Based on the visualization the algorithm seems to be:
If you input that you expect to be unemployed for a short/long time, it returns that assumption. Only if you say you don't know...
Immigrant/descendant: High risk of long term unemployment, right away. (Edit: Apparently except non-western immigrants, based on the source code!)
Age is the next check that can classify you as high risk, I didn't look for the threshold (Edit: 56, according to the source). As long as you're below that, the deciding factor is...
How long were you employed out of the past 36 months? 12 months is apparently good. (Edit: <2 is the threshold).
It seems like most of the questions don't seem to be considered (if the visualization is to be believed) and it's a very simple "if x return foo" style algorithm, not some fancy scorer/ML.
> "if x return foo" style algorithm, not some fancy scorer/ML
It's a decision tree. Decision trees falls under ML. The thresholds are learned from data.
I would imagine they had to use a decision tree in order to tell users and case workers _why_ they are at risk.
The algorithm has been heavily criticized for putting basically all non-western immigrants into the "high risc"-group, but if the job market historically hasn't been willing to hire high performing, non-western immigrants, isn't it the whole point of building an algorithm from data? To shed light on this?
Feels like a decision tree is not the kind of algorithm that can solve this problem due to its multidimensional nature. It's very vulnerable to Simpson's paradox.
It may be right most of the time if we lump everyone in the same bag, but that is not helpful at all.
Also, having the self-evaluated unemployment risk the first deciding factor seems to defeat the purpose.
A fixed decision tree isn't machine learning. If the tree can be updated or generated by code, then sure, but a human just writing a decision tree has nothing to do with machine learning.
The interesting thing is that at least the version on this website does NOT put non-Western immigrants into the high risk group. It puts Western immigrants (and descendants) there, and non-Western descendants, but not non-Western immigrants themselves!
> Immigrant/descendant: High risk of long term unemployment, right away. (Edit: Apparently except non-western immigrants, based on the source code!)
The latter part is probably on the basis that non-Western immigrants mostly needed skilled worker visas, whereas descendents and 'Westerners' (which apparently maps to "EU members" in this case) don't. Though as with most of the rest of it I'd struggle to see this as a conclusion from advanced modelling and not just a stereotype kept relevant largely by not asking the descendent or 'Westerner' what type of work they'd been doing and how long they'd worked in Denmark
You've completely misrepresented the statements of that document - it's specifically about refugees, not all "men and woman from non western countries".
Of course refugees are vastly more likely to be unemployed - 2/3 came from the Syrian civil war and there's no guarantee of entering the country with in-demand skills or any understanding of the language.
Germany has 1.24 million refugees, but it has ~14 million first-generation immigrants including over a million Turks. People who immigrated for work and had to apply for visas are going to have completely different employment outcomes than a surge of war refugees.
By law their residency was on the condition of employment or self-employment, so close to 100% by definition. Nowadays they are either naturalized (so no immigrants anymore) or pensioned, or returned back home after their work life ended, or already died. Keep in mind that this immigration wave was 40 to 50 years ago.
And yes, all of this is easily findable public data.
Germany is a bit special here because refugees often are not allowed to work at all, or, depending on their status, are only allowed to work under certain conditions.
This was introduced by the conservative parties as a juridical answer to fears of immigrants "stealing" jobs.
* minimum times, i.e. they don't automatically have rights afterwards, but have to obtain a permission for working first ("Arbeitserlaubnis")
* those minimum times prolong as long as immigrants live in special immigrant housing ("Aufnahmeeinrichtung"), i.e. as long es they don't live in normal housing. Which they can only get if the ministry grants them that (in my town there are still quite a share of syrian immigrants living in that kind of housing, not normal housing in town).
* additionally, even after that, the employer has to show that a) no German of comparable qualification wanted the job, and b) no EU citizen of comparable qualification wanted the job.
Edit:
> that study data was from 2016 onwards... There was enough time..
I'm not sure why you think a statistic applying to a different group (refugees are not all "non-Western immigrants", especially not in Denmark) in a different country in a different direction is particularly relevant.
Actually, scratch that, looking at your account history I can see exactly why...
