another crime (because that’s not exactly judges are doing when determining bond).

ulucs 8y ago

Until the populace learns how to improve their chances of getting released and starts to game the system, introducing endogeneity. (Also noticed the nice coincidence of a professor with user name klienber having a NBER Working Paper)

dagw 8y ago
Until the populace learns how to improve their chances of getting released As long as that correlates with behavior we want to see from the populace; https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
candiodari 8y ago
Which is totally not possible with judges, right ? I feel like a lot of arguments being made here fail the A vs B test. Any argument that purports to provide help with choosing Judges vs Algorithms needs to apply differently to Judges, and differently to Algorithms. How about: with Judges we simply won't know (for sure) what influences them. Are they racist ? Who knows. Do they prefere to let people with jobs out (realistically: yes, but we don't know for sure). Do they ... With algorithm we can literally test, by presenting them with artificial cases, lots of them, and see how they judge. With a judge, you can't.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  > I feel like a lot of arguments being made here fail the A vs B test. Any argument that purports to provide help with choosing Judges vs Algorithms needs to apply differently to Judges, and differently to Algorithms. Out of curiosity, is there a name for this "fallacy", if it is one, since to me it mostly seems like the other party is failing at some basic level of critical thought. I've been dealing a lot with arguments of this nature at work, and it'd be great to have a name to it. Pointing it out in the verbatim sense ("ok, but that's true of <your counter position> as well") becomes tiring quickly, and honestly, just causes the person to move on to the next fallacious claim.
- ulucs 8y ago
  Well, humans are already capable of dealing with it. The judges know that prisoners know what is expected of a good prisoner. The decisions are already being made with that in mind. Contrast this with evaluating a programmer's performance. Everyone knows that lines of code written, number of tickets closed, number of fixed bugs or lines of documentation written do correlate well with performance. But the minute they are revealed to impact performance reviews, those metrics becone trash. Until you can find viable instruments, you shouldn't ever put those into a model and expect to have good predictions. If your model is not explicitly equipped to deal with endogeneity (like structural equation models), it will fail when faced with it. If you think a judge is influenced by things that are unrelated to the case, you should appeal to the court above (which you can readily do in Continental Europe, but I don't know about Common Law).

gbrown 8y ago

The authors note that judges may care explicitly about racial bias, but based on a quick read they're making a really, really big mistake in the language they're using: they confuse arrests with crime. Arrests and convictions are simply a measurement mechanism for crime, which is known to have severe biases.

reader5000 8y ago
There is no convincing evidence that arrest rates "severely" overestimate offense rates; if anything it is just as likely arrest rates underestimate offense rates.
- moosey 8y ago
  While what you say specifically is true, using arrest rates to determine criminal activity by race (and the subsequent conviction rate, etc.) has been shown to have strong relationship to race; at least in the United States. There are entire books on the subject. You can't tie racial arrest rates to the underlying crime rate, as POC get arrested far more often for the same crimes.
  - 47gfnm8sgf7m 8y ago
    I'm not sure I understand that correctly. Are you saying that POC are acquitted or have charges dropped far more often for the same crimes (i.e. have a far lower conviction rate)?
    - ddulaney 8y ago
      In general, POC are more likely to be arrested for committing a crime. The parent's point isn't about whether they are acquitted, it's that if you were to commit a crime as a POC, you are more likely to be arrested than if you had committed that same crime as a non-POC. In both scenarios you committed a crime, but in one of them the system never has a record of it. This is why arrest rates and crime rates are different: if a POC is more likely to get arrested for committing a crime, the arrest rates by race (POCs get arrested more) will not reflect the crime rates by race (differences are generally smaller).

will_brown 8y ago

>By law, this decision hinges on the judge’s prediction of what the defendant would do if released. That isn’t the legal standard for release pending trial. Thus is may look like an algorithm “predicts” crime better than judges, but judges can’t withhold bail/bond because they “predict” a certain defendant will commit another crime (because that’s not exactly judges are doing when determining bond).