Comment by falcolas
5 years ago
> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users
Who cares?
No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.
"The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from Innocence is Irrelevant [1]
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?"
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
> The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
That doesn't mean the company gets to throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck it, it's too hard". We wouldn't tolerate that with our justice systems, and we shouldn't tolerate with corporations.
> apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
Remember, Google spends millions of dollars on lobbying every year as well. And that money comes from its customers, whether directly or indirectly.
The justice system isn't even close to error free even with a fair trial, as we define it, so I'm not sure that this is a good analog.
And yet we don't allow for blowing off that error rate because of the number of total cases in the system. It's also possible to get a retrial or dismissal if the errors are identified.
In practice, we collectively do blow off that error rate. For example, the US has many high profile miscarriages of injustice that it hasn't meaningfully solved for decades. There are people who get jerked around the justice system that can't get the system to justify a retrial or their retrial produces the same flawed outcome, similar to how Google's systems jerk people around with little meaningful recourse. There has been plenty of public protest (and insurrection) about these issues throughout the US that indicate the system isn't working as these people are fighting their issues outside normal civic/political channels.
The US is a democracy and its citizens do tolerate this level of failure.