It seems you've found the algorithm right there. Not only is this algorithm the good old mega-nested-if-test-of-hard-coded-answers for a few of the questions asked. It basically checks if you think you are at risk, then puts you "atRisk" if you are older than 56/about to retire/an immigrant/pregnant.
Sadly; that is probably enough to report relatively correct values.
There is another way to look at it; a student was able to visualize what they wanted with minimal investment in learning secondary tools to their actual field.
Similar issue is often misattributed in other places like game engines aswell. For example Unity is often labeled as lower quality because of the correlation with bad code quality in many of the games made with it, while forgetting that this is precisely because it's so easy to get started with, more new developers choose it
I don't know that it's so sad. If it replaced humans putting their fingers in the air and then pulling an answer out of their ass, it's probably a strong improvement.
HN seems to be fine with race realists and antisemites (just look at the person's recent comment history, they're not the first one I've seen either) as long as they don't go on excessively unhinged rants and resort to slurs. HN is very much trying to be a "marketplace of ideas" with all the faults and warts that come with being a marketplace (e.g. false or misleading advertising).
I think the comment in and of itself is not very substantiated but that's not why I commented. The comment I was replying to is a complete non-sequitur. The top-level comment only mentioned "non western immigrants" in passing by saying that they were _less_ likely to be unemployed. To follow this with ranting about "non-western immigrants" is simply not acting in good faith and not adhering to the site guidelines, especially
>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
"And in a case where the childless husband of a girl who is three years and one day old dies, if his brother, the yavam, engages in intercourse with her, he acquires her as his wife"
"It means that the Torah does not deem the intercourse of one who is less than nine years old to be like the intercourse of one who is at least nine years old, as for a male’s act of intercourse to have the legal status of full-fledged intercourse the minimum age is nine years. And Shmuel says: The Torah does not deem the intercourse of a child who is less than three years old to be like that of one who is three years old."
These are opinions funded in religous law that are followed by religious people.
For these people it is only natural and virtues to follow this.
It's not a personal attack to say that you have a definite horse that you like to speak on ("race", as nebulous and weird as that is). Above you have reframed more or less the same thing as a culture issue, which has been widely discussed and is currently popularly mitigated with education. We can see this works in practice.
What more do you want? Justifications for why people move out of their cultural frame to a different one? Perhaps they value more rights for women (the middle east is out then). Perhaps they enjoy a peaceful environment (again, the middle east is out). There are so, so many reasons someone might move away from their reference frame. Some don't apply to the middle east. Some don't apply to Asia. But they definitely apply to someone, somewhere.
I simply cannot believe you have not thought of this, but to construct this narrative you must ignore these realities for why people flee their own environment in favour of a new (much more uncertain) one.
"I simply cannot believe you have not thought of this, but to construct this narrative you must ignore these realities for why people flee their own environment in favour of a new (much more uncertain) one."
I did not refer race.
I am not ignoring but I am alerting that them may be BETTER served with cultures that conform with their ideologies and aptitudes.
Why create a cultural shock? Why make the person struggle to be accepted?
How many generations for me to be considered "japanese"? Or I would force japanese to me consider one of them?
This isn't a debate. What you're doing is called "sealioning" in online discourse, but you probably already know that. Not that this matters, as I have not "personally attacked" you nor even insinuated you are wrong.
I have pointed out that you are a race realist. That is not a personal attack, that is an allegation of a belief. I'm inferring that from your own comment history about race and IQ, e.g. your statement that "IQ is mostly genetic"[0][1], which you brought up twice in different conversations in your otherwise very short comment history. If "IQ is mostly genetic" and (to paraphrase one of your comments) "favoring high IQ means favoring Asians" that means in your view there is such a thing as a genetic "Asian race" that connotates inherently higher IQ than other "races" purely on a genetic level. That is a race realist claim by any other name.
If you think race realism is correct, why do you object being labelled a race realist? Calling you a race realist was the only claim I made, with no further moral judgement of that category beyond that it's apparently acceptable on HN although I find it unacceptable.
