Statistics

Mathematicians Can’t Solve Reality Equation, Want To Ban Predictive Policing

Remember how, despite warnings to the contrary, many of you thought STEM was safe from the holiness spirals and vice signaling working its way through academic like salmonella through a dumpster-diving meth-addict’s colon?

Next time listen to the warnings. STEM, it’s true, held on to Reality longer than did the humanities, but it’s grip was loosened one finger at a time until, now, it’s hanging on by, well, a hangnail on the left pinky finger.

A group of soy-drenched social justice warriors submitted an open letter to the American Mathematical Society, a letter which turned out to be an enormous hit among the mathematicians who wanted to get in the vice signaling but couldn’t figure out how.

Here’s how the letter “Boycott collaboration with police” opens:

To the Mathematics Community,

In light of the extrajudicial murders by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and numerous others before them, and the subsequent brutality of the police response to protests, we call on the mathematics community to boycott working with police departments.

Murder is a strong word, one of the strongest. The academic mathematicians, a huge and growing list of them, just called police murderers. Serious charges indeed! Are they true, or is this libel?

It’s libel.

The police did not, in fact, murder these three individuals. Floyd died from a body ravaged by drug use and criminal behavior. Taylor died inadvertently after her boyfriend shot a cop as they were serving a warrant on Taylor. And the woman McDade (who thought she was a man) was killed in an altercation when “Officers tried to stop McDade in connection with a deadly stabbing on Saxon Street minutes earlier.”

Even allowing that police killed all three is not to say police murdered them. Which they did not.

The letter thus starts on an outrageous libel. It begins with a claim having no relation to Reality—no strange thing in academia. It goes into pit after that.

Before we continue, it would be good for these falsely accused police to go the route of Nick Sandman, who successfully sued the propaganda outlets that slandered and libeled him. That young man is now rich, God bless him, because of the lies the left was foolish enough to tell about him on camera. The police accused very publicly in this letter should sue each of the universities, and course individual professors, whose names appear as signatories. Hit these people where it really hurts: their wallets.

Back to the libelous letter.

The gist is that the anxious mathematicians no longer want better mathematicians to do predictive policing.

Why? It’s—did you really not see this coming?—“racist”.

Well, and so it is, if by “racist” you mean these models use race as a input, and that input turns out to be useful in identifying areas of calm and areas of tumult. Which it does: race, that is.

Given the structural racism and brutality in US policing, we do not believe that mathematicians should be collaborating with police departments in this manner. It is simply too easy to create a “scientific” veneer for racism. Please join us in committing to not collaborating with police. It is, at this moment, the very least we can do as a community.

There is no “structural racism” or “brutality” in US policing. There is plenty of brutality in the neighborhoods identified by predictive policing to be dangerous, though. Just as there is a lack of brutality in the areas identified by predictive policing to be calm. Predictive policing works.

In favor of the critique, it’s clear that a lot of what goes in the PP is commonsense. It’s also true, like all models, PP models, and particularly facial recognition models, are not perfectly accurate and should not be used indiscriminately. As long as these models are not used as evidence of guilt in court, but as focused clues for cops during their policing, they are fine and work well.

That’s why these academics are squeaking. They don’t like that predictive policing works. The wrong people are being identified as criminals. Not wrong in misidentifying who is a criminal and who isn’t. Wrong in identifying people it’s no longer politically correct to identify.

The letter, as said, has a lot of signers. The list, probably because of a technical gaffe, has lots of duplicates. Still, it’s sizable, well over a thousand of the usual suspects. Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, University of Michigan. Maybe you’ll recognize some of the names. I don’t, but that’s because many appear to be up-and-comers or PhD students. Which is not good news, because these are the kiddies who will run the shop when whatever are left of the adults take their early retirements.

The letter is getting a lot of press. A popular magazine, once manly now woke, the one that published a method of how to scientifically tear down a statue, covered it using words like “bias” and “racist feedback loops”.

On the other hand, Nature focused on “systemic racism” and “racial biases.”

And so on.

If we had time, we could discuss “Black in AI“, but, mercifully, we do not.

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Categories: Statistics

16 replies »

  1. More and more the thought that humanity has had it springs to mind. Madness is now raging in the land coupled with indifference by the vast majority. Prepare for God’s reaction.

  2. Those publications, Nature, Science, the most prestigious scientific outlets, are so corrupt, nowadays… In more than one way. But very connected: they shun the right kind of people (the same way a university can fire a [tenured] cosmology professor for expressing his conviction that the universe shows God); so, they can’t get around being honest; and, yes, they dance the tune of the moneyed sponsors… and a big, long and fat, ETCETERA. You’re right, Nick Sandman or Albert Pujols, who threatened with a suit the first journalist who insinuated he took steroids; or those very few priests that took the same path, cleared their names and got sweet deals or rulings… If everybody falsely accused ir attacked by these thugs did that, the picture would be different

  3. And next time you found a society, don’t take lightly that devilish men are corrupting your seedbeds, that can’t be tolerated… So universities and mass media have to be deemed matters of existential security, can’t be in the hands of enemies of your culture….

  4. You’ll know the right is taking the culture war seriously when university professors, journalists, and politicians are decorating lamp posts and filling ditches.

