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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Even one fraudulent welfare check is too many. I think we can all agree with that.[/quote]

Yes, no one disagrees with that in theory, but the real question is what is the appropriate ratio of false positives. How many people is it appropriate to incorrectly identify as fraudulent and cancel their payments, when they are actually legit beneficiaries? is the appropriate ratio 1:1 one person incorrectly canceled for every one case of fraud identified? 10 people incorrectly canceled for every case of fraud? Databases with millions of people are never 100% accurate and you need to come up with a reasonable threshold that identifies fraud while minimizing harm to legitimate beneficiaries. For example, a screening tool ithat s 90% accurate at identifying fraudulent payments and 99% accurate at identifying legitimate payments. Assuming a 1% fraud rate,  I will get the following results out of a million beneficiaries. 980,100 people (true negative) 9,900 people (false positive), 1,000 people (false negative), 9,000 people (true positive).[b] Even if my system is highly accurate I still end up impacting many people who did nothing wrong. In this scenario, 52.4% of the people on the suspected fraud list are not actually fraud. [/b] Do we really want to cut all these peoples payments off and cause them to get evicted or die from not being able to afford their medication? We could evaluate this list of people but it would take years to do this in a responsible way that ensures very few people are hurt by this process. [/quote]

Your nuanced explanation with its ethical considerations will be lost on most of this audience. They don't understand that knowledge building  takes place over time. You can't come in with a high IQ (?!?!) and Red Bull and some code and expect to make sense of complex systems in a matter of weeks or months. They want simple systems with simple solutions. Nevermind that they expect their own situation to be appreciated for its complexity.

Btw, thank you for this explanation. [/quote]

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