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People just are not prepared/don't understand how even very low level of false positives looks like in real world. If a vaccine kills 1 in a million people, th
by lmilcin 5y ago
People just are not prepared/don't understand how even very low level of false positives looks like in real world.
If a vaccine kills 1 in a million people, that's still hundreds of people in US and thousands in entire world.
But now, see, how most people just don't understand the concept of very large/small numbers and can't interpret what it means exactly.
There are tests with very high false positive ratio. For example, pregnancy test.
Now, you don't do pregnancy test all the time. If you did it 5 times a day every day, basically at least once a week you will find out that you are pregnant and the test would be useful. And then you go to a real doctor to confirm.
The way to use test like that is to use it combined with some other knowledge/process/situation. In case of pregnancy test you only do pregnancy test when a) you show other early symptoms of pregnancy and b) you had sex with possibility of getting pregnant.
Facial recognition could be useful but as any high false positive test, looses its usefulness when deployed on large scale, indiscriminately.
- ohazi 5y ago> But now, see, how most people just don't understand the concept of very large/small numbers and can't interpret what it means exactly. I think the argument is that this particular form of innumeracy should no longer be acceptable if you're making decisions where this matters. At a minimum, this would be police officers, judges, lawmakers.
- lmilcin 5y agoBut they are normal people and so are our lawmakers. Unfortunately you can't build the system based on assumption that officers, judges or representatives are Vulcan and only use logic. Any system like that will necessarily be pretty bad. The safety in the system is general public scrutiny, but as we see it is failing miserably, too.
- ohazi 5y ago> But they are normal people and so are our lawmakers. Okay, then this kind of innumeracy is no longer acceptable in society, full-stop.
- lmilcin 5y agoSo how do you propose to do that? You know, this might be shocking, but around half of all people have less than average intelligence... Do we euthanize half of population? You know, then a significant portion of surviving population will have less than average intelligence...
- Nasrudith 5y agoMost people are not qualified to be doctors. We don't just throw up our hands and conclude genocide would be the only answer and it is unacceptable therefore we need to let anybody do organ transplants. Statistical literacy isn't so low we cannot make it a requirement to be a judge. The gatekeeping for once would be the start of a solution - make statistical literacy a qualification for well paying jobs and many will steer themselves to it.
- raducu 5y agoYes, but in a lot of cases facial recognition/drug testing is done without a valid prior reason, just the office pulling the "I smell weed" crap -- there is no incentive for the police officer not to make up an unfalsifiable prior reason.
- lmilcin 5y agoSoo... what I just said? The point is, for facial recognition to make sense, you would need to have some additional context. For example it could make more sense if you followed up any results with an actual person making determination (some variation on a blind or double blind test).
- zabzonk 5y ago> as any high false positive test, looses its usefulness when deployed on large scale, indiscriminately. Well of course anything mis-applied is probably bad. But sometimes false positives can be a good thing. For example, in immunology, it's quite common to use cheap tests that have quite high false positives, but low false negatives to screen samples before applying more expensive, but more rigorous tests.