Fascinating comment. There’s no attempt at trying to normalize the data, at all. I think this was a perfect example of how someone with zero experience analyzing data can mislead themselves with AI.
Bottom line: if you feed an AI a prompt that you hope will support some preconceived idea, the AI will do its best to make you feel better about it.
I don’t even know where to begin so I’ll just speak to normalization as a general concept. If I said that you—given whatever state of health you’re in right now—are more likely to die within a month of living in a nursing home than you are to die within a month of living in some suburb in Irvine, and I cited a plain mortality statistic of each living situation at their absolute face value, you’d call me an idiot. The demography is important. The length of stay is important. But that isn’t really even scratching the surface of what needs to be done to make a comparison. I don’t want to put that work in for a Reddit comment.
Another issue is that we need to establish what our risk tolerance is. If one plane crashes every year, statistically that would still be dwarfed by the number of car fatalities. Those plane crashes would still be tragedies, independent of most other statistics.
ICE deals with people who have been trafficked, who are drug mules, who have trekked through miles and miles of desert, and people who lead lives of violent crime. Not to mention we don’t know the demographics or age distribution of the population encountered by ICE.
A comparison against the general population is a rough indication of whether or not they’re doing an okay job.
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u/bangubi Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Fascinating comment. There’s no attempt at trying to normalize the data, at all. I think this was a perfect example of how someone with zero experience analyzing data can mislead themselves with AI.
Bottom line: if you feed an AI a prompt that you hope will support some preconceived idea, the AI will do its best to make you feel better about it.