<story><title>Against predictive optimization</title><url>https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>randomwalker</author><text>OP here. Many people are reacting to the title of the paper. A few thoughts:&lt;p&gt;* The paper is 35 pages long and it&amp;#x27;s hard to convey its message in any single title. We make clear in the text that our point is not that predictive optimization should never be used.&lt;p&gt;* We do want the _default_ to change from predictive optimization being seen as the obvious way to solve certain social problems to being against it until the developer can address certain objections. This is also made clear in the paper.&lt;p&gt;* The title is a nod to a famous book in this area called &amp;quot;Against prediction&amp;quot;. Most people in our primary target audience are familiar with that book, so the title conveys a lot of information to those readers. That&amp;#x27;s one reason we picked it.&lt;p&gt;* Despite its flaws, when might we want to use predictive optimization? Section 4 gets into this in detail.&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reading.</text></comment>
<story><title>Against predictive optimization</title><url>https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bjornsing</author><text>Is the problem really the predictive optimization algorithms themselves, or rather how we think about these problems &amp;#x2F; solutions in the first place?&lt;p&gt;I don’t know, it may just be that I’m getting old (45), but my impression is that there has been a substantial shift in our culture around these issues over my adult lifetime (at least in Sweden where I live). For example, only 20 years ago it was extremely rare that the Swedish police shot anybody, and e.g. holding a knife and being non compliant with police instructions was not considered enough to warrant getting shot. There has been no change to the relevant law AFAIK, but there has been a cultural change where many people now think the police is responsible if such a person suddenly runs away and attacks someone with that knife. And there’s also a constant stream of cases where the police has shot someone essentially for being non compliant (mentally ill, addicts, distraught people and so on).&lt;p&gt;I think in general 20 years ago in Sweden most people in positions of influence were a lot more principled in thinking about these issues, and the principles were the classic ones ironed out by Voltaire et al. Nowadays, not so much… The thinking seems much more primitive.&lt;p&gt;One of those principles was that it was wrong to punish (or take similar action) against someone for what they could potentially do in the future. Another was that each person is (with very few exceptions) morally responsible for their own actions. Pretty good principles in my view.</text></comment>