Will pay for real ai programmer/dev analysis for cheating

[Bill Spight]

I come back to this thread because of news from a totally different field in Britain. If you are not British you will perhaps need a bit of background.

I am in sympathy with this post, but I have a somewhat different take on the problem, which I will get to below.

We have a class of workers called sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, the latter predominating by far, I believe. They have a special place in British life. So much so that they were once a stock character in films and novels. They run post offices, sometimes in conjunction with a grocery store, in villages and other small communities, holding a sort of franchise for what used to be the nationalised Royal Mail, which was eventually turned over to the private sector.

{snip}

The typical sub-postie was just like your grannie. The last person you could ever imagine would commit a crime. Also the last kind of person who did actually feature on lists of criminals.

{snip}

But then the new boys with their MBA diplomas took over the Royal Mail, all these sweet old ladies magically turned out to be Moriarty types with skeletons in their cupboards and evil in their hearts. Not one or two but HUNDREDS were arrested because the fancy new computer program the bottom-liners had installed PROVED they were defrauding the new shareholders. For reasons that completely escape me, but at a guess must be something to do with blind, quasi-religious faith in the then new religion of computer programming, they were all found guilty.

I cannot comment on any popular, quasi-religious faith in computer programs, as I learned to program 50 years ago, and find such faith laughable.

As the number of prosecutions began to mount very, very many people nationwide began to voice disbelief. But the prosecutions just kept on coming. The computer program showed more and more fraud, even though most of the apparent fraudsters were now in gaol!

IIUC, both the US and the UK have an adversarial legal system, but for criminal prosecutions prosecutors are supposed to seek justice, but have career incentives to seek successful prosecutions, in most cases. An adversarial legal system leads to motivated reasoning on the part of the lawyers.

A campaign to revisit the evidence was strongly resisted by the Post Office. The algorithm was secret. But the basic stupidity of the prosecutions and the resistance could not be hidden.

The algorithm was secret. How in the hell could you prosecute someone on the basis of a secret algorithm?

The reason the algorithms are secret is that they are considered commercial trade secrets, whose revelation could damage the commercial viability, or at least, profitability of the firms that own them. This is a problem that continues to arise in the US as public functions have been privatized in whole or in part. I was alive at the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism, and I agree that government can be the problem. But the answer is not privatization. IMX, private bureaucracy is worse than public bureaucracy, because to the private bureaucrats we are often the enemy, but the public bureaucrats usually realize that they work for us.

See Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.

Digesting the Post Office news in Britain today, however, I also have to conclude that we are in grave danger of letting our distaste for cheating and fraud make us overlook the far worse risk of allowing the lobotomists and MBAs to run riot.

Hear, hear!

[mhlepore]

John's post is an interesting read (as usual), but I too don't understand convictions with a secret algorithm. Here in The States, the Internal Revenue Service uses algorithms to flag tax filings as suspicious or not. If there is something in your tax filings that gets the attention of the algorithm, it can trigger an audit, and it is then up to the humans to uncover the specific violations.

The traditional literature on the economics of deterrence doesn't really apply to these sub-posties, since they probably could not have foreseen technology being created that would catch them. But in online Go, it has to be on the cheater's mind, so we should be doing what we can to flag cheaters. I just don't know what that is.