Based on the visualization the algorithm seems to be:
If you input that you expect to be unemployed for a short/long time, it returns that assumption. Only if you say you don't know...
Immigrant/descendant: High risk of long term unemployment, right away. (Edit: Apparently except non-western immigrants, based on the source code!)
Age is the next check that can classify you as high risk, I didn't look for the threshold (Edit: 56, according to the source). As long as you're below that, the deciding factor is...
How long were you employed out of the past 36 months? 12 months is apparently good. (Edit: <2 is the threshold).
It seems like most of the questions don't seem to be considered (if the visualization is to be believed) and it's a very simple "if x return foo" style algorithm, not some fancy scorer/ML.
> "if x return foo" style algorithm, not some fancy scorer/ML
It's a decision tree. Decision trees falls under ML. The thresholds are learned from data.
I would imagine they had to use a decision tree in order to tell users and case workers _why_ they are at risk.
The algorithm has been heavily criticized for putting basically all non-western immigrants into the "high risc"-group, but if the job market historically hasn't been willing to hire high performing, non-western immigrants, isn't it the whole point of building an algorithm from data? To shed light on this?
Feels like a decision tree is not the kind of algorithm that can solve this problem due to its multidimensional nature. It's very vulnerable to Simpson's paradox.
It may be right most of the time if we lump everyone in the same bag, but that is not helpful at all.
Also, having the self-evaluated unemployment risk the first deciding factor seems to defeat the purpose.
A fixed decision tree isn't machine learning. If the tree can be updated or generated by code, then sure, but a human just writing a decision tree has nothing to do with machine learning.
The interesting thing is that at least the version on this website does NOT put non-Western immigrants into the high risk group. It puts Western immigrants (and descendants) there, and non-Western descendants, but not non-Western immigrants themselves!
> Immigrant/descendant: High risk of long term unemployment, right away. (Edit: Apparently except non-western immigrants, based on the source code!)
The latter part is probably on the basis that non-Western immigrants mostly needed skilled worker visas, whereas descendents and 'Westerners' (which apparently maps to "EU members" in this case) don't. Though as with most of the rest of it I'd struggle to see this as a conclusion from advanced modelling and not just a stereotype kept relevant largely by not asking the descendent or 'Westerner' what type of work they'd been doing and how long they'd worked in Denmark
You've completely misrepresented the statements of that document - it's specifically about refugees, not all "men and woman from non western countries".
Of course refugees are vastly more likely to be unemployed - 2/3 came from the Syrian civil war and there's no guarantee of entering the country with in-demand skills or any understanding of the language.
Germany has 1.24 million refugees, but it has ~14 million first-generation immigrants including over a million Turks. People who immigrated for work and had to apply for visas are going to have completely different employment outcomes than a surge of war refugees.
By law their residency was on the condition of employment or self-employment, so close to 100% by definition. Nowadays they are either naturalized (so no immigrants anymore) or pensioned, or returned back home after their work life ended, or already died. Keep in mind that this immigration wave was 40 to 50 years ago.
And yes, all of this is easily findable public data.
Germany is a bit special here because refugees often are not allowed to work at all, or, depending on their status, are only allowed to work under certain conditions.
This was introduced by the conservative parties as a juridical answer to fears of immigrants "stealing" jobs.
* minimum times, i.e. they don't automatically have rights afterwards, but have to obtain a permission for working first ("Arbeitserlaubnis")
* those minimum times prolong as long as immigrants live in special immigrant housing ("Aufnahmeeinrichtung"), i.e. as long es they don't live in normal housing. Which they can only get if the ministry grants them that (in my town there are still quite a share of syrian immigrants living in that kind of housing, not normal housing in town).
* additionally, even after that, the employer has to show that a) no German of comparable qualification wanted the job, and b) no EU citizen of comparable qualification wanted the job.
Edit:
> that study data was from 2016 onwards... There was enough time..
