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Emile comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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On the Freakonomics blog, Steven Pinker had this to say:
I've seen a common theme on LW that is more or less "if the consequences are awful, the reasoning probably wasn't rational". Where do you think Pinker's analysis went wrong, if it did go wrong?
One possibility is that the utility function to be optimized in Pinker's example amounts to "convict the guilty and acquit the innocent", whereas we probably want to give weight to another consideration as well, such as "promote the kind of society I'd wish to live in".
Why single out race? There are other demographic factors that could count too: sex, age, social class ... and if a policy of "OK, conviction standards for blacks are lower" would be political suicide, a policy of "OK, conviction standards for working class people" would be even worse.
Even so such policies may indeed increase the accuracy of convictions, 1) they don't match our intuitions about justice, which I suspect would make people less happy, 2) judges and juries already take such factors into account (implicitly and approximately), so there's a risk of overcorrecting, and 3) energy would be much better spent increasing the accuracy of conviction with less ambiguous things like cameras, DNA tests, etc.
I do believe that such demographic data can be useful to help direct resources for crime prevention, though.
Isn't that the status quo?
Not explicitly, as far as I know (implicitly, possibly, hence what I said about over-correcting).
One would hope not.
Leaning more towards "increased police presence in the ghetto" or "only frisk the Muslims"?
Whatever works, I don't have any specific policies in mind (I'm far from being an expert in law enforcement).
But to take a specific example, I don't think information about higher crime rates for blacks is enough to tell whether we need "increased police presence in the Ghetto" - for all I know, police presence could already be 10 times the national average there.
There is a tendency I dislike in political punditry/activism/whatever (not that I'm accusing you of it, you just gave me a pretext to get on my soap box) to say "we need more X" or "we need less X" (regulation, police, taxes, immigrants, education, whatever) without any reference to evidence about what the ideal level of X would be, and about whether we are above or below that level - sometimes the same claims are made in countries with wildly different levels of X.
Single-valued logic