News: A brief and brilliant piece on how crimes are just “youthful mistakes” for white folks

Krista Vernoff tweeted out a list of crimes she personally committed in her youth on Twitter, and how, in EVERY INSTANCE, she was escorted home, chided gently, and given a bottomless series of chances to change her life.

She knows that black people don’t receive these bottomless chances, and asks other white folks to reflect on this, and to change the system. Because: IT NEEDS TO CHANGE.

She wrote the tweets up into a piece for the Washington Post, and I’m sharing because it is worth a read:

Perspective | My list of youthful crimes is long. I survived because I’m white.

When I was 15, I was chased through a shopping mall by police while a store owner shouted, “Stop, thief!” I had thousands of dollars of stolen merchandise on me. I made it to the parking lot and hid between the cars before I was caught, booked, tried, sentenced to six months of probation, and required to see a parole officer weekly.

It is fantastic to read this as a first-person perspective: that may be enough to inspire others who were forgiven for their youthful “mistakes” to act on behalf of others who have not been so fortunate.

Advocacy: Algorithmic Justice League

After reading about all of the biases that can be introduced into AI systems which can have life-and-death influences on real humans in real life, I remembered reading a GREAT interview with the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, who is helping people understand, and hopefully avoid, the dangers of blindly trusting software that may have profound flaws.

Prevent incorrectly trained software from mathwashing bad ideas!

AJL’s website is worth a visit: