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Comment by batushka3 | Hacker News Reader

No. False positives in the justice system are never acceptable. Even a single case will undermine faith in the entire system.

If you want to persecute chinese scientists, you can't do it under the guise of justice and expect people to take the justice system seriously afterwards. Getting arrested over bureaucratic nonsense like failing to disclose some affiliation? That's some 1984 stuff.

>No. False positives in the justice system are never acceptable. Even a single case will undermine faith in the entire system.

What you replied to is ridiculous, but so is this. At scale, false positives are inevitable. The only way to ensure no false positives is to never convict anyone. And false negatives also undermine faith in the justice system.

> At scale, false positives are inevitable.

Perhaps, but they should be treated as grave mistakes and heaven and earth should be moved to attempt to avoid them.

>Getting arrested over bureaucratic nonsense like failing to disclose some affiliation? That's some 1984 stuff.

People routinely cheer when the bureaucratic gotcha is being applied to someone they don't like. People gleefully cite the Al Capone prosecution for example.

> No. False positives in the justice system are never acceptable

Welcome to human systems. Expecting 100% rigor is never going to happen.

Some of us, governments included, believe that the presumption of innocence is a fundamental right.

"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."

That quote is from Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the US government.

That is the principle, but, being a society made up of fallible people, we do have false positives.

All systems of justice contain false positives. There is no escape from it.

It’s a balance between order and disorder where too much disorder results in chaos and too much order in tyranny.

> All systems of justice contain false positives. There is no escape from it.

They should inscribe that at the entrance of court buildings. Really drives home the aspirations of the justice system.

Its somewhat important that this principal only applies to criminal court.

Why?

presumption of innocence is a legal principle that only applies to criminal court.

so i assume when youre equating the fundamental right to what governments believe, youre talking about specifically presumption of innocence before convicted criminally, and being jailed or executed.

the government does not fundamentally believe in presumption of innocence in civil law. for example, you could sue a bank for losing some of your records it's required to keep. the onus is on the bank (the defendant) to prove they did not lose those records, rather than on the plaintiff to prove that they don't have the records.

Because that's where the most severe officially imposed sanctions can come from.

Less severe stuff like parking fines can be done wrong and it's not such a big deal.

I suppose that's a practical argument for it. Philosophically it still doesn't seem right, though.

What's philosophically right about no-false-positives? There should be a debate about whether it's not more right to balance the different injustices (innocent people in jail vs guilty people going free), rather than install a very high bar for conviction as the desired outcome. Perhaps I just haven't come across the argument.

For me, it's more what's philosophically right about an innocent person enduring suffering or punishment through no fault of their own. To me, that appears to be a great (maybe even the greatest) injustice.

We cannot marginalize segments of our population based on race, nationality, religion, sex, etc. and expect to remain competitive. This is a basic truth of economics. And it's also wrong to do that to people in the first place.

Americans are Americans and we all should be treated equally by our government.

Interesting comment...Other than the statement made about not wanting to speak to his wife in a foreign language, which I took as Gang Chen's perceived fear of racist treatment rather than actual racism. I did not get the opinion that racism had any role in the actions taken by authorities.

I am curious and you obviously do not need to answer, but in an effort for a fair and honest conversation and your seeing racism in this story, do you identify as a visible minority?

I think he was targeted upon returning from China when he refused to turn over device passwords to the DHS agents (Who could have been racist but are definitely authoritarian).

Don't get me wrong this whole situation rings heavily of McCarthyism and worse the offer to confess or take a deal is a disgusting practice that has destroyed many young (Black) men's lives under the guise of justice being served. There is a history of the state making the threat that not confessing's result will be so bad that deals were made and those deals had life long consequences that changed and continue to change the trajectory of lives that otherwise had great potential if not for a corrupt legal system.

Absolutely. But there’s also a large number of Chinese (rather than Chinese-American or Chinese-[European]) scientists working at Western institutes on Chinese grants. And things become a lot trickier there. Especially as there have been more than a few very visible cases of espionage that happened similarly.

No disagreement about ethics, but:

> This is a basic truth of economics.

Is this basic truth backed up by anything tangible? Ethnic Chinese already face unfair hurdles by the current push against standardized testing. But one more obstacle would suddenly make the US unable to compete? With whom, anyway - the only worthy competitor I can think of is hardly egalitarian.

It seems like dangerously wishful thinking to me that liberal ethics, or just basic fairness, automatically translates into economic strength.

>>>Ethnic Chinese already face unfair hurdles by the current push against standardized testing.

Please elaborate on this argument.

Hard to pick a neutral source about this, how about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

> According to his testimony, if an Asian-American applicant with certain characteristics (like scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities, family background) would result in a 25% statistical likelihood of admission, the same applicant, if white, will have a 36% likelihood of admission.

(And that is with standardized testing in the mix, it stands to reason that the gap will grow with further emphasis on "personality".)

I don't have data to prove that these statistics apply to Chinese-Americans specifically, that's an assumption on my side. Whether this is morally wrong is up for debate, but I thought it was relevant in the context of national competitiveness.

Asian-Americans (in particular ethnic Chinese and Indian) have, on average, far better ACT/SAT scores than white or black applicants to good US universities.

It is an open secret that in order to balance admissions (i.e. racially discriminate) against the former and in favour of the latter, most universities downweight test scores in favour of other subjective categories like "personality" scores where Asians magically get far worse scores than people of other ethnicities. A quite divisive practice, as it is quite clearly racist, but serves "affirmative action" of raising black representation in good schools.

See the famous case "Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College", to be litigated in front of the SCOTUS this year.

Who says Chinese spies are ethnically Chinese? Charles Lieber isn’t ethnically Chinese. Money can corrupt regardless.

Exactly. The best Chinese spies wouldn't be ethnically Chinese at all, it'd be too obvious.

>We cannot marginalize segments of our population based on race, nationality, religion, sex, etc. and expect to remain competitive.

Seems to be working for China.

I thought salaries in the STEM fields were higher for foreigners than locals. It's kinda like reverse-marginalization.

>Works like precaution

To keep scientists of Chinese descent out of US academia, yes indeed.

I've worked in Academia. There are so many Chinese scientists. Trust me that's not a problem in the least.

So we should make it a problem?

It will never be a problem. There are so many Chinese scientists in America. Labs upon labs upon labs that don't hire non-Chinese and don't speak English.

"False positives are inevitable / better than the alternative / etc." talk is usually a sign that your justice system needs a brutal purge, to get rid of all the thuggish, politically motivated, self-serving, lazy, and just plain incompetent people.

As long as the false positives never happen to cause great harm to you or your loved ones in particular, am I right?

Ah yes, the "Japanese-American relocation centers argument".

It was a criminal state violating human rights back then, and it is a human rights violation today.

Democracy is not a criminal state. That's nihilism. Nihilism tells us to let criminals off the hook and not hold them accountable, because of course they're part of a criminal state, "the government". But that's just as wrong as what these officials did. These people infiltrated my government, allowed their personal prejudices to affect their professional decision-making and the result was a man-made catastrophe. We can't let them off by saying "oh well it's a criminal state, this is normal behavior for them." No, it's not normal. Hold these people accountable. Fight against it.

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