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If the case you're making is that you think that there should be a national effort to correct for historical injustices that were done by the state by actively

If the case you're making is that you think that there should be a national effort to correct for historical injustices that were done by the state by actively discriminating by race, that is a completely different discussion. That is what proponents of the structural racism model are doing. Here's an example I took from the book Weapons of Math Destruction: When people are convicted of a crime, they undergo a number of personality tests, including the LSI-R (Level of Service Inventory - Revised). This is a highly detailed questionnaire that asks about prior convictions, whether the prisoner had accomplices in their crimes, whether drugs or alcohol were involved, etc. It does not ask about race. What it does ask about are things which highly correlate with race, such as the number of police encounters (no criminal suspicion necessary), the number of friends/family/neighbours who have committed crimes, etc. If two first-time offenders have committed identical crimes but one of them grew up in wealthy suburbs and the other grew up in the rough inner city, they will receive very different scores on the LSI-R. So what do they use the LSI-R for? They feed it into a model which assigns the offender a recidivism risk score. Then they use that risk factor directly when determining the person's sentence, restrictions, parole eligibility, etc. So now we're not even talking about historical injustices, we're talking about ongoing injustice based on historical injustice. It's a vicious cycle, or a negative feedback loop, if you will. This is a serious problem! Edit: Just to add another piece of the puzzle, the reason wealthy suburbs vs rough inner cities correlate so highly with race is a direct result of the historical racist practices of redlining [1] and white flight [2]. Now combine that with grinding poverty (also a result of redlining and segregation) and the war on drugs, and the result is high-crime neighbourhoods in the inner city. Those high crime neighbourhoods attract highly increased police presence, which leads to more convictions, which leads to more patrols, etc. This is another vicious cycle which feeds into the above statistical model. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

ralusek 7y ago
I assume that the LSI-R is something that is actually trained based off of how much those factors actually predict the rate of recidivism, though, no? If friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes is an accurate predictor of recidivism, the fact that black Americans in the inner city have more friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes does not make the model racist. They're either good predictors or they're not. A black kid in the inner city with friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes very likely does have a higher rate of recidivism than a white kid in the suburbs, and if this weren't true, but was being predicted by the model, then this would simply be a bad model. If it turns out that there are many black kids who happen to live near neighbors who've committed crimes, but actually do not have a higher rate of recidivism, then the model is as racist as it is using a poorly correlated indicators of recidivism. Your indicator for whether or not a model is racist cannot simply be that the model produces outputs that are delineated by race in such a manner that is unpalatable. So long as the model is actually not using race as a means of predicting outcomes, though, any behavior that is racist would simply be due to including poor features.
- chongli 7y ago
  I think you’re still missing the point. Whether the model is accurate or not is beside the point. A completely accurate model may indeed show a higher recidivism risk for an inner city kid compared to one from the suburbs. If it’s used in sentencing or other life-affecting decisions then it’s going to amplify historical injustices. People commit more crimes when they have less opportunity. People have less opportunity when they grow up in high crime neighbourhoods. This is a negative feedback loop which was started by slavery and accelerated by segregation and redlining. It’s not enough to use a hands-off approach. To correct the problem requires an active push in the opposite direction, to restore opportunity and break the cycles. Edit: Think of it this way. You and some friends are playing Monopoly, drinking a few beers and having a great time. An hour and a half into the game (we all know games of Monopoly can last 4 hours or more), you discover one of your friends has been cheating. Now what? He says "Sorry everyone! I'll stop cheating now and everything will be fine." Is that true? Of course not. The proceeds from cheating may have been used to acquire the orange properties and maybe even put houses up on them. Every time you and the other friends land on those properties you end up paying rent to the previously cheating friend. Rent that he should not be collecting because those assets were acquired by cheating. This is what it's like to have historical injustices continue to perpetuate into the future.
  - hello_marmalade 7y ago
    Yes, but you can't build it into your model. In this example, you would end up with a result of putting people back into these communities who have a high level of recidivism. You are actively not avoiding an actual issue because of perceived racial injustice when the issue is not racial. This is the problem with processing our world down racial lines. You're trying to correct for a historical injustice. The fact that race factors into the circumstance of why people are where they are right now doesn't change the fact that those variables lead to recidivism. It's not racist. It's accurate. If you want to fix the problem, then you need to fix the underlying issues, which tend to be economic. Those economic issues stem from an issue that affects all races, and therefore splitting it across racial lines only serves to reduce the possibility of actual change. All you're doing when you try to account for historical injustice is slapping a band-aid on a deeper issue. (Edit: Grammar)

ralusek 7y ago

I assume that the LSI-R is something that is actually trained based off of how much those factors actually predict the rate of recidivism, though, no? If friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes is an accurate predictor of recidivism, the fact that black Americans in the inner city have more friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes does not make the model racist. They're either good predictors or they're not. A black kid in the inner city with friends/family/neighbors who have committed crimes very likely does have a higher rate of recidivism than a white kid in the suburbs, and if this weren't true, but was being predicted by the model, then this would simply be a bad model. If it turns out that there are many black kids who happen to live near neighbors who've committed crimes, but actually do not have a higher rate of recidivism, then the model is as racist as it is using a poorly correlated indicators of recidivism. Your indicator for whether or not a model is racist cannot simply be that the model produces outputs that are delineated by race in such a manner that is unpalatable. So long as the model is actually not using race as a means of predicting outcomes, though, any behavior that is racist would simply be due to including poor features.

chongli 7y ago
I think you’re still missing the point. Whether the model is accurate or not is beside the point. A completely accurate model may indeed show a higher recidivism risk for an inner city kid compared to one from the suburbs. If it’s used in sentencing or other life-affecting decisions then it’s going to amplify historical injustices. People commit more crimes when they have less opportunity. People have less opportunity when they grow up in high crime neighbourhoods. This is a negative feedback loop which was started by slavery and accelerated by segregation and redlining. It’s not enough to use a hands-off approach. To correct the problem requires an active push in the opposite direction, to restore opportunity and break the cycles. Edit: Think of it this way. You and some friends are playing Monopoly, drinking a few beers and having a great time. An hour and a half into the game (we all know games of Monopoly can last 4 hours or more), you discover one of your friends has been cheating. Now what? He says "Sorry everyone! I'll stop cheating now and everything will be fine." Is that true? Of course not. The proceeds from cheating may have been used to acquire the orange properties and maybe even put houses up on them. Every time you and the other friends land on those properties you end up paying rent to the previously cheating friend. Rent that he should not be collecting because those assets were acquired by cheating. This is what it's like to have historical injustices continue to perpetuate into the future.
- hello_marmalade 7y ago
  Yes, but you can't build it into your model. In this example, you would end up with a result of putting people back into these communities who have a high level of recidivism. You are actively not avoiding an actual issue because of perceived racial injustice when the issue is not racial. This is the problem with processing our world down racial lines. You're trying to correct for a historical injustice. The fact that race factors into the circumstance of why people are where they are right now doesn't change the fact that those variables lead to recidivism. It's not racist. It's accurate. If you want to fix the problem, then you need to fix the underlying issues, which tend to be economic. Those economic issues stem from an issue that affects all races, and therefore splitting it across racial lines only serves to reduce the possibility of actual change. All you're doing when you try to account for historical injustice is slapping a band-aid on a deeper issue. (Edit: Grammar)