> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?
No? He dunks on Shirley. His point is that professional investigators found and documented much worse things.
Except for the part where when asked for proof he laughed off the idea of using convictions as a measure of accuracy.
My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.
From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.
But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.
A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.
The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.
It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.
My ultimate take on the article is "so what?"
Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article.
I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't.
If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower standard of evidence before taking action.
Is there something I'm missing?
There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.
The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.
A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.
But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
> If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity
This is not a fair or reasonable conclusion from what the article actually says.
That's what I'm getting from this article too. It's giving "Nick Shirley in the style of lots of extra words".
Did you read the actual report? The part about how a single investigator didn't like how some daycares were run, the level of supervision, and then used that to extrapolate a hypothetical invalidation of all payments to those facilities as "fraudulent"?
Democrats have rationalized much worse things than this, for example the ethnic cleansing (genocide) in Gaza. So with all due respect frankly I'm not at all assuaged by your caveat.
[flagged]
> (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!)
Minor point: I'm pretty sure that HN comments cannot be deleted/edited after about an hour. Very different from most web forums in this regard, and worth keeping in mind when digging into past discussions! Maybe the rules are different for a superuser like tptacek here with lots of karma, but I doubt it.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Nobody can go back and delete comments the way that person is claiming. What a weird thing for him to have said.
I can't help but notice that said other person's profile claims "out of here"; and before this thread, had not commented since October 2024 — in that case also to get in an extended political argument with you specifically. That's quite a grudge to hold.
Two hours, I believe. But they can't be deleted if they have been replied to.
As if: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916838
What if this article is just the rationalist version of the Nick Shirley hit piece?