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[return to "Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings"]
1. koheri+9e[view] [source] 2020-06-22 19:35:24
>>pseudo+(OP)
This doesn't seem to make sense. By more accurately predicting where crimes will occur, the police departments can reduce the amount of patrols needed.
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2. uoaei+sf[view] [source] 2020-06-22 19:39:44
>>koheri+9e
I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.
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3. chriss+Zj[view] [source] 2020-06-22 19:54:32
>>uoaei+sf
> I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.

This is fiction.

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4. munk-a+Hy[view] [source] 2020-06-22 20:49:01
>>chriss+Zj
Fiction is a really powerful tool that can be used to warn us of societal dangers while sparing us actually needing to live through them.

It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen.

Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)

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5. chriss+Jz[view] [source] 2020-06-22 20:54:02
>>munk-a+Hy
It's literally just made up in someone's head. It's a hypothesis without an experiment. You can hypothesise anything and everything.

If I similarly just made up a book where police surveillance was the best thing in the world would you cite that as an argument in favour?

How can you use a made up story to argue something when someone else could make up another story that disproves your point and proves theirs?

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6. uoaei+Y11[view] [source] 2020-06-22 23:37:32
>>chriss+Jz
All theory is made up until we have a practical example to compare against.

Using the logic you've already employed, one could conclude that the entire anthology of philosophical texts also have zero bearing on reality because "they're all made up".

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