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Green Card Lottery Judgment Favors Mathematical Randomness
guusbosman writes "Yesterday a district court in Washington, D.C. issued its ruling in a case that boiled down to the definition of 'strictly random.' In the 2011 drawing of the U.S. 'Green Card Lottery,' a computer programming error was made and two weeks after the official drawing of the lottery the Department of State closed the website and voided the results. A lawsuit sought an injunction claiming that, while the process was not mathematically random, it was random in the dictionary definition of 'without definite aim, direction, rule or method.' The court, analyzing language from the State Department's regulations, and examples from laws on casinos and the like, rejected that and came out in favor of a mathematical definition of randomness. The lottery is voided and the results of the new drawing came out today at noon EST."
Sometimes xkcd is pretty relevant
The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case. For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.
Anybody else remember the Green Card Lottery Spam all over USENET. Good times. Canter & Siegel...
This year they also added a CAPTCHA after you've signed in for the results.
So I had a little OMG moment today before the usual let down.
My wife and I have applied every year for the last 9 or so (since they went to internet based registrations). It's always been the same, nothing has changed until now.
In hindsight, since I never applied in the first two weeks I was probably wasting my time all those years which is a bit of a bummer.
I probably should have just went over on an H1-B. It always seemed a bit like indentured servitude tho..
// $gets_green_card = ( rand()/rand_max() < $green_cards_to_give_away / $total_applicants ? true : false); //randomly choose applicant //choose from an array!
$gets_green_card = ( in_array($applicant_name, $array_of_my_friends_to_give_green_cards) ? true : false);
That sort of programming error? what sort of error are we talking about here?
So your statement that Asians "have the greatest intelligence on average of any race" shows that you're not racist. Now that's a solid argument.
measurement of the decay of atoms in a radioactive mass.been around for years. we know it will happen, just not when, and th
However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes.
Quite true. However, there are credible biologists who will simply state that human mental performance is divorced from race. The last time I checked, it was all of them. No credible geneticist believes that mental performance is tied to race.
Please, please cite your legitimate sources that say that Asian genes are superior. I assure you, I am in the process of digging up my own.
You are a racist.
The problem was that the buggy algorithm only randomly selected entries that were submitted during the first two days that the submission system was open. The law specifies that entries are to be selected "in a random order," which implies (at least to the judge) that all of the entries must be shuffled in, and given equal probability of being chosen.
For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.
Well this is surely a weighted claim if I've ever heard one. Just think about this for a moment.
Scenario 1: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it arson. Arson being a crime, the police investigate, find a suspect, put them on trial, and the expert is presented as a witness explaining why they think it is arson.
Scenario 2: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it accidental. Accidents are not crimes. There is no investigation, no suspect, and no trial for the expert to sit at and say it was not arson.
So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?
Should I be warming up the ovens for those aphasic scum?
Arbitrary does not imply 'chance' so much as 'human discretion'. The sense of random described is in line with the larger use of the word. 'Random' is a cognate of 'run' and its use in probabilities refers to the idea of making a rushed choice. (In which cases, using a badly-cobbled together computer program seems oddly appropriate.)
The problem stated was that "The algorithm that was used only looked at submissions of the first 2 days." I am not sure exactly what they think they mean by "scientific randomness"--obviously, many things in science described as random are not equally weighted. As long as the choice from the first 2 days was itself random, it would still be correct to call it a random choice.
But choosing from the first two days is really the sort of thing that will bias your sample in certain ways--you'll find that people who signed up in the first two days were all avid internet users, for example.
Personally, I do not understand why we would want to admit random people for citizenship in the first case. How about admitting the most educated, or the most hard working? Is the goal of the immigration system to give foreigners a fun casino game they can play, or is it to connect people who will improve our society with the opportunity to participate in it?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
You are a racist. You identify traits by race and use them to judge all of those people. There is no justifications you can add that will invalidate that racism. If you really believed in genetics, you would be interested in letting in "brown people" who passed some tests. That way we'd get the best genetics from all. But you are just a bigot who claims genetics without racism without understanding genetics or racism.
Learn to love Alaska
A racist is someone who judges a class of people by race, whether correct or not.
Learn to love Alaska
I think he's talking about Cameron Todd Willingham. The case involved a house burning down with kids inside. The mother was shopping, the father escaped alone with burns.
After the man was executed, Gov. Perry stalled the commission tasked with looking into whether the fire marshall investigating the arson had done his job properly (going so far as to restaff it when the first set of handpicked people started to look like they might not give him the answer he wanted).
