Is it really off-topic to suggest that looking at the accuracy of the courts may amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic in a context where we’ve basically all agreed that
the courts are not terrible at making accurate determinations of whether a defendant broke a law
The set of laws where penalties can land you in prison are massively inefficient socially and in most people’s minds unjust (when we actually grapple with what the laws are, as opposed to how they are usually applied to people like us, for those of us who are white and not poor).
The system of who is tried versus who makes plea bargains versus who never gets tried is systematically discriminatory against those with little money or middle/upper class social connections, and provides few effective protections against known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.
How different is this in principle from TimS’s suggestion about lower hanging fruit within evidentiary procedure, just at a meta level? Or did you consider that off-topic as well?
known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.
Can you cite evidence for this?
Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African descent) > P(conviction|Eurasian descent) and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African descent) > P(guilty|Eurasian descent) as a racist.
Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African decent) > P(conviction|Eurasian decent)
That is Bayesian evidence that there is a racial bias in the conviction process.
Only if one doesn’t know anything about the base rate.
and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) as a racist.
(But that isn’t evidence!)
Why not?
Mind you those people are probably being racist. In particular they are ‘pointing out’ rather than, say, hypothesizing.
According to your profile you’re from Australia, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the above statement is due to all your information about the US being filtered through a politically correct filter.
Only if one doesn’t know anything about the base rate.
No, unless you mean by ‘base rate’ something entirely different to the actual priors I would use when making the update the reverse is true. You need to be able to calculate some prior for the relevant base rate in order to make the update either way.
Why not?
Hey, I was agreeing with you! The reason I did so was that the quoted behavior is a social attack that contains more or less no information that is not orthogonal to the issue.
According to your profile you’re from Australia, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the above statement is due to all your information about the US being filtered through a politically correct filter.
I’m going to suggest, instead, that you are so (justifiably) fed up with abusive usage of political correctness that you patterned matched my statement onto a far more general position which I would not dream of supporting. My actual semantics of my claim is rather mild. The limitation to a probability would itself be sufficient to make it correct but more important is the emphasis on how the potentially claim is presented. The likely neglect of corrections for socioeconomic status and how that impacts whether the difference is in what kinds of crimes are committed and how much those crimes are the sort that actually get convictions irrespective of guilt.
A relevant datapoint regarding the drug use—the most ridiculous element of America’s absurd legal system: the last relevant study I read (the abstract of) found that contrary to common belief white Americans actually use illegal drugs more than black people. Of course the manner and type of drug use is also on average drastically different.
(I also corrected the word ‘decent’ into ‘descent’. My original reading of the claim you actually described regarding decency made the claim even more racist and also confusing.
Now responding to the suggestion of political correctness based naivete I counter that I am actually far less politically correct than average except when the politically correct beliefs are coincidentally correct. With respect to the topic of race in particular I, like many Australians are far less inclined to hit the berserk button and start throwing around social signalling whenever the topic is mentioned. I hypothesize that this is because we never went and captured a whole bunch of African slaves then have a civil war about it! The ‘black vs white’ divide in Australia is in some ways more similar to the ‘white vs Native American’ divide that you have. That is, the race that the English settlers/conquerors mostly genocided when they arrived. This means that we have a different style of racism here and ‘African’ doesn’t warrant a special case when considering racism towards foreign immigrants.
A relevant datapoint regarding the drug use—the most ridiculous element of America’s absurd legal system: the last relevant study I read (the abstract of) found that contrary to common belief white Americans actually use illegal drugs more than black people.
You might be interested in this thread where Alicorn challenged me on that very claim. (Since I had to update on it, I’m obligated by the terms of my Bayesian novitiate to loudly point it out when someone reiterates my previous prior.)
In gist, white Americans are overrepresented in lifetime illegal drugs use, but black Americans are overrepresented in recent (e.g. last-month) illegal drugs use. This is relevant because you don’t get arrested today for having tried cocaine ten years ago. (In other words, if you’re white you’re more likely to have tried dope, but if you’re black, you’re more likely to have used it in the past month.)
