On 5-5-2010 14:28, Warp wrote:
> andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>> - You fail to indicate what exactly is condescending in your opinion so 
>> that leaves me guessing.
> 
>   Talking with someone else about me and apparently my typical negative
> behavior as if I were some kind of child who must be understood. 
Oh, but you are ;)
> It sounds patronizing.

I know. It wasn't meant that way, but other than starting an e-mail 
discussion behind your back (which you would also not have liked if you 
knew about it) there is no other way to communicate. That is the curse 
of a public discussion.

>   When you write "IME a thread with Warp dies when there is nothing left
> for him than to apologize" it gives the strong impression that you are
> saying "he always writes controversially, he is usually wrong, but always
> too stubborn to admit it even though we show him how wrong he is, so he
> is either forced to apologize, or the thread dies because nobody else
> wants to continue". It sounds like you are implying some negative personality
> traits. The worst thing is that you aren't telling me about it, but someone
> else, making it sound like "you just have to understand him", which sounds
> extremely patronizing and condescending. (Maybe it was not how you intended
> it, but it *does* sound like that.)

Darren noticed that some threads suddenly drop dead without any feedback 
that somebody has changed his mind or ended with 'I see your point, but 
I still disagree'. I can only confirm that and that is what I did. It 
has annoyed me again and again over the years.
I don't think this is new to you, I vaguely remember having said this 
before.
Also not that there is another sentence behind what you quoted. This was 
  meant as a point for you to drop in into the discussion with your own 
points of view if you would have wanted to. In stead you chose to go 
into meta immediately, now I still don't know what your motivation was. 
More importantly, there is no indication from your part if you are 
prepared to end discussions in a more grown up way (sorry for the 
patronizing term). Remember: people are not going to apologize to 
someone who never apologized when an apology was badly needed.

>   "We have made progress", in this context, also gives an impression of
> being patronizing. And since you are not telling that to me but to someone
> else, it makes it sound like you were ganged up with others (or at least
> want to be, like with a mentality of "we are right, he's wrong").

I don't know about ganging up, but anyway it is not about being right or 
wrong in the discussion. It was about the use of invalid discussion 
tricks to not apologize for insulting people.

>   That's the impression your post gave me, which is why I replied in the
> way I did.

And this was my motivation.

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andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Because the first implies that you think that race may be important in 
> same cases and the latter that you don't believe so.

  Maybe originally I expressed myself poorly. When I said "race is not
important" I meant that "race is not something which, IMO, would deserve
special protection over other human traits; it should be considered as
important or unimportant as anything else".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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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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On Wed, 05 May 2010 07:43:28 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> On Tue, 04 May 2010 15:00:34 -0400, Warp wrote:
> 
>> > Where did you conjure this "stupidity" thing
>> >   all
>> > of a sudden?
> 
>> You imply it when you say "I've explained it over and over again and
>> I'm not going to continue to repeat myself".  The undertone there is
>> "if you're too stupid to understand it, I'm not going to try any more".
> 
>   I have not implied any such thing. Any such "undertone" you are seeing
> is purely your own invention. I have never written anything with that
> kind of mindset.

Maybe you didn't imply it, but clearly it was inferred.

>   When I wrote that I wouldn't bother explaining the same things again,
> I was simply implying that I'm tired of doing so again and again, as the
> conversation is going in circles. "Stupidity" had absolutely nothing to
> do with any of this.
> 
>   (Well, I didn't actually keep my promise. I succumbed into trying to
> explain it, once again, to Darren in a previous post I made today. Let's
> see if it helps this time. If not, then I suppose this is hopeless.)
> 
>> When I engage in these conversations with you, Warp, it's never ever
>> ever ever EVER with the intention of "twisting your words".  It's with
>> the intention of trying to understand what you're saying.
> 
>   I understand it if someone misinterprets something I say. What I don't
> understand is why they keep misinterpreting it even *after* I say that
> they misinterpreted it.

You frequently try to explain by just saying the same thing again.  When 
you explain something a second time, taking a different approach can 
often help make your point clear.

>> Instead of trying to explain, you then get all defensive and blame
>> everyone else.
> 
>   But I have tried to explain. However, the conversation nevertheless
> goes in circles.

Then a different explanation is needed, not getting pissed off.

Jim

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I simply think in this case you either haven't thought 
> through the math of the "statistics" you're proposing

  *sigh*

  I have reached the limit of my ability to write, as the post you were
responding to was my best and most honest effort at explaining myself,
and I just can't think how I could explain myself better. No matter how
clearly I try to put it, it doesn't seem to matter.