The final outcome of the final commission with Gov. Perry's best hand-picked cronies was that the arson investigator used outdated techniques and terribly bad science. The commission was disbanded without considering what conclusions would have been reached by applying modern techniques to the evidence.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If labor is to be restricted from freely leaving one country and coming to another, then so too should capital be restricted. If I cannot walk across the border and sell my labor where it is more highly valued, why should the business tycoon on the other side of the line be allowed to set up a factory in my country and exploit my lower standard of living and lower wages? You cannot have an ethical and just system where only one form of immigration is allowed to be effectively infinite and the other is not. The restrictions on capital moving between borders should be similar to the movement of labor. I'd prefer this to be accomplished by loosening the restrictions on the movement of labor, not by restricting capital flow. Letting capital walk the earth freely while we keep workers chained to their place of birth is one of the primary tools of the capitalist elite ruling class and the Global North countries to maintain their hegemony over all peoples. It is directly opposed to the principles of self-determination and progressive philosophy.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.
And which language should that be, being as there is no official one.
How good is your Spanish by the way? Italian? Polish? I could go on :)
Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.
Ah, but you are so wrong. Try a google search on "entropy gathering". There are well known ways to generate truly random sequences without any "special" hardware, using environmental noise collected from device drivers and other sources. There are Linux distros whose /dev/random implementations use these techniques. On other Unixen the EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) provides random sequences in a similar way.
See the Wikipedia article on /dev/random for more info.
http://www.random.org/randomness/ has a useful discussion of pseudo-random (program generated) versus "true" (aka physically generated) random numbers.
If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything.
Well, for starters, there are objections to your premise.
Then the second problem is your assumption that physical laws "govern" how objects interact. We don't have to accept that assumption; we can assume instead that physics is a collection of predictive theories about the world, which we accept because they meet some statistical criteria.
The experiments that support your typical physical theory don't produce the exact numbers that the theories' equations predict. We don't reject the theories because of this; rather, we use statistical tests to see how well the numbers fit the theory if we assume that they are the result of random deviations from the prediction.
In this case, then, we can support a deterministic physical theory without having to conclude that the world must be nonrandom, because we cannot prove that the deviations that we observe from the theory are deterministic. Such a proof would require yet another theory to predict the deviations, and the experiments to support that second theory would in turn have the same random deviation from our predictions.
Are you adequate?
A judgment is a subjective thing; a matter of opinion. A study that determines something factual is not subjective. Therefore, if your metric for saying something is racist requires that it be a subjective judgment, a study confirming something about a racial class that differentiates it from another racial class isn't racist.
It still is. If black people are taller on average than whites, then assuming a black person would be taller than a white person when you've seen neither is racism. It doesn't matter if it's true or pejorative.
"Racist" is almost universally agreed to mean something that is a pejorative based on racial classification.
And prejudice indicates a pejorative prejudgment. However, neither require negative connotations to be correct, and there is no other word for either that doesn't also indicate pejorative. As such, without a replacement word, they retain both the original non-pejorative as well as the current pejorative because there is no other option.
Learn to love Alaska
Because he would investigate every scene, and ALWAYS say it was arson. Because there was no statistical or numerical way to show if a particular burnt patch ACTUALLY was arson, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the supreme court bitchslapped it down, after the state of Texas murdered the man, and they released several other prisoners sent to prison for the same reason.
Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random".
Perhaps very bad, or at least ignorant computer programmers think this. The good ones know about things such as "hardware random number generators", which generate random random numbers using thermal noise, which is random at the quantum level. These are built into many chipsets, and are hardly considered exotic. I've got one myself in a cheap VIA motherboard. QM could be wrong of course, anything in science can be. If you think you can predict thermal noise, or some other quantum phenomenon, I guarantee there's a nobel prize in it for you if you're correct. If you're really holding out for that without any evidence to support it, then the conversation is essentially over.
We can possibly debate on whether other sources of randomness (keyboard timings, network latency packets, etc) are truly unpredictable. That's not something I have any special knowledge of. But you're quite wrong if you think that nothing is truly random. Our current theories about how the universe works would say that the lowest level of everything IS random and unpredictable.
AccountKiller
This wasn't a TV call-in prize, it was an act of Congress that allowed 50,000 visas awarded randomly among ALL applicants. Hence the Supreme Court decision, which was only concerned with following the law.
When election results are screwed up, they do a recount, they don't feel bad for the guy they mistakenly declared the winner and give him an extra position. Sometimes it sucks, but the law just isn't about making people feel better...
That's because he has nothing to support it with.
"Allowing both groups" presents the following problems:
#1 - it is unfair to allow one group (the ones who were in the "heightened chance" of the faulty selection process) to have more than one chance to get in.
#2 - it is unfair to deny another group (the ones from the other 28 days' worth of submissions) an EQUAL chance at selection.
#3 - it is unfair to those from other years, who were each given EQUAL chances in each year, to provide a different standard for this year only.
#4 - it is unfair to the US to insist that, because of an error that was caught soon enough to rectify it before any serious harm was done, they should accept double the "winners" from this year (which would undoubtedly lead to a LOWER CHANCE for applicants in subsequent years as they then played catch-up).
