Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

"Homeless" is one of those catch all words like "plastic" or "cancer", where the things being described only look relatively similar from the outside.

As the blogpost notes: "There are already lots of hidden homeless passing for normal, couch surfing, etc. People tend to not realize it."

Fortunately right now, I'm at very low risk of homelessness, but I can imagine scenarios where it could happen. Some people don't have family to fall back on. Some people's family are terrible people and it's questionable whether they are better off with them or living rough.

A lot of people live in their cars or vans for a while.

Here in Austin, urban camping was decriminalized (I am not an expert, this may not be entirely correct) and now there are quite a lot of tents popping up all over the place.

As a civilian, it's impossible for me to tell what situation a person is in; are they potentially violent, do they live in the same world as me, are they mentally and physically capable but undergoing hard times? They are all people, and they should all be helped, but help for one person isn't like help for another; and just lumping people together and parking them doesn't help anyone.

> As a civilian, it's impossible for me to tell what situation a person is in; are they potentially violent, do they live in the same world as me, are they mentally and physically capable but undergoing hard times? They are all people, and they should all be helped, but help for one person isn't like help for another; and just lumping people together and parking them doesn't help anyone.

I think you're conflating separate questions: how to act around a given homeless person, and what kind of system is needed to help them at scale.

As for helping them, while there will be nuances to any group of people, I don't think it's a waste of time to make general statements about what solutions might look like. There may be complicating circumstances, but the fundamental barrier is the same: our society (unfortunately) requires you to make some amount of money and to have a place to live if you're going to participate in it and have much hope of upward mobility. And there's a circular effect, where if you don't have those things, it's incredibly hard to "bootstrap" your way into it.

This core mechanism applies to nearly all homeless people. So anything that tries to solve that bootstrapping problem will apply to a whole lots of people, even if it needs to be combined with other things like addiction help, mental healthcare, etc on a case-by-case basis.

For anyone else here in Austin, this is a great organization that works on this problem: https://www.caritasofaustin.org/

> I think you're conflating separate questions: how to act around a given homeless person, and what kind of system is needed to help them at scale.

I think you're right, and it probably has to do with the context of my interactions.

In the same category: love, racism, (G)god, forever.

Is this not the problem that "credit scoring" systems are designed to solve? You've identified a major issue, certain segments of the homeless population are much riskier for "civilians" than others. The problem is the guy who couldn't make rent last week is lumped together with the schizophrenic meth addict with a long history of violence.

The solution, at least for the "harmless homeless" is to credibly broadcast to civilians and authorities their benign circumstances and histories. With widespread facial recognition and augmented reality, this might not be as hard to do as it seems. The homeless can be assigned a social credit score based on their criminal record, user rating by shelters and other provider institutions, employment history, and how long they've been homeless. Authorities, and potentially even civilians, can instantly identify and flag homeless people that are likely to be problematic.

Without a doubt, this regime would certainly make life better for the harmless and down-on-their-luck homeless types. Yet my guess is most would oppose such a system. The point is tradeoffs exist in the social design space. Most of the down-on-the-luck homeless are unfairly stigmatized because society at large lumps them in with the violent, destructive and anti-social. We can make more efforts to draw a visible class distinction between those respective groups, yet it's often homeless advocates that oppose doing so.

Yes, the groups and volunteers that work with homeless people, attempt to provide care, understanding, and social services, and if possible a path out of being a rough-sleeper are generally opposed to attempting to "solve" this complex set of issues with facial recognition and augmented reality, and this ought to cause us to hesitate before we make terrifyingly glib declarations like "without a doubt, this regime would certainly make life better for the [homeless & homeless types]".

> if possible a path out of being a rough-sleeper are generally opposed to attempting to "solve" this complex set of issues with facial recognition and augmented reality

These two avenues are completely orthogonal to each other. There's no reason that you can't create a path out of homelessness, but still make the time somebody spends homeless more pleasant. Effort in one doesn't negate the other.

And yes, without a doubt adding visible class distinctions between the down-on-their-luck homeless and the violent, destructive homeless would almost assuredly make life better for members of the former. You may still oppose the idea on other grounds, but there's absolutely no reason to doubt why raising a sub-group's social class status wouldn't improve their life.

Your opening statement alone required the downvote I needed to give you.

You have no idea what people have been through. The circumstances that may end them up with a poor credit score have little to do with how responsible or diligent that person is.

Have some understanding. Not shocked your post has garnered more downvotes than mine.

> The circumstances that may end them up with a poor credit score have little to do with how responsible or diligent that person is.

And yet, very few people support the abolition of financial credit scores. Or support expunging people's criminal records after they're done serving time. Or oppose the existence of sex offender registries. Or believe that restaurants should not be able to turn away someone on the basis of "no shoes, no shirt, no service".

All of those things are ways that social institutions flatten people out into making quick, and often rough, decisions about people. All are subject to the very same criticism you raise. Their are all sorts of exigent circumstances that might make someone wind up with bad credit, or a criminal history, or on a sex offender registry, or without clean clothes for the day.

Yet we as society accept a wide variety of surface level decisions about the human beings around it. We accept that the inevitability of false positives, because the overall gains of being able to easily segment people into social classes makes society as a whole more pleasant for everyone. At the end of the day, it's simply a matter of utilitarian calculus.

If anything, a social credit score for the homeless is less unjust than any the above. Because there's no element of coercion to it. Ir wouldn't be used for any official institutional purposes, it's simply a way for users to quickly gather more information about the homeless people they're interacting with.

