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Odd. I replied to this comment, but now my reply is gone. Gonna try again and type up as much as I can remember.
Regardless, an algorithm expecting binary answers will obviously not take para- and extralinguistic cues into account. That extra 50 ms hesitation, the downwards glance and the voice cracking when answering “no” to “has he ever tried to strangle you before?” has a reasonable chance to get picked up by a human, but when reducing it to something that the algorithm can handle, it’s just a simple “no”. Humans are really good at picking up on such cues, even if they aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it, but if said humans are preoccupied with staring into a computer screen in order to input the answers to the questionnaire, then there’s a much higher chance that they’ll miss them too. I honestly only see negatives here.
It’s helpful to have an algorithm that makes you ask the right questions […]
Arguably a piece of paper could solve that problem.
Seriously. 55 victims out of the 98 homicide cases sampled were deemed at negligible or low risk. If a non-algorithm-assisted department presented those numbered I’d expect them to be looking for new jobs real fast.
I think they vastly underestimate how many things Meta tracks besides ad tracking. They’re likely tracking how long you look at a given post in your feed and will use that to rank similar posts higher. They know your location, what wifi network you’re on and will use that to make assumptions based on others on the same network and/or in the same location. They know what times you’re browsing at and can correlate that with what’s trending in the area at those times, etc.
I have no doubt that their algorithm is biased towards all that crap, but these kinds of investigations need to be more informed in order for them to be useful.