this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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There's strong correlation in crime statistics for both severity and frequency of violent crime and being black
It is therefore not a surprise that feeding prisoner crime data, and not any race data, into a computer to determine prisoner risk has the same correlation between race and likelihood of violence
To reduce the rating based on their race would be discrimination by definition
Psst don’t call out facts, you’ll be downvoted
Nah, these facts are not the issue. Omitting that the statistics themselves are the result of discrimination is kinda negligent though.
The solution wouldn't be to try to balance out a bias in a fundamentally flawed dataset, but to establish a human system of decisionmaking that's resilient to prejudice and bias instead of relying on machines that can only imitate their makers' mistakes.
Yeah, the human part is quite often the problem in such systems though.
Unfortunately, yes.
A machine trained on human decisions isn't gonna make better decisions, and I'm not aware that a sufficiently advanced machine reasoning from principles instead of correlations exists yet. So as it stands, the best we can do is try to minimise the problematic aspects of humanity.
It's not a good solution, just the less bad one.