  Well, since I don't think I can express myself more clearly, I suppose
I will have to simply stop and let you think whatever you want, to let
you have whatever notion of what I "have been proposing" you want. I'm
out of ideas. So I give up.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Wed, 05 May 2010 07:32:46 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> That's because you keep saying "profiling based on race isn't a
>> problem"
> 
>   The problem is that when you say "profiling based on race", you are
> implying some kind of prejudiced discrimination and abuse based on race.
> When I say "profiling based on race" I mean "making statistics based on
> race, and *if* those statistics could be used to do something more
> efficiently, then do it". That doesn't imply discrimination nor racist
> prejudice.
> 
>   You can argue that race can *not* be used as a profiling factor to
> distribute police resources more efficiently. Well, my answer to that
> is: If that's so, then don't use race as a profiling factor, it's that
> simple. My *point* is, however, that *if* race *could* be used to catch
> criminals more efficiently, then it would make sense to do so. (But I do
> understand that many people could get offended by that, so there are
> also practical reasons why it cannot be done.)
> 
>   Personally I don't see race as such a holy element that must be
>   protected
> from such things. It's no different from gender, age or any other
> personal feature.

Perhaps if you lived in or grew up in a country where racism was pretty 
extreme and practiced not just by "normal" people but also by law 
enforcement, your view would be different.  It's not been so long ago 
that in parts of the US, just being black could get you killed by so-
called "vigilante justice" and those who were supposed to actually 
enforce the law would look the other way.

Go do a little reading on Jim Crow laws (which doesn't get into lynchings 
and the like, but is a starting point for understanding why institutional 
use of race as a differentiator is a problem here), for example - then 
maybe you'll understand better why it's such a hot button over here.

>> and then claim - quite counterintuitively, that you don't see race.
> 
>   I have made no such claim. (Why do I feel like I'm repeating myself?)
> 
>   What I have claimed is that to me race is exactly as important and
> unimportant as any other personal factor, such as gender, age, shoe size
> or hair color. I don't care about race any more or any less than about
> any of those other things. It's all the same.

Well, I could go back and find where you seemed to be saying that, but I 
don't have the time at the moment to do so.  I could swear, though, that 
you said something to that effect.

>> >> What we have here is a failure to communicate.  Plain and simple. 
>> >> You simply refuse to acknowledge that you play a role in this
>> >> failure to communicate, and that everyone ELSE must be stupid.
>> > 
>> >   See, here we go again. You are putting words in my mouth. Words I
>> >   have
>> > never said. This is your idea of "communication"?
> 
>> Oh FFS, I AM NOT PUTTING WORDS IN YOUR MOUTH.
> 
>   You wrote quite directly above, that in my opinion "everyone else must
> be stupid". I have not said nor implied any such thing. If that's not
> putting words in my mouth, then what is?

It's a logical inference (IMO) from the way you write, at least, that's 
how you come across.  You may not *write* those specific words, but when 
you say "why do I feel like I'm repeating myself", you come across as 
implying "god, you're stupid".

Jim

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On Wed, 05 May 2010 08:37:48 -0400, Warp wrote:

>   I honestly don't see how contrasting the two things are
>   counterintuitive.
> Maybe he means something with "profiling based on race isn't a problem"
> that I didn't understand.

Because profiling based on race assumes guilt rather than innocence.  
"The person is of hispanic descent, therefore they must (or even are 
highly likely) to be in the country illegally."

That is not probable cause in US legal terms to stop someone.

Jim

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On Wed, 05 May 2010 06:57:21 -0400, Warp wrote:

>   So if I have responded several times already that "I did not claim
>   that",
> and even *after* that you still keep saying "you claimed X", then what
> else is it than lying?

What I see is you saying that you didn't claim X, and then asserting X in 
a later post, and then when you're called out on it, you say "I never 
said that".  Again, I could probably find specific examples for you to 
clarify, but this thread has gotten quite long and I simply don't have 
the time to search it for those instances.  Maybe next time.

>   If you misunderstood something I wrote, that's ok. 

Clearly that is a likely option here.  So instead of saying "you're a 
liar" in response, make what you're writing clearer, and when you're 
asked for clarification (such as "earlier you said X, now you seem to be 
changing your stance", instead of screaming "NO!  I've been saying that 
all along", see that as an opportunity to *clarify* what you mean and 
reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements.  When you start 
going into "liar liar pants on fire" mode, that's when you start coming 
across as the persecuted soul who everyone's lying about, being 
condescending to, and patronising.  For my part, I generally never 
*intend* to do that, I want a genuine conversation.  If I don't want a 
genuine conversation, I'll go do something else.

> When I later say
>   that
> what you interpreted was not what I was trying to say, the correct thing
> to do is to stop saying "you claimed X" over and over.

