this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Nah, these facts are not the issue. Omitting that the statistics themselves are the result of discrimination is kinda negligent though.
The solution wouldn't be to try to balance out a bias in a fundamentally flawed dataset, but to establish a human system of decisionmaking that's resilient to prejudice and bias instead of relying on machines that can only imitate their makers' mistakes.
Yeah, the human part is quite often the problem in such systems though.
Unfortunately, yes.
A machine trained on human decisions isn't gonna make better decisions, and I'm not aware that a sufficiently advanced machine reasoning from principles instead of correlations exists yet. So as it stands, the best we can do is try to minimise the problematic aspects of humanity.
It's not a good solution, just the less bad one.
Is that the only reason? Or perhaps is there a cultural component to this?
You mean whether a people trapped in poverty, deprived of perspectives, desperate and frustrated by the injustice that continues to be done to them, develops a culture of violence?
Yeah. Probably. That's what centuries of slavery, segregation and wealth-gating social mobility will do to people: they get stuck in a cycle of poor conditions harming childhood development, leading to ill-adjusted adults struggling to get or hold good jobs, some of which will resort to other ways of making money.
https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/violence
https://www.opencrime.us/analysis/crime-and-poverty
Pretending it's a racial issue or a culture of violence is only half the truth. The other half is that it's an economic issue arising from a history of treating them as second-class citizens at best, at worst basing your entire government on the conviction "that slavery subordination to the superior race is [the black man's] natural and normal condition" and going to war over it.
You need to get out more. Listen to what people who successfully got out of the ghetto say about the social difficulties involved with getting out. "Acting white" is frowned upon. Crabs in a bucket.
Yes, that divide exists and is reinforced by the identities tied to the status within those relics of a segregation that was never effectively dismantled.
Discriminatory policing isn't gonna help with that divide. Being prejudiced by someone's ethnicity has nothing to do with statistics. Humans aren't numbers or probabilistic distributions. We're individuals that deserve being judged by our actions, not the colour of our skin. My white isn't inherently more or less criminal than someone else's black.
Leaning on statistics to justify the actions that reinforce the root causes of those statistics is circular logic. It's not a valid justification for prejudice.
It isn't, and yet, for a randomly selected individual with white or black skin, the chances of each one in fact being a violent criminal are vastly different.
Does it suck? Sure. But that's how it is, there is nothing you or I can do about it.
Reducing people to chances based on a single factor is deeply dehumanising. The statistics aren't wrong; the interpretation and application is.
Individually, we can't do a whole lot. But we can do our part to break that cycle, to treat people as people and stop normalising or excusing racism.