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The BBC is reporting on the Compas assessment, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions. This tool is used by a number of agencies to assess if someone is likely to commit additional crimes and the resulting score is used in determining bail, sentencing, or determining parole. The article points out that while the questions on the assessment do not include race the resulting score may be correlated with race but this is disputed by the software's creators. The assessment scores someone on a 10 point scale but the algorithm used to determine someone's score is kept secret. Because of this defendants are unable to effectively dispute that the score is incorrect.
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The Mathematics of the American Justice System
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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:48PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:56PM
> is clearly not really racism.
Are you really going to complain that what sociologists consider racism doesn't match your personal definition?
The fact is that average black household wealth is just 7% of average white household wealth. And that is the legacy of hundreds of years of "real" racism. You can't just hand-wave that all away and say its just socio-economic. The result is that black voices do not get heard. Problems specific to black communities are ignored. You can argue about the specific mechanisms of that failure, but the end result has clear racial delineations.
> Framing the thing in terms of race does not seem to be helpful, if you want to solve it instead of perpetuate it.
Ah, you are an adherent to reactionary colorblindness. Good on you! Not.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:06PM
what sociologists consider racism doesn't match
AC brings up an interesting concept I've been thinking about WRT American culture which is the idea of escape velocity.
So say, due to entryism or natural selection or whatever it don't matter, I propose that eventually the values and even the language itself diverge at a gradually increasing speed until something like orbital mechanics escape velocity is reached. Kind of like a protozoa cleaving into two, except with the added concept of the rate of change increasing as the rate of change increases and distance increases until suddenly one day they're just martians screaming literal nonsense on a foreign planet.
I'm willing to propose that concept applies to SJW/academic/BLM type radical leftist groups, they have been moving left faster and faster and have jumped the rails and no longer are part of the greater USA orbit of ideas, they're off orbiting alpha centuari and nobody cares about their ideas anymore because the language itself has diverged.
So yeah specifically I'd say what some flaky academic SJWs think who are emphatically not part of our culture probably have nothing useful to say to the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:40PM
> AC brings up an interesting concept I've been thinking about WRT American culture which is the idea of escape velocity.
Wow, something insightful about sociology from VLM. An analysis of how black people can't escape poverty because they have been denied the necessary resources, especially in the form of generational wealth. A recognition that Dr King spoke the truth when he said, "It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps." Bravo! A hearty congratulations is in order.
> So yeah specifically I'd say what some flaky academic SJWs think who are emphatically not part of our culture probably have nothing useful to say to the real world.
Oh never mind... Just the same old public masturbation we've all sadly come to accept from the willfully ignorant contingent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:32PM
Are you really going to complain that what sociologists consider racism doesn't match your personal definition?
That whole field has made a sharp detour from relevance. At this point, give me a definition not a bunch of would-be experts and I'll decide whether I'll complain or not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:42PM
> That whole field has made a sharp detour from relevance.
Yeah, just like climate science has. Fucking ivory tower eggheads!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:14AM
The social sciences have terrible successful replication rates and often rely on subjective data gathering. Enough with the false comparisons.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday October 19 2016, @03:16AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:46AM
As a result it's an easy and obvious target for political activism.
I think also that the problem is that there are real world stakes. There's huge investments in these worldviews, including political and economic policies.