However, proportional to recent illegal drugs use, black Americans are overrepresented in illegal drugs arrests.
That said, the statistics I was able to find did not distinguish arrests for drug possession vs. drug dealing; did not distinguish occasional from heavy users (so long as they’d used within the past month); and did not distinguish among different illegal drugs. They also didn’t control for economic class, which is probably significant in where people choose to obtain and use their illegal drugs, which in turn would have some effect on arrest rates.
They also didn’t control for economic class, which is probably significant in where people choose to obtain and use their illegal drugs, which in turn would have some effect on arrest rates.
They also wouldn’t have controlled for technological and strategic capability. ie. The knowing or being able to find out how to use an anonymous service like silkroad, use a conservative policy when receiving such goods and make use of substances in a way that minimises arrest potential. These days working the basics on thing likes this is easy. Spend several hours with google. Yet it remains the case that which subculture someone is in will drastically influence how much they will end up knowing and caring about minimising risk. (“Rah geeky rationalist skills!”)
Yet it remains the case that which subculture someone is in will drastically influence how much they will end up knowing and caring about minimising risk.
Or willingness to use said techniques. I am routinely contacted, due to my Silk Road page, by people wishing me to explain how to use Tor/Bitcoin/Silk Road (despite the entire page being just that sort of guide!) or to buy stuff on Silk Road for them (seriously? you think I might buy some LSD for a random stranger?). I’ve begun to understand why ESR could feel compelled to write how to ask questions the smart way.
Some (most) people really are just mindboggling bad at knowing when and how to just google something, consolidate the knowledge and practically implement it! Or perhaps we just overestimate our capabilities in this regard relative to the norm.
P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) alright, but that kind of evidence is easily screened out. For any non-trivial amount of forensic evidence E, P(guilty|E, African descent) ought to be approximately the same as P(guilty|E, Eurasian descent). (For example, if E points toward the defendant being guilty, even though you’d assign a higher prior probability of guilt for a black person than for a white person, you’d assign a higher prior probability of E for a black person than for a white person too, so that in the posterior probabilities those cancel out.)
Is it really off-topic to suggest that looking at the accuracy of the courts may amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic in a context where we’ve basically all agreed that
the courts are not terrible at making accurate determinations of whether a defendant broke a law
The set of laws where penalties can land you in prison are massively inefficient socially and in most people’s minds unjust (when we actually grapple with what the laws are, as opposed to how they are usually applied to people like us, for those of us who are white and not poor).
The system of who is tried versus who makes plea bargains versus who never gets tried is systematically discriminatory against those with little money or middle/upper class social connections, and provides few effective protections against known widespread racial bias on the part of police, prosecutors and judges.
How different is this in principle from TimS’s suggestion about lower hanging fruit within evidentiary procedure, just at a meta level? Or did you consider that off-topic as well?
Can you cite evidence for this?
Most of the evidence for this is based on arguing that P(conviction|African descent) > P(conviction|Eurasian descent) and dismissing anyone who points out that P(guilty|African descent) > P(guilty|Eurasian descent) as a racist.
(Or even do the homophone and ‘cite’?)
That is Bayesian evidence that there is a racial bias in the conviction process.
(But that isn’t evidence!)
Mind you those people are probably being racist. In particular they are ‘pointing out’ rather than, say, hypothesizing.
Thanks fixed.
Only if one doesn’t know anything about the base rate.
Why not?
According to your profile you’re from Australia, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the above statement is due to all your information about the US being filtered through a politically correct filter.
No, unless you mean by ‘base rate’ something entirely different to the actual priors I would use when making the update the reverse is true. You need to be able to calculate some prior for the relevant base rate in order to make the update either way.
Hey, I was agreeing with you! The reason I did so was that the quoted behavior is a social attack that contains more or less no information that is not orthogonal to the issue.
