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That's not a bug, it's a feature! User jawns posted some of their marketing copy elsewhere in this thread:

"COMPAS offers separate norms for males, females, community and incarcerated populations"

And they call that "defensible decisions"! In other words, they want to make sure the software doesn't rock the boat. If there's a bias, they want to preserve it so it doesn't look like their algorithms are "weird".

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> In other words, they want to make sure the software doesn't rock the boat. If there's a bias, they want to preserve it so it doesn't look like their algorithms are "weird".

Isn't that what judges do when they follow precedent?

No, and judges don't always follow precedent (they theoretically have to when it is binding, but no precedent is binding on the highest court, even it's own.)

When they follow precedent, they are not matching outcomes to outcomes to avoid looking wierd, they are applying what was previously established as the formal decision rule.

That's a very different thing that attempting to preserve biases that may not even reflect the formally-annoubced decision rules in the cases that produced them, but may represent silent deviations from the formal rules.

Legal precedents tend not to explicitly single out one gender, race or religion.

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