Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > In other words, my question was whether
> > people are objecting to the law purely because they have an automatic
> > aversion to anything that makes a distinction between races, or whether
> > there are *logical* reasons to oppose the law.

> There are logical reasons to oppose the law. The number of false negatives 
> found by avoiding investigating those who lack feature X is unrelated to the 
> number of false positives caused by investigating those who possess feature X.

  I didn't ask what those logical reasons are because they have been
presented countless times already in this thread. I think I said that
in the paragraph above, but you left that part out.

> Do you understand that?

  I have said countless times in this thread that I do understand why the
law wouldn't work.

> Because you still seem to be asking the question

  Even though I *explicitly* say that I'm not?

> instead of going "Oh! I see now!  I no longer have to ask the question, 
> because you answered it."

  How many times do I have to write "but I understand why it wouldn't work
in practice" before it sinks in?

  (And how many times do I have to write that it doesn't change my original
point?)

> >   My personal opinion is that *if* in some contexts crime could be more
> > efficiently stopped by making the distinction, then it would make sense
> > to do so.

> I completely understand. And I'm telling you "the math shows that there are 
> no contexts in which crime could be more efficiently stopped by making the 
> distinction," in any case where you don't already know something about the 
> specific criminal you seek.  And yet, you still haven't said you understand 
> this. Do you?

  No.

  Firstly, I don't see how the math says that.

  Secondly, it was not my point. My point *still* is "if it could make a
difference, it would make sense to use it".

> Even when you use race to find a mugger reported (say) to be a black man, 
> you're not using race to decide who to question. You're using location (near 
> the time and place of the mugging) to decide who to question and you're 
> using race to *eliminate* suspects from questioning. You don't question all 
> black men. You question all people *near the crime scene*, *except* for the 
> people you know *cannot* be the mugger.  Which is entirely different than 
> "focusing your attentions on those of the right profile."

  You talk like using a profile is mutually exclusive with using other clues.

  If your clues have narrowed down the list of suspects to 100 people, 50
males and 50 females, and your profile says that the criminal is most likely
a male (for example, in rape cases it's pretty unlikely for the criminal to
be female), you reduced your list from 100 to 50.

  For some reason you seem to think that "using a profile" means "discard
all other evidence and *only* use the profile" (in some past post you even
explicitly talked about profiles *increasing* the amount of subjects, which
at the time I didn't understand at all because it made no sense, but now I
think you were implying "using a profile *and* discarding all other clues").
I don't understand where you are getting that. It's certainly not something
I have said nor implied.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message