  5. The advice to sue is the right advice.

    Far too many on the right (The Mark Levins of the world, who is a lawyer) bellyache and moan and promote their latest book.

    Big deal…

    Sue the bastids is action

  6. Mathematicians for anarchy!!! Wow, talk about dissing and destroying your own field. I’d say they can’t get any stupider, but I’m sure someone would prove that wrong.

    Again, BLAME the parents who PAY to turn their kids into these anarchists. You get what you pay for. With a six to seven figure cost, this is one way to identify the complete idiots we once referred to as parents. (No, they don’t qualify now.) Parents fully support this SJW garbage, so stopping it will be virtually impossible.

    If we would stop with the science and math crap and just go back to policing as in the prehistoric days, cops knew where the trouble was, knew who to watch, etc. It does take more work–models and math are the lazy way out. Plus, they destroy the very entity they claim to help due to politics. There’s no connection between police and those they serve in large cities, destroying one of the most effective policing methods out there, knowing the people you serve. It’s probably too late now. Unless the cops grow a set and STAY HOME NOW, this will not end well at all. Even then, there’s a 50/50 chance that stupid will win out and utter anarchy and destruction of society will win. As it stands currently, it’s 90/10 in favor of a destroyed society.

    Race is just the chosen boogeyman here. We let our society literally go to hell and as such, ANY boogeyman would have done—wealth, political beliefs, job, pacifist, etc. It’s just that race is the most obvious and Americans have always loved easy targets. (Quiz: Did anyone know Megan Markle was “mixed race” before she threw up a banner and shouted it out? See, you just need a little push and voila, race becomes the issue. I had no idea and still don’t care.)

    Michael: I fully believe we have ruined our existence for the next several hundred years. Evil is very hard to overcome. God need not react—the world is created and built with natural consequences that kick in when humans get cocky and reject God. We were warned, but ignored that reality.

  7. It is a remarkably small group of men who have produced the appearance of unstoppable revolution. They did it by targeted infiltration of power levers: finance, media, education, law, et cetera, where a small force can produce a large force, as the ridiculous Oz concocts an appearance of godlike powers. It’s a humbug, and it will collapse, but the damage it can do and is doing is considerable in the meanwhile. So be of good cheer and keep pulling back the curtain, as the salutary example of our esteemed host, and refuse to participate in the fraud, as much as you are able, and don’t forget to laugh and smile and love life and the Risen Christ. The humbugs really hate that.

  8. After destroying the natural law, eventually they must convict and destroy nature itself.

    Forget about any WWIII, I’m convinced that these folks will self-detonate the nukes to save the Earth from its racist self.

  9. Well stated Dean Ericson. Another important power lever that was infiltrated: the Church.

  10. Sheri, I agree very much with what you say, I mean, you speak truth in almost every account (those parents, shame on them)… but, in the last part, you are missing something: nature does have “punishing mechanisms” for those who act against her; but God also intervenes: God destroyed Sodom for beins like a meeting of saints and chaste saint Theresas compared to what we are seeing. He will intervene, but only after this is very well under the natural terrible consequences… God won’t abandon His Church, He promised, it can’t be otherwise. For His honor, not for our sinfulness…

  11. My first political argument was with my father. It was 1972 and Alice Cooper was running for president. Even though I was not old enough to vote I declared that Alice would most likely win because everyone under 30 was bound to vote for him. My father’s only comment was that “I was full of $#!+.” End of discussion. Youth has a higher probability of being delusional because they lack real world experience. With the advance of technology more and more people are being sheltered from real world experience. There are more or more apps to hide behind. Today I volunteered at our community “lunch club.” In a little more than an hour we distributed approximately 1700 meals to people in need for the week. Most will be back next week. We did not require police assistance. Please relay to those mathematicians that the number was verified at 1700 and that they are full of $#!+.

  12. I saw a report saying that Mathematicians are one of the most conservative departments in most universities. They get all the way up to 15% Republican!

  13. [QUOTE]
    Before we continue, it would be good for these falsely accused police to go the route of Nick Sandman, who successfully sued the propaganda outlets that slandered and libeled him.
    [/END QUOTE]

    That bears highlighting.

    We have a VERY limited tool set remaining to push back against this.

    And the only alternative is to all flee to the piney woods which is not an option for large numbers of the innocent. And the USSR had no problem starving the Ukrainian peasants out in the sticks anyway.

    Flinging law suits at the demon addled degenerates sounds like a darn good idea.

  14. Mathematics will fall within two decades, maybe within one. Currently most of what is taught in mathematics classes is actual mathematics. This is largely due to the topic being one that can be presented in a very cut and dry manner, with no need to bring in external concerns. So it is natural for things like politics to never come up.

    That is changing though, since the people who conquered the rest of the academic system will not rest while there is even a single class that does not spew their propaganda. Mathematics will be engulfed more and more by “mathematics and social justice”, “mathematics and sustainability”, “mathematics and race” and other such courses. Many such courses already exist and even the AMS publishes books on such topics. Hell, the AMS even endorsed #ShutDownMath: https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2020/06/06/shutdownmath/#more-2090. I don’t know how much clearer they can make their intentions than that.

  15. Quantum mechanics has done a great service to society by proving that god is throwing dice. Essentially, nothing is a single thing, so lets stop pretending.

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