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Comment by drukenemo | Hacker News Reader

I’m an immigrant to the Netherlands and have lived here for more than 10 years. I don’t recollect ever experiencing racism. At the same time, I think there are demographics in this country that are more likely to abuse the system or display behavior that make one a little more suspicious of them in principle.

That said, country profiling by the government, as much as it would probably be an effective dimension to detect fraud imo, shouldn’t be used by a government. The same way airport control shouldn’t profile people by appearance or any racial and gender characteristics.

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I think the problem is that it’s only effective in the short term to profile like that. If you already consider someone guilty before they do anything, there’s very little stopping them from actually doing the thing for real (at least, I would have few moral qualms).

>At the same time, I think there are demographics in this country that are more likely to abuse the system or display behavior that make one a little more suspicious of them in principle.

I have zero intention to engage in a useless discussion but I am startled to still see a comment like that.

Yes, this is also exactly what they thought, and that's why they are called racist and got fined.

You don't use statistical data to become more suspicious of individuals due to their race and discriminate against.

How hard to understand this.

> At the same time, I think there are demographics in this country that are more likely to abuse the system or display behavior that make one a little more suspicious of them in principle.

i want to gently point out, without implying intention, that this is, in it's self, a racist belief

It's also true.

Split any number of people into any arbitrary groups and some of those groups will be higher than average and other lower than average.

This has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with randomness.

> Split any number of people into any arbitrary groups and some of those groups will be higher than average and other lower than average.

Wait, what? Surely they should all be (sans a bit of noise) the same? (Split 1000 random numbers into two groups. The sums should be almost equal).

no if you take big enough group it will average out.

But random numbers can and do have "random distribution" which means some high some low, most somewhere in between.

But that only works with large enough sample. With small sample size, randomness can look like not random.

How do you know they demographics they are talking about are defined by race?

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