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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

In this case false positives are far, far worse than false negatives. A false negative in this system does not mean a tragedy will occur, because there are many other preventative measures in place. And never mind the fact that this country refuses to even address the primary cause of gun violence in the first place: the ubiquity of guns in our society. So systems like this is what we end up with when we ignore to address the problem of guns and choose to deal the downstream effects of that instead.

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> the primary cause of gun violence in the first place: the ubiquity of guns in our society

I would have gone with “a normalized sense of hopelessness and indignity which causes people to feel like violence is the only way they can have any agency in life” considering “gun” is the adjective and “violence” is the actual thing you're talking about.

Both are true. The underlying oppressive, lonely, pro-bullying culture creates the tension. The proliferation of high lethality weapons makes it more likely that tension will eventually release in the form of a mass tragedy.

Improvement in either area would be a net positive for society. Improvement in both areas is ideal but solving proliferation seems a lot more straightforward than fixing the generally miserable society problem.

I think there’s probably some correlation between ‘generally miserable society’ and ‘we think it’s ok to have children surveiled by AI’

I tend to categorize these under a dutch idiom which I can’t describe, but which is abundantly clear in pictorial form:

https://klimapedia.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Dweilen_met...

"Treating the symptoms not the cause" would be the english equivalent.

(for others: the Dutch expression is "Dweilen met de kraan open", "Mopping with the tap open")

To be clear, the false negative here would be a student who has brought a gun to a school and the computer ignores it. That is a situation where potentially multiple people can be killed in a short amount of time. It is not far, far worse to send cops.

Depends on the false positive rate doesn't it. If police are being sent to storm a school every week due to a false positive, that is quite bad. And people will become conditioned to not care about reports of a gun at a school because of all the false positives.

For what I’m saying, no it doesn’t because I’m just comparing a single instance of false positive to a single instance of false negative. Neither is desirable.

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