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The GP clearly wrote: "What would be wrong though is to blindly take that probability for the fact." And it's right: your algorithms can use all sorts of indi
by Udik 6y ago
The GP clearly wrote:
"What would be wrong though is to blindly take that probability for the fact."
And it's right: your algorithms can use all sorts of indicators to flag suspicious cases, but in the end the evaluation needs to be done by a person on a case by case basis. As long as the investigation on the single case is performed "silently" (i.e. without causing any loss of time or money or any annoyance to the person who is investigated) I don't see the issue. Otherwise it's the same as saying you cannot sort rows in an excel sheet according to some criterion and start looking at the data from where it looks more promising.
- jawarner 6y agoI still think racial profiling to flag suspicious cases is an example of discrimination. That's because the system more stringently checks people in one racial group for wrongdoing, which results in more of those people in the criminal justice pipeline. As a concrete example of where this can go wrong, let's say that (hypothetically) 1% of people commit fraud, and that this prevalence is not correlated with race. But, due to past discriminatory practices, more people of one race than another are convicted of fraud. Then, this algorithm would perpetuate this discrimination, since, say, it would identify 80% of fraud in the discriminated group but only 50% of the non-discriminated group.
- sir_bearington 6y agoCorrect, and algorithm shouldn't use a protected class as an input. But at the same time, simply pointing out that a inequitable outcome is produced is not evidence of bias. Also, dual citizenship is not a protected class last time I checked.