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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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Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven;
confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 18 2016, @04:55PM
if the algorithm is a secret
Here's the algorithm for old white men in judges robes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential#Cable_theory [wikipedia.org]
I'm not sure this algo being public helps the ethics or morality of the decisions made by old white men in judges robes.
There is a microscopic argument of fairness in that so far no one has accused the algorithm of being non-deterministic. So unlike human 100 judges all with lifetimes of varying levels and types of biases, at least everyone judged by algo has the same odds as anyone else.
Speaking of the above, given a fair algo, wouldn't some kind of natural selection in the long run "fix" things such that black folk "knowing" the algo is out to get them would simply grow up and behave in a more civilized manner than the whites, assuming they don't culturally like being the victim/underdog? I mean its kinda rough on the first couple generations, but shouldn't they be learning and by now shouldn't they be performing better than the whites rather than much much worse?
I'm just saying white folk know that you don't walk down dark alleys at 2am, so rather than doing it over and over and getting victimized and complaining about the unfairness of it all, we ... don't do that, and that works pretty well.
So a century and a half after the civil war, ya-all as a group know either truly or as a false belief that the white devils are out to get ya, a century of lynching and jim crow laws and all that... and still they just won't stop committing crimes 150 years later. Something wrong with that culture, something faulty. So whats up? What culturally is broken here and who's fixing it? And don't give me the race thing, because we haven't owned agricultural implements in 150 years but we put the japs in camps just a couple decades ago and they're not 100th as Fed up.
In summary the whole thing seems blown over, given the choice of a glass of water thats mostly empty at an unknown value vs one we can measure as exactly predictably 2/5 empty, some folks like the new glass that has more water (mostly insiders) and some folks like to complain the new glass isn't full (mostly political rabble rousers of little import or influence).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:05PM
Except, you have no clue how much is empty and how much is full in either stage because it wasn't empirical before, and isn't transparent now.