Predictive Policing Reinforces and Accelerates Racial Bias

A massive PredPol leak confirms its role in driving racist outcomes, as police departments buy outside validation for the indefensible

When you or I seek out evidence to back up our existing beliefs and ignore the evidence that shows we’re wrong, it’s called “confirmation bias.” It’s a well-understood phenomenon that none of us are immune to, and thoughtful people put a lot of effort into countering it in themselves.

But confirmation bias isn’t always an unconscious process. Consultancies like McKinsey have grown to multibillion-dollar titans by offering powerful people confirmation bias as a service: Pay them enough and they’ll produce a fancy report saying whatever you want to do is the best thing you possibly could do.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#cool-story-pharma-bro

A sizable fraction of the machine learning bubble is driven by this phenomenon. Pay a machine learning company enough money and they’ll produce a statistical model that proves that whatever terrible thing you’re doing is empirical and objective and true. After all, “Math doesn’t lie.”

The best term I’ve heard for this is “empirical facewash.” I learned that term from…