Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

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If you have (created!) a job that closely resembles a work of dystopian fiction, laughing that off is absolutely lacking in human empathy. That's not even the first problem with this line of work, but since you're also laughing off the problem, it deserves a rebuttal.

If I said to you that I was going to create a network of surveillance devices that also serves as mindless entertainment and routinely broadcasts faith routines that non-participants will be punished for, and you told me that sounds like something out of 1984, and I told you were paranoid, you'd think I'm mad.

And the advance of technology unhindered is not a universal good. Algorithms only have better judgment than humans according to the constraints they were assigned. If there's a role for automation in criminal justice, that role must be constantly questioned and adjusted for human need, just as the role of human intervention should be. Because it's all human intervention.

Or it's that non-specialists with only a vague understanding of what you're doing don't know what you're talking about. I don't consider stem cell researchers to be lacking in empathy because some of the hyper-religious accuse them of dangerous experiments and "playing god", even though their work "resembles a work of dystopian fiction."

Of course we can question where technology is going, but saying "gee, group x commits crimes at 27 times the rate of group y, on average we should consider them to be more at-risk" isn't 1984, it's how car insurance, the job market, dating, the stock market, almost everything works.

It's not optimally fair by a long shot, but neither is the alternative of analyzing no data and making social policy out of how you wish things were instead of how the data tell you they actually are. The solution to data telling you unpleasant facts is to try to change those facts with policy, not put your head in the sand and bleat "totalitarianism" every time a fact enters the conversation.

What is a "faith routine" ? Thanks

In context, faith routines would be things like, in the book 1984, the Two Minutes Hate. In reality, it might be a (imlicitly mandatory, if not explicitly) routine such as pledging allegiance to a flag, or mandatory participation in a moment of prayer, or something similar.

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