Comment by janalsncm
1 year ago
In any system, there are false positives and false negatives. In some situations (like a high recall disease detection) false negatives are much worse than false positives, because the cost of a false positive is a more rigorous screening.
But in this case both are bad. If it was a false negative students might need therapy for a more tragic reason.
Aside from improving the quality of the detection model, we should try to reduce the “cost” of both failure modes as much as possible. Putting a human in the loop or having secondary checks are ways to do that.
In this case false positives are far, far worse than false negatives. A false negative in this system does not mean a tragedy will occur, because there are many other preventative measures in place. And never mind the fact that this country refuses to even address the primary cause of gun violence in the first place: the ubiquity of guns in our society. So systems like this is what we end up with when we ignore to address the problem of guns and choose to deal the downstream effects of that instead.
> the primary cause of gun violence in the first place: the ubiquity of guns in our society
I would have gone with “a normalized sense of hopelessness and indignity which causes people to feel like violence is the only way they can have any agency in life” considering “gun” is the adjective and “violence” is the actual thing you're talking about.
Both are true. The underlying oppressive, lonely, pro-bullying culture creates the tension. The proliferation of high lethality weapons makes it more likely that tension will eventually release in the form of a mass tragedy.
Improvement in either area would be a net positive for society. Improvement in both areas is ideal but solving proliferation seems a lot more straightforward than fixing the generally miserable society problem.
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I tend to categorize these under a dutch idiom which I can’t describe, but which is abundantly clear in pictorial form:
https://klimapedia.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Dweilen_met...
"Treating the symptoms not the cause" would be the english equivalent.
(for others: the Dutch expression is "Dweilen met de kraan open", "Mopping with the tap open")
To be clear, the false negative here would be a student who has brought a gun to a school and the computer ignores it. That is a situation where potentially multiple people can be killed in a short amount of time. It is not far, far worse to send cops.
Depends on the false positive rate doesn't it. If police are being sent to storm a school every week due to a false positive, that is quite bad. And people will become conditioned to not care about reports of a gun at a school because of all the false positives.
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> But in this case both are bad. If it was a false negative students might need therapy for a more tragic reason.
Given the probability of police officers in the USA taking any action as hostile and then ending up shooting him a false positive here is the same as swatting someone.
The system here sent the police off to kill someone.
Yep. Think of it as the new exciting version of swatting. Naturally, one will still need to figure out common ways to force a specific misattribution, but, sadly, I think there will be people working on it ( if there aren't already ).
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Sure. But school shootings are also common in the US. A student who has brought a gun to a school is very likely not harmless. So false negatives aren’t free either.
What's the proportion of gun-carrying to shooting in schools?
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I was swatted once. Girlfriend's house. Someone called 911 and said they'd seen me kill a neighbor, drag their body into the house, and was now holding my gf's family hostage.
We answered the screams at the door to guns pointed at our faces, and countless cops.
It was explained to us that this was the restrained version. We got a knock.
Unfortunately, I understand why these responses can't be neutered too much. You just never know.
In this case, though, you COULD know, COULD verify with a human before pointing guns at people, or COULD not deploy a half finished product in a way that prioritizes your profit over public safety.
s/COULD/SHOULD/g
Happened to a friend of mine by an ex GF who said he was on psych meds (true though he is nonviolent with no history) and that he was threatening to kill his parents. NYPD SWAT no-knock kicked the door down to his apartment which terrorized his elderly parents as they pointed guns at their son (in his words, "machine guns".) BUT because he has psych issues and on meds he was forced into a cop car in front of the whole neighborhood to get a psych evaluation. He only received an apology from the cops who said they have no choice but to follow procedure.
edit should add sorry to hear that.
> who said he was on psych meds (true though he is nonviolent with no history)
I don't understand the connection here
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Do the cops not ever get tired of being fooled like this? Or do they just enjoy the chance to go out in their army-surplus armored cars and pretend to be special forces?
I had convos with cops about swatting, the good ones aren't happy to go kick down someone's door who isn't about to harm someone but feel they can't chance making a fatally wrong call when it isn't swatting, also they have procedures to follow and if they don't the outcome is on them personally and potentially legally.
As for bad cops they look for any reason to go act like aggro billy badasses.
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This is a really good question. Sadly the answer is that they think it's how the system is meant to work. Well that seems to be the answer that I see coming from police spokespeople
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It doesn't make sense. If you were holding people hostage, you'd have demands for their release. Windows could be peeked into. If you dragged a dead body into a house, there'd be evidence of that.
False positives can effectively lead to false negatives too. If too many alarms end in teens getting swatted (or worse) for eating chips, people might ignore the alarm if an actual school shooter triggers it. Might assume the AI is just screaming about a bag of chips again.
I think a “true positive” is an issue as well if the protocol to manage it isn’t appropriate. If the kid was armed with something other than nacho cheese, the provocative reaction could have easily set off a tragic chain of events.
Reality is there are guns in schools every day. “Solutions” like this aren’t making anyone safer. School shooters don’t fit this profile - they are planners, not impulsive people hanging out at the social event.
More disturbing is the meh attitude of both the company and the school administration. They almost engineered a tragedy through incompetence, and learned nothing.