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Who cares? It's not right! A hobo who hasn't showered in a decade should be able to argue his case, be heard and receive justice. Anything less, you're using r
by badrabbit 6y ago
Who cares? It's not right!
A hobo who hasn't showered in a decade should be able to argue his case, be heard and receive justice. Anything less, you're using rules to enforce a social order, the legal system has no relationship with justice if this is acceptable.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago>>A hobo who hasn't showered in a decade should be able to argue his case, be heard and receive justice. Anything less, you're using rules to enforce a social order, the legal system has no relationship with justice if this is acceptable. Should is they keyword and maybe one day we'll reach that point. Meanwhile, looks and appearance can make a huge difference, so why take the chance?
- badrabbit 6y agoI agree, it's should. I am not saying take a chance but let's emphasize should, the way things are is wrong, period. Not worse, but wrong and incorrect and it should not be tolerated much like racism and msiogyny shouldn't have been tolerated in the past.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rocqua 6y agoTo put it the most callous way I can, that's not very baseyian of you. How someone looks informs your prior probability of who they are. What they say informs your posterior probability, but you gotta take that prior into account when forming the posterior. At least, if you want 'accurate' statistics. (Bias - variance trade-off not withstanding, nor second-order effects of doing the 'correct' thing being possibly more detrimental than the advantage given by the 'correct' thing)
- amznthrowaway5 6y agoBut how strong is the effect? It's not just a binary judgement. People can heavily bias based on features that are borderline irrelevant. Also, you may end up hurting a lot of innocent people by generalizing too much based on some feature that is not causally associated with the actual crime, even if it predicts well overall. Are you comfortable applying this same bayesian logic to other factors like race?
- rocqua 6y agoThere are 2 separate issues. Firstly, are people correctly estimating their priors, or are their priors unfounded. Secondly, and more importantly I think, what effects does a 'correct' bias have when it starts interacting with other people. It might be the optimal choice in isolation. But that doesn't make it a good idea game-theoretically if everyone starts doing it. The end result can be difficult to explain though. Because it means that not taking certain useful information into account leads to better decisions. I think that, sometimes, we argue that a systemic bias is stronger than the statistics warrant. When sometimes the argument should be that sysyemic bias, statistically warranted or not is harmful. (Note, my original comment was me making the mistake I argue against in this post)
- badrabbit 6y agoIt doesn't matter,your opinions of them does not matter to justice. The facts of the case is all that matters for justice.
- rgblambda 6y agoThis is what unconscious bias is. People don't even know they're making these kinds of judgements.
- badrabbit 6y agoYes, same thing with racial disparities. Something needs to be done about both issues, perhaps technology can help by using deepfake audio/video to repeat what the defendant is saying and avoid judge/jury/prosecutor visual contact.