Ideas From The Seminar: Generalizations

January’s Insight Seminar was a lot of fun for me (and, I hope, for the participants). During the sessions, we would get into various discussions about some of the concepts and ideas we are exploring. Even relatively simple ideas like generalization can generate some interesting ideas. One such idea was the idea that governments, by necessity, are generalists. That is, at the governmental level, things tend to be handled in terms of “big numbers” as opposed to dealing with individuals. There are a number of implications of this phenomenon, and I recently found one particular article that serves as a good example of the difference between thinking generally and thinking in terms of specific individuals.

Check it out here.

To sum up, the article talks about government efforts to use “crime prediction software” to determine the level of supervision a particular prisoner should have upon probation or parole. By analyzing the prisoner’s environment, history, and other factors the crime-prediction software creates a statistical probability of that person committing a crime.

From the government’s general perspective, this is a great idea—it saves time and expenses by allowing parole officers to focus on the more likely cases of criminal relapse. It is easy to see how a government would love such a system. From the perspective of an individual, however, this can represent a terrible system, as an individual is being judged, not by the type of person he or she is, nor by the actions that person takes, but by environmental and social factors that may be outside of his or her control. Thus, the system becomes, from the perspective of an individual, an example of profiling which demeans the individual by taking the sentence the government has required and adding conditions to it on the word of a computer.

Ultimately, questions regarding the appropriateness of such software focus on finding a balance between the government’s need to manage by numbers (where all citizens are, by necessity, regarded as statistics), and the need to maintain the dignity of the individual. At the heart of this debate is a very simple concept: generalizations are generally true (but by no means universal in application). This is the major struggle we see in many debates about policy—to make governing easier for the government, or to make life more free for the governed.