#5 - it is unfair to allow there to be two groups of "winners", one set of which had a "random selection" chance from 1/15 of the total pool, the other set of which had a "random selection" chance from 14/15 of the total pool. One group clearly had a higher chance of selection than the others.
So, he has no rational basis to stand on.
People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed. If you were white and grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, you might get into your head that blacks have a proclivity towards crime, because many of them commit crimes there. However, this would be subject to selective attention, because in fact many of the whites and many people of every other ethnic group are also commiting crimes there. I'm not even trying to be politically correct here. The fact is that the vast majority of negative things that people attribute to blacks (in particular, but also various latin groups as well here in the US) are NOT a function of race but instead a function of SOCIAL CLASS. (Or perhaps other related things like socioeconomic status, etc.) Even if there is some effect of race on behavior (although what it is is probably 100% neutral), it is FAR overshadowed by the effects of class. The main differences between lower-class blacks and lower-class whites (e.g. trailor trash) are minor cultural things that have only superficial effects on their lack of social graces, education, values, and other things (as they are perceived by people of middle and upper classes). Now, it may be, due to residual effects of slavery or any number of other reasons, that a greater proportion of blacks in the US are lower class, but there ARE plenty of upper-class blacks, and they're no different from the upper-class whites. Dave Chappelle even did a show on this, where each ethic group got to recruit people, and the whites wanted Tiger Woods, and the blacks wanted Eminem. Being "black", culturally and dialectically, is so much a function of where and how you grew up that any effects of race (insofar as there is any such thing) completely disappear into the statistical noise.
I was reading somewhere about the IQ differences between caucasians, Africans, and Asians. IIRC, Asians tested slightly high, Africans slightly low, and caucasians in the middle. However, the variance was HUGE compared to the differences in mean. The overlap between races was far greater than the differences. It's hard to infer anything useful from these minor differences. However, the fact that one average may be slightly different from the other MAY indicate some differences due to genetics, but we have to keep in mind that (at the risk again of sounding P.C.) no one race is superior, but in fact, we're all superior in the context of how we are adapted to the environment we evolved in. There are some differences in environment between sub-saharan Africa and northern Europe, with the most obvious thing being skin tone. More sun requires more protection against UV rays, or else you get skin cancer. Less sun requires less protection against UV, or else you'll suffer vitamin D deficiencies, which lead to birth defects, among other things. Well, sun isn't the only environmental difference, and there are of course random mutations that differ between geographically divergent groups, or else natural selection couldn't have selected for skin color in the first place. One thing I have noticed, subject of course to observation bias, is that although I am white, I have a _slightly_ easier time connecting socially with blacks, particularly strangers. (Of course, there could just as well be something I'M doing that might explain this better than race or culture or whatever.) But in fact, sociologists have documented studies of low-IQ children and found that while a 70 IQ white kid will typically be socially retarded, a 70 IQ black kid will be socially normal. (I don't recall if the number they mentioned was actually 70, but you get the idea.) Among other things, there may be some suggestion that Africans have evolved slightly superior social intelligence. IQ doesn't measure social intelligence, and the human brain has tradeoffs, where all of our talents must fit within some total capacity. If some capability is greater, then generally some other capability is reduced. Personality theories like Myers-Briggs at
Well, I see I'm a little late to the party that ShooterNeo (ugh) is throwing here... and I think someone has always pointed out the idiocy of the idea of the US being made of "good genes" that will get diluted if we let "brown people" in (after all, the US as we think of it today is a result of years of immigration/contribbutions by those very same brown/yellow/whatevs people)... and anyone who has studied the history of the IQ test knows that it is a culturally biased clusterf*ck... so I guess the real question is:
What kinda combo mod does this merit?
-1 Flameracist? -1 Racistbait?
People wait an awful long time for this, sure, but they often start making plans as soon as they find out that they won. They want to come here, badly. Badly enough to take new pictures and jump through the sumbissions process each year. Within a few days, people are making arrangements, buying plane tickets, giving things away...
Don't discount how much this sucked for those who had their yes turned into a no.
Granted, I talked with someone who was worried that now her brother was going to come to the states. With the results invalidated, she's probably privately thrilled.
Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.
The right solution has nothing to with math and everything to do with keeping our promises.
The right solution would be to honor the results of the first lottery run and then run the lottery again to give everyone else a fair chance. The people who were told they won the lottery didn't do anything wrong - we lied to them. We need to honor our word, not pawn off the responsibility by blaming "computer error."
Many of the people who received notification of winning the lottery made irrevocable changes like selling off property, turning down other opportunityes, even going into debt in order to meet the financial requirements to emigrate to the USA. Leaving them to twist in the wind because of mistake we made is disgraceful.
That ought to be the real story here. If there is one thing nerds and geeks are, it is literalists. We sent those people letters that told them they had qualified for the immigration process, if we said it and then we meant it, end of story.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.