Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> In this conversation, for example, Warp says "If 90% of illegal immigrants 
> look Mexican, wouldn't it be more efficient to focus on people who look 
> Mexican?"[1]   I answer "No, the math doesn't work that way, because... for 
> example..."[2]  And then Warp, instead of saying "Oh, I see, that's a good 
> point I hadn't considered" before continuing the conversation, instead says 
> "Stop nit-picking the math."  Or instead doesn't respond at all, giving the 
> impression they haven't even read the answer.[3]  It would be far better to 
> respond "Yes, I see what you're saying. However, I disagree because..." Then 
> it wouldn't turn into a dead-horse-beating-fest.

  The problem is that you are misinterpreting my response, even *after*
I explained it more clearly.

  Originally I was comparing "concentrate the resources on people who fit
the profile better" vs. "distribute the resources evenly among all people".
That last part is important.

  I might not have explicitly said that in the original post, but I tried
to explain in followups, for example by comparing the situation to solving
a rape crime, where it makes sense to restrict investigation on males instead
of spreading the investigation equally on males and females. In other words,
when you narrow your input by some factor, the same resources will be more
efficiently used compared to if you distributed the resource evenly to the
entire input.

  Your argument was that "using ethnicity as a basis of narrowing down the
possible suspects is not the *best* factor". In other words, you were not
disagreeing with what I was saying (in other words, that narrowing the
input by using some known factor helps utilize resources better), you were
simply disagreeing with the notion that ethnicity would be the best factor
to do that.

  That's also fine, and I said that many times. I didn't claim that
ethnicity is the *best* factor. I simply said that narrowing factors can
be used to distribute resources better and increase the likelihood of
success, and that *if* ethnicity were such a factor (which is different
from saying that it *is* such a factor), it would make sense to use it.
I even gave a simple example where this indeed gave a positive result.
The example was not intended to depict a real situation, but as a simple
demonstration of the basic principle of narrowing down the samples.

  The problem is that you kept sticking onto the "ethnicity" part and
wouldn't understand what I was *really* saying. It feels like it was some
kind of red flag which made you blind to anything else. You kept attacking
that "ethnicity" argument over and over, and completely ignoring me when
I said that it's not what I was saying and to stop nitpicking about the
specific example. But you wouldn't stop, no matter what I tried.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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