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Warp wrote:
> 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 *still* understand what you're saying. You *still* aren't saying what
"profile" you're talking about. Using a profile based on race is *still* not
as efficient as a profile based on probable cause, regardless of the
political correctness.
And people aren't complaining about profiles based on actual causal
relationships to the crimes being investigated. Nobody is complaining about
"profiling" people who are driving badly for sobriety tests, and nobody is
complaining about "profiling" people who don't pay their taxes for
immigration status testing.
And people aren't complaining about random testing, but you repeatedly seem
to conflate "random" testing with "random testing of people who fit a
profile", which are two entirely different things. Plus, random testing
might have a deterrent value in the case of sobriety tests, but it's not
really possible to deter someone from having their ethnicity.
Yet you still haven't indicated that you understand that.
> 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.
Yes. And again, nobody is disputing that. Nobody is saying that if you know
something about a criminal, you should use that information to not
investigate people who could not be the criminal.
A profile of the type you seem to be recommending is not that sort of thing,
for reasons I have repeatedly tried to explain and you *seem* to be ignoring.
> 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.
No, I was disagreeing on several fronts:
1) You *cannot* use the statement "Most of the criminals have trait X, hence
we should focus our questioning on people with trait X." The math doesn't
work that way. You have yet to acknowledge that you understand why the math
doesn't work that way.
2) You *can* use the statement "Most of the criminals have trait Y, hence we
should *not* focus our question on people who *lack* trait Y." Again, this
is how the math works. Again, you have yet to acknowledge that you
understand this point.
This is a tremendously fundamental part of the whole "profiling"
conversation. You waved it off with "don't nit-pick the math." This implied
to me that you didn't understand why it's important.
It's like having a debate with someone who thinks "A implies B" implies "Not
A implies Not B". And then the correction is waved off with "Oh, you know
what I mean." No, really, I don't.
Basically, the problem is related to the rate of false negatives not telling
you anything about the rate of false positives. Maybe that phrasing helps.
> 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
And I gave examples where ethnicity *can* be used that way (e.g., medicine),
and explained why linking genetics to criminal behavior is *not* an
effective means of profiling (because of (1) and (2) above). Which, as far
as I could tell, you didn't read or didn't understand.
> I even gave a simple example where this indeed gave a positive result.
Other than the rapist bit? See (1) vs (2) above. You're not going to get
many false negatives be eliminating female rapists. You're going to get a
lot of false positives by considering all or random subsets of males as
rapists.
I didn't see any example where you wound up with a positive result other
than the rapist bit. Note that the stopping of SUV drivers has the same
problem as (1). Your example of eliminating the bus drivers is an example of
(2). The sparsity of false negatives in a group does not imply a sparsity of
false positives in the compliment of that group.
> 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.
Except when I tried substituting other examples with the same problem, such
as profiling based on religion, you first ignored it, then called it
outlandish. In this country, when you say someone's statement is
"outlandish", it's generally of the connotation "What, are you crazy?"
Hence, it first looked like you were trying to ignore the example and
continue the debate as if it hadn't been given (which is a mark of debating
with someone unwilling to change their mind). Then it looked like you
thought it was a terrible example because it *wasn't* based on ethnicity,
and indeed the very thought of profiling based on something other than
ethnicity was crazy talk.
Then you gave a bunch of examples like eye color and hair color, all of
which are part of race/ethnicity/etc.
Then you got defensive when people were saying all your examples were
racist. (Not you, your examples.)
That's part of why I thought you were suggesting using ethnic profiling
rather than some other type of profiling.
Here's a suggestion, tho, just in terms of personal-communication:
If you've made a mistake, and someone corrects you, don't berate them for
correcting you. If you give an example, and someone says "The math doesn't
work that way," don't say "don't nit-pick the math." Instead, say "sorry,
that was a bad example, let me try again."
Otherwise, you're saying "You're clearly misinterpreting what I meant to
say, because what I meant to say was something that's correct. Don't nitpick
on the fact that what I actually said was wrong, but instead assume instead
that I said something correct and go from there."
You sometimes get into this mode in a conversation and it makes it hard to
get out, because you start thinking people are intentionally
misunderstanding you. You give bad examples, then complain when people use
those examples even when you say "that's not what I meant." But you never
actually express what you *do* mean, you just say "apply the appropriate
corrections, then discuss that instead."
HTH.
And honestly, it was fun. I learned a bunch how to express my thoughts on
this subject. I hope I didn't offend you. That wasn't my intention. I don't
think you're racist. I simply think in this case you either haven't thought
through the math of the "statistics" you're proposing or you don't actually
care enough about the topic (since you see it as irrelevant and it probably
doesn't happen much around you) to really think about whether profiling
really would work. I think because of this you might *sound* racist to some.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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