What I'm trying to do is reconcile two seemingly contradictory 
statements.  So when I say "you claimed X" (which I don't think I've said 
directly, but if I have, <shrug>) in response to something that to me 
appears to contradict claim X, then what I'm looking for is some sort of 
reconciliation - or even a "you know, I didn't think of it that way 
before, and that's not what I really meant".  But you get so defensive 
that you seem to never back down and say "hey, I made a mistake".

>   If you don't like being called a liar, neither do I. If you don't
> acknowledge me when I say "I did not claim that", then you are,
> effectively, calling me a liar, as you keep insisting that I made the
> claim.

Fair enough, but again, understand that I'm trying to reconcile something 
you've said earlier with something you've said now - so help us reconcile 
those two statements by either clarifying or by saying "I was wrong".  
It's not so hard, and nobody is right 100% of the time.

>> >> Maybe it's time for me to filter your posts again, because you take
>> >> such an irrational approach to discussion.  But of course, you'll
>> >> see that as some sort of insult, no doubt.
>> > 
>> >   If that makes you feel better, who am I to stop you?
> 
>> It doesn't make me feel better.  I like *reasoned* debate.  But when I
>> come up against someone who takes an absolutist position and then turns
>> around and accuses me of twisting what they said and then accusing me
>> of lying, when I'm actually TRYING TO UNDERSTAND, yeah, I get pissed
>> off to the point of saying "there's no point in continuing the
>> discussion."
> 
>   I simply can't understand your rationale with the post filtering
>   thing.

Because when I start getting wound up, scoring posts as "ignore" from 
someone who pisses me off (whether intentionally or not) reminds me not 
to engage.  I still see the posts, but it's a visual reminder to me that 
I should just walk away rather than try to understand or engage in 
constructive conversation, because the conversation has turned to a point 
of not being constructive any more, but a screaming match about who said 
what and who's lying about what.

That's simply not fun for me, so it's better to remind myself that I 
don't want to get drawn into that kind of discussion.  Sadly, that 
happens with you here more than just about anyone else (well, I can think 
of one other individual, but he's been absent for a while now and things 
have generally been a lot calmer as a result), and you *seem* to not care 
how you are perceived (that's probably not the case, but it's how you 
come across).

One of the reasons debating with you is so frustrating to me is that you 
don't seem to put yourself in anyone else's shoes in order to understand 
a different perspective.  In this instance, you've said over and over 
that you don't see why race shouldn't be used to identify illegals (at 
least that's what you seem to be saying).  I and others have tried to 
explain, both in a cultural context and in the context of how US 
jurisprudence is supposed to work, and you've pretty flatly rejected 
those explanations instead of saying something like "that's not how it 
works here, but I can understand why people in the US might feel this way 
given the history".

When you do that, you come across as having an air of superiority - not 
you personally, but culturally certainly - and it is interpreted as 
"we're better than you".

You need to understand and acknowledge that there is more than one way to 
do things in the world, and the way it's done in Finland isn't the way 
it's done in the US or other countries, and that perhaps there's 
something you can learn from us.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> When you do that, you come across as having an air of superiority - not 
> you personally, but culturally certainly - and it is interpreted as 
> "we're better than you".

And even if you (Finland, whatever) are, it still doesn't mean you can't 
understand. You can be superior in many ways and still understand why the 
other person's/country's/etc inferiority exists.  You can say "that's wrong" 
without saying "I can't understand why you don't know that's wrong."

-- 
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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Warp wrote:
>   I think that's the core issue in this whole thread.

Thank you. This was a *clear* explanation.

> aversion to anything that makes a distinction between races,

One item to note: One of the reasons people say "there's no such thing as 
race" is because "race" is really a mixture of a whole lot of features, and 
the variation between those features in any particular "race" (regardless of 
how you cut up the races) is larger than between separate "races".

It's not people denying genetics. It's people denying that there's any 
feature that occurs in one "race" that doesn't occur in another "race" with 
enough frequency to warrant the distinction.

It's taking 100 genes that determine different factors of your make up and 
chopping you into one of 3 or 5 or 10 buckets, then dealing with you based 
on those buckets instead of the 100 or so genes.

> promoting outright banning the entire concept of "race",

Yes. It's deep down a meaningless term. I've seen twins born of "mixed race" 
families where one twin looked like he was from finland and the other looked 
like she was from kenya. Yet they were both born of the same parents. Are 
they the same race?

Why is Obama "black" but not "japanese"?  I believe even you once pointed 
out the absurdity there.

Kenyans are tall, but not all of them, and some British are tall too. I'm 
sure you know some people born where you are that have dark curly hair.

It's like arguing over whether a programming language is "high level" or 
not. Sure, SQL is "high level", and machine code is "low level", but that 
doesn't mean you can categorize most programming languages into one or the 
other of those categories in any non-arbitrary way.

That's why people argue against using race for *any* purpose.

HTH.

-- 
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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