4 ms·

Perpetuating bias, observing reality. Tomato tomato? Crime statistics aren't racist, people's explanations for "why" can be. If it's 90% accurate, then great?

Perpetuating bias, observing reality. Tomato tomato? Crime statistics aren't racist, people's explanations for "why" can be. If it's 90% accurate, then great? Do we need the algorithm to perform worse to make people feel better?

nicbou 4y ago
Crime statistics can absolutely be racist. The police as a force and as individuals choose which crimes to respond to, and with what intensity. Say for example that a white guy smoking a joint gets a slap on the wrist, and the black guy gets the book thrown at him. What would an AI derive from what it's given? Crime stats aren't collected in a scientific vacuum. They reflect the previous strategies the police used to fight crimes.
- dtx1 4y ago
  > Crime stats aren't collected in a scientific vacuum. They reflect the previous strategies the police used to fight crimes. It may also just reflect reality. Let's say you have a group of people that commit a specific kind of crime significantly more often than another group, i.e. white male investment bankers are more likely to commit tax fraud than female black nurses. Any reasonable policy fighting this kind of crime would have to look biased against white men when it comes to enforcing tax fraud. I think that no one would reasonably call such enforcement policies bad or racist. But when black men are significantly more likely to be prosecuted for violent crime, suddenly it's a racist policy and must be the racist polices fault, because that's the only acceptable answer.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Profiling people on what they do is very different from profiling people based on what they are. Conflating both is a perfect definition of a racist policy. If you keep targeting the same people, and you punish their crimes harder than any other people, you will get a data set that will bias any algorithm. The AI won't know that the police stops a disproportionate number of black drivers, or that they are more likely to prosecute a black criminal than a white one. It might not understand the biases that leads to harsher sentences. In other words, an algorithm trained on our biases will just try to reproduce our biased outcomes.
    - dtx1 4y ago
      I don't disagree that american policing practices are horrible and a significant number of racist police officers will cause the data to be skewed and that would cause AI trained on that data to be skewed aswell. What I am rejecting is that the underlying "true" data wouldn't show differences between different races. Again, tax fraud is likely commited to a much higher degree and in much higher numbers by white people (especially investment bankers). An AI wouldn't be racist to predict a higher likelyhood of a white man commiting it than a black woman. But somehow predicting a higher likelyhood of violent crime by a black male (especially if they receive wellfare) is racist because it must be so, even if the underlying data shows this to be correct. My argument is simple, if your statistics contains racial data, either directly or transitively, than you will find statistical differences between them. It becomes a racism issue if the polices based on that data are racist, i.e. harsher sentences for the same crime etc.
      - nicbou 4y ago
        > What I am rejecting is that the underlying "true" data wouldn't show differences between different races Nobody claimed this
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      > profiling people based on what they are. The London police do race quotas in stop and search. So for every X they stop they need to step some proportional k*Y too. No matter how you do it you will end up stopping people in "bad" neighbourhoods more. So if that is considered a problem you need to give up patrolling or do unnessecary stopping in other places to weigh up due to racial composition in the worse of neighbourhoods.
    - Tozen 4y ago
      Very good points! In addition, the "AI" can be used as a kind of shield to hide bias or racist policies, because it is "blamed" for the tainted outcomes and not those who have created it or the creation of the pretense that the AI couldn't be wrong.
- casefields 4y ago
  For petty crimes that’s true. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to hide or fudge murders which are still committed a disproportionate amount by blacks. Usually black on black.

nicbou 4y ago

Crime statistics can absolutely be racist. The police as a force and as individuals choose which crimes to respond to, and with what intensity. Say for example that a white guy smoking a joint gets a slap on the wrist, and the black guy gets the book thrown at him. What would an AI derive from what it's given? Crime stats aren't collected in a scientific vacuum. They reflect the previous strategies the police used to fight crimes.

dtx1 4y ago
> Crime stats aren't collected in a scientific vacuum. They reflect the previous strategies the police used to fight crimes. It may also just reflect reality. Let's say you have a group of people that commit a specific kind of crime significantly more often than another group, i.e. white male investment bankers are more likely to commit tax fraud than female black nurses. Any reasonable policy fighting this kind of crime would have to look biased against white men when it comes to enforcing tax fraud. I think that no one would reasonably call such enforcement policies bad or racist. But when black men are significantly more likely to be prosecuted for violent crime, suddenly it's a racist policy and must be the racist polices fault, because that's the only acceptable answer.
- nicbou 4y ago
  Profiling people on what they do is very different from profiling people based on what they are. Conflating both is a perfect definition of a racist policy. If you keep targeting the same people, and you punish their crimes harder than any other people, you will get a data set that will bias any algorithm. The AI won't know that the police stops a disproportionate number of black drivers, or that they are more likely to prosecute a black criminal than a white one. It might not understand the biases that leads to harsher sentences. In other words, an algorithm trained on our biases will just try to reproduce our biased outcomes.
  - dtx1 4y ago
    I don't disagree that american policing practices are horrible and a significant number of racist police officers will cause the data to be skewed and that would cause AI trained on that data to be skewed aswell. What I am rejecting is that the underlying "true" data wouldn't show differences between different races. Again, tax fraud is likely commited to a much higher degree and in much higher numbers by white people (especially investment bankers). An AI wouldn't be racist to predict a higher likelyhood of a white man commiting it than a black woman. But somehow predicting a higher likelyhood of violent crime by a black male (especially if they receive wellfare) is racist because it must be so, even if the underlying data shows this to be correct. My argument is simple, if your statistics contains racial data, either directly or transitively, than you will find statistical differences between them. It becomes a racism issue if the polices based on that data are racist, i.e. harsher sentences for the same crime etc.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      > What I am rejecting is that the underlying "true" data wouldn't show differences between different races Nobody claimed this
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    > profiling people based on what they are. The London police do race quotas in stop and search. So for every X they stop they need to step some proportional k*Y too. No matter how you do it you will end up stopping people in "bad" neighbourhoods more. So if that is considered a problem you need to give up patrolling or do unnessecary stopping in other places to weigh up due to racial composition in the worse of neighbourhoods.
  - Tozen 4y ago
    Very good points! In addition, the "AI" can be used as a kind of shield to hide bias or racist policies, because it is "blamed" for the tainted outcomes and not those who have created it or the creation of the pretense that the AI couldn't be wrong.
casefields 4y ago
For petty crimes that’s true. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to hide or fudge murders which are still committed a disproportionate amount by blacks. Usually black on black.