Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· John Arnold
And what's the likelihood that you're going to come back for your trial? That should decide, do you need to be detained before you're convicted of the crime, or can you be released back into the community? Meanwhile, we have this cash bail system that's largely based upon, do you have money to post to get out or not? We've worked with a number of states, both Republican and Democratic states, over the years, trying to think about how you align the process with what the goals of society are. This criminal justice reform movement has had its ups and downs. We were one of the very few philanthropies that was looking at it when we got started close to 15 years ago, particularly on the adult side, and then it became a very popular movement. A lot of the people that were coming into it were coming in from a social justice and racial equity perspective. I think one of the things that distinguishes us is we always try to think about, what are all the goals of the system? Here’s the goals of the criminal justice system. First and foremost, you can never lose public safety on it. So any reform you do can't have a trade-off of public safety. But social justice and racial equity are certainly goals in that system. We look at a lot of ideas about how to improve it, and we try to figure out what are the trade-offs that exist, try to quantify them to the extent that we can, try to figure out, are there trade-offs? If you do one thing, it could improve social justice or racial equity, but there could be a trade-off on cost or a trade-off of public safety.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Do you think that the best place to improve things is just that subjective probability that you'll get caught? Using technology especially, is that where we should invest the outsized amount of our time and attention? Because it seems, all it takes is one case of some guy whose probability is low, so you let him go and he commits another really bad violent crime or something, and everyone freaks out and says, shut this down. It's like nuclear. Three Mile Island happens, and then we get no nuclear forever. Does that mean that we should focus our attention on making people more scared that they'll get caught, as the number one lever in this system?
· John Arnold
[00:00:00] S1: I think so. The way you do that in a society where, number one, there's not the public funds at the city level to really significantly increase the number of police. Second is that communities are hesitant to have a lot more police in their neighborhood. It's weird, in that communities don't want to lose the police they have, but you also ask them, they don't want a lot more police coming in, and the status quo bias associated with it. The question is, if you don't have a lot more money and communities don't want a lot more officers just walking around, then what's the solution? I think there’s a lot of interesting technologies that are being developed. There's always this trade-off about security versus surveillance, or security versus privacy. I think this is one where each community has to figure out where they want to be on that spectrum. And different communities are going to choose different equilibriums there. You walk down midtown Manhattan, it might be the most surveyed place in the United States. It's also one of the wealthiest. I've been in the Real-Time Crime Center in Beverly Hills and there’s cameras everywhere and they have drones. Everything's being filmed. So the wealthy communities have decided, "We want this, and we're willing to trade some of our privacy for security." Meanwhile, a lot of the debate happens – the assumption is that low-income people don't want that, and that they want more privacy at the expense of security. I think there’s real questions about that. You see the positive response that people have whenever crime goes down. The privacy that we're willing, as individuals, to give up on the internet in order to get something we like. The rewards of the internet, we're willing to give a lot of our privacy. So I think there is this broad rethink now about this trade-off, and what tools are available and how to use the tools that don't lose the trust of the public and that minimize the chances that people are going to misuse any of these tools.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, John Arnold
[00:00:00] S0: What about education as something upstream of crime? Have you observed or discovered in your work a useful or interesting relationship between those two things? And how do you think about the system of education as well? [00:00:00] S1: The first issue we got involved in was K-12 Ed, because the outcomes there are associated with almost any outcome you could think about that matters, whether it's drug dependency, or economic outcomes, or criminal outcomes. [00:00:00] S0: So the relationship is strong. Better K-12 equals better outcomes. [00:00:00] S1: Yes, there's strong correlation. Then you try to like, okay, is there causation here? If I can improve the educational outcomes, does that change? I think the answer is generally yes. I think the hard part is, how do we improve educational outcomes? That's a question the United States has been struggling with for decades. We've been able to do it a little bit as a society, but we haven't cracked that nut. What's maybe surprising is this is true globally as well. We've worked with a number of charter schools, worked with Teach for America over the years. Almost every country around the world that has a significant K-12 system has come to America to try to figure out what we're doing because they're facing the same challenges on education that we are.
· John Arnold, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Yes, there's strong correlation. Then you try to like, okay, is there causation here? If I can improve the educational outcomes, does that change? I think the answer is generally yes. I think the hard part is, how do we improve educational outcomes? That's a question the United States has been struggling with for decades. We've been able to do it a little bit as a society, but we haven't cracked that nut. What's maybe surprising is this is true globally as well. We've worked with a number of charter schools, worked with Teach for America over the years. Almost every country around the world that has a significant K-12 system has come to America to try to figure out what we're doing because they're facing the same challenges on education that we are. [00:00:00] S0: What makes you most hopeful in that area? I had Joe Liemandt on the show talking about Alpha School last year. That seems young, but extremely promising in some of the early results. I always try to catch myself to not be too overly optimistic about technology solving all of our problems, but it sure does seem like AI could solve a lot of the problems in education, maybe. I'm curious what you think.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, John Arnold
[00:00:00] S0: What makes you most hopeful in that area? I had Joe Liemandt on the show talking about Alpha School last year. That seems young, but extremely promising in some of the early results. I always try to catch myself to not be too overly optimistic about technology solving all of our problems, but it sure does seem like AI could solve a lot of the problems in education, maybe. I'm curious what you think. [00:00:00] S1: I think there's a lot of promise. I think there's promise in Alpha School. What my hesitancy to get too excited about is, we've been hearing this promise from the EdTech industry for 20 years now. We've adopted more and more technology in the classroom over that 20 years, and outcomes have gone down. You talk to any of these providers of an EdTech platform, and they have all this data they're going to show you the remarkable results that they get from their students. Then you step back and you just never see it in the actual data applied in the real world. [00:00:00] S0: Is that like the solar thing, where the AI system is the equivalent of the solar panel? It's getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper, but that's not actually the thing that matters. It's more the rest of the stuff in the system.