I'm not sure why you think a statistic applying to a different group (refugees are not all "non-Western immigrants", especially not in Denmark) in a different country in a different direction is particularly relevant.
Actually, scratch that, looking at your account history I can see exactly why...
It seems you've found the algorithm right there. Not only is this algorithm the good old mega-nested-if-test-of-hard-coded-answers for a few of the questions asked. It basically checks if you think you are at risk, then puts you "atRisk" if you are older than 56/about to retire/an immigrant/pregnant.
Sadly; that is probably enough to report relatively correct values.
There is another way to look at it; a student was able to visualize what they wanted with minimal investment in learning secondary tools to their actual field.
Similar issue is often misattributed in other places like game engines aswell. For example Unity is often labeled as lower quality because of the correlation with bad code quality in many of the games made with it, while forgetting that this is precisely because it's so easy to get started with, more new developers choose it
I don't know that it's so sad. If it replaced humans putting their fingers in the air and then pulling an answer out of their ass, it's probably a strong improvement.
HN seems to be fine with race realists and antisemites (just look at the person's recent comment history, they're not the first one I've seen either) as long as they don't go on excessively unhinged rants and resort to slurs. HN is very much trying to be a "marketplace of ideas" with all the faults and warts that come with being a marketplace (e.g. false or misleading advertising).
I think the comment in and of itself is not very substantiated but that's not why I commented. The comment I was replying to is a complete non-sequitur. The top-level comment only mentioned "non western immigrants" in passing by saying that they were _less_ likely to be unemployed. To follow this with ranting about "non-western immigrants" is simply not acting in good faith and not adhering to the site guidelines, especially
>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
"And in a case where the childless husband of a girl who is three years and one day old dies, if his brother, the yavam, engages in intercourse with her, he acquires her as his wife"
"It means that the Torah does not deem the intercourse of one who is less than nine years old to be like the intercourse of one who is at least nine years old, as for a male’s act of intercourse to have the legal status of full-fledged intercourse the minimum age is nine years. And Shmuel says: The Torah does not deem the intercourse of a child who is less than three years old to be like that of one who is three years old."
These are opinions funded in religous law that are followed by religious people.
For these people it is only natural and virtues to follow this.
It's not a personal attack to say that you have a definite horse that you like to speak on ("race", as nebulous and weird as that is). Above you have reframed more or less the same thing as a culture issue, which has been widely discussed and is currently popularly mitigated with education. We can see this works in practice.
What more do you want? Justifications for why people move out of their cultural frame to a different one? Perhaps they value more rights for women (the middle east is out then). Perhaps they enjoy a peaceful environment (again, the middle east is out). There are so, so many reasons someone might move away from their reference frame. Some don't apply to the middle east. Some don't apply to Asia. But they definitely apply to someone, somewhere.
I simply cannot believe you have not thought of this, but to construct this narrative you must ignore these realities for why people flee their own environment in favour of a new (much more uncertain) one.
"I simply cannot believe you have not thought of this, but to construct this narrative you must ignore these realities for why people flee their own environment in favour of a new (much more uncertain) one."
I did not refer race.
I am not ignoring but I am alerting that them may be BETTER served with cultures that conform with their ideologies and aptitudes.
Why create a cultural shock? Why make the person struggle to be accepted?
How many generations for me to be considered "japanese"? Or I would force japanese to me consider one of them?
This isn't a debate. What you're doing is called "sealioning" in online discourse, but you probably already know that. Not that this matters, as I have not "personally attacked" you nor even insinuated you are wrong.
I have pointed out that you are a race realist. That is not a personal attack, that is an allegation of a belief. I'm inferring that from your own comment history about race and IQ, e.g. your statement that "IQ is mostly genetic"[0][1], which you brought up twice in different conversations in your otherwise very short comment history. If "IQ is mostly genetic" and (to paraphrase one of your comments) "favoring high IQ means favoring Asians" that means in your view there is such a thing as a genetic "Asian race" that connotates inherently higher IQ than other "races" purely on a genetic level. That is a race realist claim by any other name.