I'm genuinely curious would you bite that bullet. Should we ban credit scores, and permanent criminal records, and sex offender registries, and dress/hygeine codes on the same basis that you oppose social credit scores for the homeless.

> The circumstances that may end them up with a poor credit score have little to do with how responsible or diligent that person is

How, exactly?

Glad you’ve never been through the depths of depression, trauma or accidents that would allow you to understand how difficult it is to hold your life together for.

I envy you. Ignorance is absolutely bliss.

so by "responsible or diligent that person is", you mean personality wise? A person that doesn't pay their bills due to depression is still not acting responsibly.

The problem here is you just re-invented the term "deserving poor".

And the "undeserving homeless", the violent drug addict with mental health problems - well (s)he deserved our help about ten or fifteen years previously, when under funded health services let him slip through the net, or neighbours and uncles and aunts did not want to believe her dad was actually doing that to her and ....

A lot of people have shitty lives and deserve our help - not just when the symptoms are impossible to ignore.

I kind of see what you are reaching for - that there must be some solution. Yeah there is - but it's about a decade or two before people hit the streets, so we need to fix all the problems in our society that let children doing well in Kindergarten, fall that far. And we also need help for those that have fallen right now - and the article had some pretty good ideas about that I thought.

> The problem here is you just re-invented the term "deserving poor".

You're citing this as if the concept of "deserving poor" isn't something that's already enshrined in public policy. For the vast majority of American voters segmenting the deserving from the undeserving poor is a feature not a bug.

That's the reason we don't have unconditional UBI, and instead have a welfare system that's based on life circumstances. When we're more generous with children, the infirm, and the elderly than able-bodied adults who eschew work (or even worse commit crime), that is the concept of the deserving poor. And frankly I agree with that class distinction.

> the violent drug addict with mental health problems - well (s)he deserved our help about ten or fifteen years previously

And yet the very same criticism can be said about permanent criminal records or sex offender registries. Yet the vast majority of people in our society accept that committing a violent crime is "crossing the rubicon". Once you've done so, you'll always be a second-class citizen at best.

This isn't something controversial, policies based on this belief are nearly universally supported by voters. Regardless of prior personal circumstances, American society always lays the blame primarily at the perpetrator himself.

And it’s starting to become clear that this approach is not working.

>>> who eschew work (or even worse commit crime)

Wait, what? Equating criminals should be punished with some people are more deserving than others is not the point - the deserving poor was a kid victorian justification for selectively providing assistance to a (conveniently limited) number of people while letting the majority of poor rot away in plain sight.

It was a means of ignoring the systemic issues that created and sustained grinding poverty - and is IMO something we are doing still - the underclass has shrunk, yes, we have lifted many people out of overfly in the West, but prisons are populated mostly with men with poor backgrounds, educational low attainment, mental health issues and drug problems - waaaaay too out of proportion to be confidence, thus making those issues part of the modern day systemic faikures that mean some of our fellow citizens have the odds stacked against them.

"deserve" is an entirely different concept. It implies no help should be given - labelling someone as having a mental illness (or addiction, the same) is the opposite of this.

That said, if someone has no such mental issues, yet a low social score, what else should be done - Who deserves to be exposed to that?

> A lot of people have shitty lives and deserve our help

our help? who's that? The employer who ends up with a violent or maladjusted employee bears the burden themselves - not us.

That schizophrenic meth addict deserves help as much as anyone else does. Drug addicts don't become drug addicts just because we can: and mental health disorders are pretty much always comorbid with addiction.

And I'm not saying that they're not. But the reality is that that help isn't coming from the average person on the street. The institutions capable of actually providing help, already have access to this data.

What's relevant is the proposed tech empowers the average person the street to quickly access and synthesize already public information. It's essentially no different than a real-time background check.

And I would almost certainly think that you'd agree that in a situation where your personal safety is potentially at risk, that you'd prefer to have this information available to you. If you were hiring a baby-sitter for your kid, would you not conduct a background check. If the background check revealed that said babysitter was a schizophrenic meth addict, would you still hire that person?

Of course not. That person needs help, but you as a private individual going about your life is not the entity capable of providing it.

You're arguing something that I never said, though. I agree with you: private individuals should not be expected to fix systemic issues on their own. But the government and the institutions and so on that we create sure should.

You said:

> That schizophrenic meth addict deserves help as much as anyone else does.

Does that not imply op suggested otherwise?

They deserve sympathy, but not necessarily the same care. For maximum societal benefit it may be that it's better to spend more on kids in school than schizophrenic meth addicts. We live in a world of scarcity, we can't do everything.

But if the original complaint is the implied threat of violence from said homeless addict, especially aimed at those kids in school, you can see why I find that a bit heartless.

Besides, the school system needs more than just money, just like the "homeless problem". I don't feel comfortable passing judgement on one class of people vs another solely because of the circumstances they were born into.

I absolutely agree with not passing a judgment on a class of people because of variability of how they respond to help. I've never heard of any reason that all 'schizophrenic meth addicts' as in GP's example will not respond well to help. If hypothetically they all show no positive outcome from the help they have received, then it is indeed fine to say helping them this way is a waste of time and resources, until a new method of helping is devised.

The part 'vs another solely because of the circumstances they were born into' from the parent post does not reflect what the GP post actually says. The GP was solely arguing on the practicality and the costs and benefits of doing it; solutions to problems have trade-offs, it is no good wishing them away.

That said, how the homeless are treated in a lot of rich nations today are a complete disgrace. Increasing a well off persons well being is worth far less than increasing a not so well off persons well being IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com