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Comment by rincebrain | Hacker News Reader

When I read it, as a native speaker, I read "treated poorly by the algorithm" as being a term for the behavior of culture and systems of the time, and not a hypothetical algorithm from the future that took as input the culture of the time and made decisions about fairness.

I think it was the use of "the algorithm" and not "an algorithm" that most affected my reading there - "poorly by an algorithm" comes across, to me, as "poorly by some algorithm", rather than "poorly by _the_ algorithm", implying a specific instance of a thing, already known by the reader or referred back to later, doing it.

Consider "treated poorly by the system" versus "treated poorly by such a system", which has an even clearer connotation, to me.

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My first reading as a native speaker was that "the algorithm" meant "the Man". But after several readings, I think he meant that this algorithm would categorize someone who was legally considered less than a citizen as a more likely recidivist. Which is an interesting point. Particularly in the US where there's a notion of illegal immigrants having already broken the law. Would this algorithm consider them to be more likely to be repeat offenders if it were weighted to treat noncitizenship as a factor, or overstaying a visa as a crime? And if so, then why wouldn't it weight slaves as more likely to reoffend. And if it did that, what would stop it from weighting the descendants of slaves the aame way?

I thought the US was somewhat unusual in its lax treatment of illegal immigration. However lying to or sneaking past border officials to enter a country is literally a crime yes (certainly for foreign nationals, and probably not kosher for citizens to do either). Though entering on a visitor visa and overstaying is just a civil violation with a civil penalty (deportation). If a citizen had a record of using false identity documents or trying to evade legally-enforced border crossings, a fair algorithm would presumably have to take that into account just as well.

Interesting example of how context can affect the sentencing and seriousness of the crime!

Well if you enter as a legal visitor through a border checkpoint you give the govt the opportunity to do security checks, restrict import of various things, charge customs taxes. Plus they have an idea you are there. It makes sense that sidestepping some or all of that screening and record-keeping will be treated more harshly.

Yes! Exactly. If humans wrote an algorithm, to determine sentencing of crimes, it's possible that biases and predjudices of the time would be included in the algorithm because they don't realize or don't want to admit that their current ways are unfair.

Much like the constitution did!

But the constitution can be amended to be more fair and so the abstract sentancing algorithm, whatever it may be, would have to be amendable as well.

I hope that statements not racist!

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