Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   I said that if the vast majority of illegal immigrants can be distinguished
> > by how they look, it makes sense to concentrate more on those people than on
> > people who are much less likely to be illegal immigrants.

> And you're ignoring the fact that
> A) they can't be, because they live where the majority of people look like 
> them, and

  You are using a different meaning of the word "distinguish" than I am.

  Take 100 illegal immigrants. If 90 of them are of mexican origin and
the rest are of European origin, you certainly *can* distinguish the majority
of them by how they look.

  That's different from what you are arguing, which is: Take 100 mexicans.
You know that 10 of them are illegals. Try to distinguish them by how they
look.

  What I am saying is:

  Take 100 mexicans and 100 canadians. You know that there are approximately
9 illegals of mexican origin and 1 of canadian origin (hence "90% of illegals
are of mexican origin", as in the example). Hence if you check all the 100
mexicans you will most probably get the 9 illegal mexicans even if you miss
that 1 illegal canadian.

  However, if you checked the 100 people completely at random, you will
only catch about 4 or 5 illegals in average.

  So exactly where is the flaw in this math?

> B) there are dozens of traits more useful for distinguishing legal from 
> illegal residents than looks.

  That may well be true.

> Concentrate on people who look mexican?  Bad idea!

  Maybe it's a bad idea, but not because of statistics, but because of
people's feelings and sense of privacy. That has nothing to do with math.

> >   I found it so incoherent and outlandish that I didn't know what to say.
> > Maybe that's what you were after.

> Why did you find it outlandish?  If 90% of illegal immigrants look mexican, 
> and 90% of illegal immigrants are christian, why is it better to focus on 
> people who look mexican than to focus on people who look christian?

  You might as well argue "100% of illegals look like people, so why not
concentrate on people?"

> The very fact that you're calling it outlandish is *exactly* the point I'm 
> making. *That* is why focusing on people who look mexican is racist and not 
> just statistics.

  What do you even mean by "racism"? Usually "racism" implies prejudice and
forming preconceptions about people based on their ethnicity. A policeman
thinking "most mexicans are criminals and deserve to be beaten" is racism
because it's a prejudiced opinion based on ethnicity.

  Statistical profiling based on ethnicity might be *technically* labelled
"racism" in the sense that it segregates people based on ethnicity. However,
if it's purely hard neutral statistics, there's no prejudiced intent. It's
simply the result of keeping up records and calculating the statistics from
them.

  One could argue that keeping statistics based on ethnicity is wrong, but
curiously that happens only if the statistics make *certain* ethnicities
look bad, while with other ethnicities it's ok. (For example, if a statistical
study showed that, let's say, Japanese people are in average more intelligent
than Finnish people, it wouldn't cause any commotion. However, heaven forbid
if such a statistic said that, for example, Finnish people are in average
more intelligent than, let's say, Nigerians. The outrage! That kind of
statistic would immediately be labelled "racist". Of course if it happened
to be the other way around, nobody would complain.)

> *This*, right here, is the crux of where you are wrong. You're asking me to 
> adjust my nit-pick of your math so that you turn out right. OK, if 80% of 
> illegals look mexican, and 90% are christian, would you still feel it's 
> outrageous to stop people going into churches and ask them for proof of 
> citizenship?  If not, then your proposal hasn't anything to do with 
> statistics of efficient policing.

  Well, if we have 100 christians and 100 non-christians, and we know that
approximately 9 of the christians are illegal immigrants and about 1 of the
non-christians is, then checking 100 christians would produce a higher
success rate than checking 100 randomly chosen people. It works the same.

  Statistically speaking it would be better to check only the christians
if we want to maximize the success rate of 100 random samples.

  You are arguing that "there are too many christians and there aren't
enough resources to check them all, hence it would be inefficient".
I didn't ever claim that checking all people of a certain group would be
*the most efficient* way. I said that it would be *more efficient* than
purely random checks. There's a difference between "more" and "most".

> >   Maybe it could be a good idea to change that, then? It's not like it's
> > something unheard of.

> Welcome to democracy.

  Democracy implies no citizenship-proving ID?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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