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Comment by traderjane | Hacker News Reader

If black Americans are more likely to commit local crimes and you are developing software for police to predict hotspots of crime, wouldn't race be another aspect of pattern recognition in this narrative?

And would it be wrong for banks or loan programs to optimize on such pattern recognition if it were found that ethnicity could improve their forecasting? Or for software companies to forecast employee effectiveness on similar pattern recognition?

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It's not really a dilemma.

Do you know what will happen with such an optimization? The pattern will be reinforced and you will end up with something like a civil war. At some point, your company will suffer because people will be busy shooting each other.

The movement towards fixing discrimination did not emerge because old folks were bad and the new folks are better people, it emerged because people recognized the issues it creates. It adresses the same issues that anti-competitive practices of the monopolies create: destruction of the market for short term gains of a single company.

Whether those things are wrong is a good question for the debating society.

What they are is illegal.

Do you want your system to be "nice" or do you want it do be effective?

I want it to be effective, which is why racial profiling is a bad idea. Crime rates correlate to poverty rather than race. If you design your system to target race you'll get lots of false positives in middle class black neighbourhoods and you'll ignore crime in poor white neighbourhoods. Racial profiling doesn't work.

This is just not true. The percentage of blacks in a population is a higher correlate for crime than income, poverty, or any other economic factors. This has been replicated many times.

edit: Here are some studies. I would have put them in a reply but I'm being rate limited. Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.

http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

http://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10940-011-9134-...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/591624?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12552-016-9164-y

Can you share one of those studies?

This opinion is heavily biased toward a white-nationalist narrative. For instance, the second linked “study” is actually a propaganda piece published by the New Century Foundation, an organization described by its founder, Jared Taylor, as “white-separatist”.

HN is not the place for this.

Can you find something wrong with the research itself in any of the papers that I linked?

I miss when HN throwaways were used to serve as whistleblowers.

Not for spreading "The Bell Curve" 90s research and unsourced white nationalist propaganda.

> Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.

You use technical terms like "sufficient" and "replicated", as though you actually understood how science worked, but then link to a pile of crap scholarship published in third-rate journals by cranks and racists. It's annoying. And dangerous. Worse, you appear to be completely unaware of the distinction between correlation and causation, and what policy implications that has. Kindly get a clue.

Can you look at the data and come to a different conclusion rather than attack the paper ad hominem?

So class profiling then ? This does not sound any better.

> Applying your intelligence effectively is what it's all about.

They actually do correlate to race, beyond that which income accounts for, but you'd kind of expect that if law enforcement was racist against blacks and was perceived as such: policing is less effective in black communities both because of police attitudes toward blacks and vice versa. (Racial profiling—literally law enforcement targeting people based on race—obviously exacerbates this.)

When we use the coercive power of the state, it can only be with respect to the actions of an individual. Group punishments are completely unacceptable.

Quote Rev. Bayes till you're blue in the face, but profiling amounts to holding a group responsible for the actions of bad individuals.

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