If you think race realism is correct, why do you object being labelled a race realist? Calling you a race realist was the only claim I made, with no further moral judgement of that category beyond that it's apparently acceptable on HN although I find it unacceptable.
To humor you, as you insist on arguing race realism itself rather than whether you're a race realist (which certainly makes me wonder why you don't want to be labelled as such if you agree with it):
> So you mean Asian as a race does not exists?
That's a strawman. Race realism doesn't just claim that races exist the same way sex realism doesn't just claim sex exists. Race, sex, species, etc are categories we have defined in order to describe and reason about the world around us. They exist the same way other categories exist, i.e. they have definitions (although often ultimately self-referential ones as they are based on abstractions derived from observations of groups of individuals rather than a single reference specimen as with historical definitions for units of weight and such).
What race realism claims is that race is a meaningful category in biology to the degree that it effectively creates sub-categories of humans that are persistent enough to have explanatory function. For example, the claim that IQ is genetic and that different races have different genetic limitations for their maximum IQ is a race realist claim.
Of course this completely ignores that races were not defined based on genetics but on superficial similarities (dark skin, "almond eyes", etc), which is why the actual categories are somewhat in flux depending on which race realist you talk to (not to mention mysticists and occultists like proponents of the Hibernian theory or the Thule Society). Actual biologists nowadays use clines instead of races the same way species taxonomies don't map to Biblical "kinds".
Incidentally, IQ is a hilariously flawed mechanism for demonstrating this as it has been demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to nurture over nature, i.e. you can literally train to have a higher IQ score (without becoming "more intelligent" in any significant way). Additionally, psychological research has shown that test takers who expect to score lower will unconsciously self-sabotage. Of course you'll probably have some Emil Kirkegaard red pill dump at your fingertips to counter this with "facts and logic".
Another problem with race realist claims about IQ is that they conflate heritability in the general sense and genetic heritability. A child born into poverty will likely perform worse socioeconomically than a child born into wealth, but this isn't through a "poverty gene" but the environmental circumstances, including basic things like bad nutrition and lead poisoning but research has shown that even parental stress prior to birth can alter the genetic material that will be passed on to the children, in addition to the effects maternal stress (and other environmental factors affecting the pregnant person) can have on embryonic development.
Knock yourself out, I'm not going to read through your replies. You're a single-issue account derailing every thread you participate in into race realist talking points, which means you're probably a sock puppet of someone too chicken to admit to their beliefs. I wonder why that is. No, wait, I don't.
"Incidentally, IQ is a hilariously flawed mechanism for demonstrating this as it has been demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to nurture over nature"
Nurture has its effects too but still is WAY lower than genetics.
It seems you always avoid to refute science and goes tangent in personal attacks.
I must refer to a study using Twins that were adopted in different families followed by 30 years. [1]
results:
"
Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02]
•
Heritability was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]
•
Parent-offspring correlations for educational attainment polygenic scores show no evidence of adoption placement effect"*
I am really enjoying discussing with you. Thank you
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If you input that you expect to be unemployed for a short/long time, it returns that assumption. Only if you say you don't know...
Immigrant/descendant: High risk of long term unemployment, right away. (Edit: Apparently except non-western immigrants, based on the source code!)
Age is the next check that can classify you as high risk, I didn't look for the threshold (Edit: 56, according to the source). As long as you're below that, the deciding factor is...
How long were you employed out of the past 36 months? 12 months is apparently good. (Edit: <2 is the threshold).
It seems like most of the questions don't seem to be considered (if the visualization is to be believed) and it's a very simple "if x return foo" style algorithm, not some fancy scorer/ML.
Look for function setValues() in https://ledighedsalgoritmen.dk/p5vis.js