> Even if being an immigrant is correlated with higher rates of some crime, an algorithm cannot take that into account without bigotry. Imagine being an innocen

> Even if being an immigrant is correlated with higher rates of some crime, an algorithm cannot take that into account without bigotry. Imagine being an innocent immigrant. That's insane. Men commit 99% of violent rape, imagine not being able to say that. And I say that as a man, innocent of rape. Similarly, if people with dual-citizenship smuggle more you're wasting time by treating everyone equally when looking for illegal imports. > If the algorithm tags you as guilty, no amount of explanation about averages or neural nets are going to make you feel better about your erroneous charge. Yes, any black-box trial is crap. But a transparent algorithm based on real data that a certain subset of the population is more likely to commit a crime, which is used for proper planning and investigation, is not. > Our language around probability doesn’t help either. We say things like “being an immigrant makes it /more likely/ that you will take some action”. There might be a correlation in aggregate data but in any individual case we can only look at the relevant facts. Think again about being an innocent immigrant. Would you accept someone saying that /you personally/ were more likely to have committed a crime? Of course not! You have one proper point about terminology and then an appeal to rage. You are right that nothing my demographic does (men, raping) makes me more likely to rape. But you're wrong later where you say "[claimed] /you personally/ were more likely to have" because, yes I (by the nature of being physically capable of rape) am more likely to have committed it than other people. To me I'm not a statistic, to you I literally am a population sampling. > Would you accept someone saying ... If they're right, yes. Otherwise you're just saying that my outrage should trump the truth. If a woman wants to organize a women's only bus, or hotel room, because she fears the harm I as a man could commit I shouldn't have the right to force myself on her. > This is the reason “stop and frisk” was such a huge deal: it let the cops “racial profile” for drugs, meaning that at any time all black and brown people were more likely to experience 4th amendment violations by the cops. No, the problem with stop and frisk is that it was (allegedly, I'm not from there) used by racists to target black people. If it was used as commanded by an algorithm then it would only happen where data showed an actual correlation.