I’m going to suggest, instead, that you are so (justifiably) fed up with abusive usage of political correctness that you patterned matched my statement onto a far more general position which I would not dream of supporting. My actual semantics of my claim is rather mild. The limitation to a probability would itself be sufficient to make it correct but more important is the emphasis on how the potentially claim is presented. The likely neglect of corrections for socioeconomic status and how that impacts whether the difference is in what kinds of crimes are committed and how much those crimes are the sort that actually get convictions irrespective of guilt.
A relevant datapoint regarding the drug use—the most ridiculous element of America’s absurd legal system: the last relevant study I read (the abstract of) found that contrary to common belief white Americans actually use illegal drugs more than black people. Of course the manner and type of drug use is also on average drastically different.
(I also corrected the word ‘decent’ into ‘descent’. My original reading of the claim you actually described regarding decency made the claim even more racist and also confusing.
Now responding to the suggestion of political correctness based naivete I counter that I am actually far less politically correct than average except when the politically correct beliefs are coincidentally correct. With respect to the topic of race in particular I, like many Australians are far less inclined to hit the berserk button and start throwing around social signalling whenever the topic is mentioned. I hypothesize that this is because we never went and captured a whole bunch of African slaves then have a civil war about it! The ‘black vs white’ divide in Australia is in some ways more similar to the ‘white vs Native American’ divide that you have. That is, the race that the English settlers/conquerors mostly genocided when they arrived. This means that we have a different style of racism here and ‘African’ doesn’t warrant a special case when considering racism towards foreign immigrants.
You might be interested in this thread where Alicorn challenged me on that very claim. (Since I had to update on it, I’m obligated by the terms of my Bayesian novitiate to loudly point it out when someone reiterates my previous prior.)
In gist, white Americans are overrepresented in lifetime illegal drugs use, but black Americans are overrepresented in recent (e.g. last-month) illegal drugs use. This is relevant because you don’t get arrested today for having tried cocaine ten years ago. (In other words, if you’re white you’re more likely to have tried dope, but if you’re black, you’re more likely to have used it in the past month.)
However, proportional to recent illegal drugs use, black Americans are overrepresented in illegal drugs arrests.
That said, the statistics I was able to find did not distinguish arrests for drug possession vs. drug dealing; did not distinguish occasional from heavy users (so long as they’d used within the past month); and did not distinguish among different illegal drugs. They also didn’t control for economic class, which is probably significant in where people choose to obtain and use their illegal drugs, which in turn would have some effect on arrest rates.
They also wouldn’t have controlled for technological and strategic capability. ie. The knowing or being able to find out how to use an anonymous service like silkroad, use a conservative policy when receiving such goods and make use of substances in a way that minimises arrest potential. These days working the basics on thing likes this is easy. Spend several hours with google. Yet it remains the case that which subculture someone is in will drastically influence how much they will end up knowing and caring about minimising risk. (“Rah geeky rationalist skills!”)
Or willingness to use said techniques. I am routinely contacted, due to my Silk Road page, by people wishing me to explain how to use Tor/Bitcoin/Silk Road (despite the entire page being just that sort of guide!) or to buy stuff on Silk Road for them (seriously? you think I might buy some LSD for a random stranger?). I’ve begun to understand why ESR could feel compelled to write how to ask questions the smart way.
Some (most) people really are just mindboggling bad at knowing when and how to just google something, consolidate the knowledge and practically implement it! Or perhaps we just overestimate our capabilities in this regard relative to the norm.
P(guilty|African decent) > P(guilty|Eurasian decent) alright, but that kind of evidence is easily screened out. For any non-trivial amount of forensic evidence E, P(guilty|E, African descent) ought to be approximately the same as P(guilty|E, Eurasian descent). (For example, if E points toward the defendant being guilty, even though you’d assign a higher prior probability of guilt for a black person than for a white person, you’d assign a higher prior probability of E for a black person than for a white person too, so that in the posterior probabilities those cancel out.)
Agreed, however, I fail to see what this has to do with my point.
Never mind. I had misunderstood your point.