Comment by gernb
3 years ago
repeating myself but
> ts better to let 10 criminals get away with it than to convict 1 innocent person.
is arguably false. it forgets that 10 criminals had 10 or more victims. If you optimize for the least number of victims then it's easily possible that convicting a few innocent people has a net positive in lowering the total number of victims including the victims of being wrongly convicted
to put it another way, perfect is the enemy of good. In this case if in pursuit of perfection of having zero wrongly convicted you end up causing more victims of criminals then you've arguably failed
That’s debatable.
I also believe that it’s better to let 10 criminals get away with it than it is to wrongly convict 1 innocent person. And I’m fairly sure that all the innocent people who were unfortunate enough to go through the court system would agree with me.
Also, not every crime must have a victim. There are a million victimless crimes.
Yes, it’s also debatable whether those should even be crimes (in my opinion - no), but the argument that 1 crime = at least 1 victim is flat out false.
1 crime can easily be more than one vicitm.
also you too made the exact same error. you discounted the victims of the criminals. yes the 1 innocent wrongly convicted is bad but what about all the innocents that are victims of the criminals. You absolutely have to add those innocents to your total of how many innocents you helped
if you catch 10 serial killers and 1 happens to be innocent you still saved 9-18-27 lives in exchange for one innocent. If because of over zealousness of zero innocents being caught you only catch 5 serial killers you saved 1 extra life and forfeited 5 to 15 others
You arguably believe what I'm saying. no law enforcement can be perfect so it's guaranteed that innocent people will be mistakenly convicted. The only logical conclusion is if you truly believe there must be zero innocents convicted then you believe law enforcement should not exist since there will never be perfect law enforcement
> 1 crime can easily be more than one vicitm.
Yes, but 10000 crimes can also have 0 victims.
Since perfect accuracy is impossible, you must choose a balance between precision and recall.
it doesn't forget that. it implies that you shouldn't optimize for the least number of victims. it's cool to disagree with that and think about why or why not, but please actually engage with the idea rather than just assuming they didn't think it through at all.