To humor you, as you insist on arguing race realism itself rather than whether you're a race realist (which certainly makes me wonder why you don't want to be labelled as such if you agree with it):
> So you mean Asian as a race does not exists?
That's a strawman. Race realism doesn't just claim that races exist the same way sex realism doesn't just claim sex exists. Race, sex, species, etc are categories we have defined in order to describe and reason about the world around us. They exist the same way other categories exist, i.e. they have definitions (although often ultimately self-referential ones as they are based on abstractions derived from observations of groups of individuals rather than a single reference specimen as with historical definitions for units of weight and such).
What race realism claims is that race is a meaningful category in biology to the degree that it effectively creates sub-categories of humans that are persistent enough to have explanatory function. For example, the claim that IQ is genetic and that different races have different genetic limitations for their maximum IQ is a race realist claim.
Of course this completely ignores that races were not defined based on genetics but on superficial similarities (dark skin, "almond eyes", etc), which is why the actual categories are somewhat in flux depending on which race realist you talk to (not to mention mysticists and occultists like proponents of the Hibernian theory or the Thule Society). Actual biologists nowadays use clines instead of races the same way species taxonomies don't map to Biblical "kinds".
Incidentally, IQ is a hilariously flawed mechanism for demonstrating this as it has been demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to nurture over nature, i.e. you can literally train to have a higher IQ score (without becoming "more intelligent" in any significant way). Additionally, psychological research has shown that test takers who expect to score lower will unconsciously self-sabotage. Of course you'll probably have some Emil Kirkegaard red pill dump at your fingertips to counter this with "facts and logic".
Another problem with race realist claims about IQ is that they conflate heritability in the general sense and genetic heritability. A child born into poverty will likely perform worse socioeconomically than a child born into wealth, but this isn't through a "poverty gene" but the environmental circumstances, including basic things like bad nutrition and lead poisoning but research has shown that even parental stress prior to birth can alter the genetic material that will be passed on to the children, in addition to the effects maternal stress (and other environmental factors affecting the pregnant person) can have on embryonic development.
Knock yourself out, I'm not going to read through your replies. You're a single-issue account derailing every thread you participate in into race realist talking points, which means you're probably a sock puppet of someone too chicken to admit to their beliefs. I wonder why that is. No, wait, I don't.
"Incidentally, IQ is a hilariously flawed mechanism for demonstrating this as it has been demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to nurture over nature"
Nurture has its effects too but still is WAY lower than genetics.
It seems you always avoid to refute science and goes tangent in personal attacks.
I must refer to a study using Twins that were adopted in different families followed by 30 years. [1]
results:
"
Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02]
•
Heritability was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]
•
Parent-offspring correlations for educational attainment polygenic scores show no evidence of adoption placement effect"*
I am really enjoying discussing with you. Thank you
This website is quite terrible on mobile. I don’t know how many times we’ll have to tell people to stop hijacking the scroll position, but I suspect until the end of time…
Also, none of my questions mattered, by virtue of being a western immigrant and expecting to look for a job from 3-6 months I’m somehow at risk of long term unemployment.
>Also, none of my questions mattered, by virtue of being a western immigrant and expecting to look for a job from 3-6 months I’m somehow at risk of long term unemployment.
I wonder if the underlying cause is "having savings and not needing a job to have a comfortable living." May also tie into how easily or not you can get government support. The more desperate you are the more likely you'll settle for any job as quickly as possible.
It would be really great if any javascript binding could be turned off in about:config or it's equivalent in other browsers. It's not really a solution, but would bandaid a lot of bad design which I can't see any legitimate use for (like scroll-hijacking).
I guess you can already overwrite any existing function with your custom non-function with userscripts, but that seems quite hacky and non-portable, since most mobile browsers don't really support extensions (Firefox does, but only a small subsection)
Yeah, I got the same result, too. Really wonder if this algorithm is good for anything. I tried to play "Give me a break, then I'll look for a job and I am certain I'll find something" and it just tells me I've got a high risk for long term unemployment... Ok, whatever.
Certainly it's difficult to imagine someone motivated by accuracy rather than making political points about migrants (and education and desire to work) concluding that what industry people have worked in, the years of experience they have, the level of seniority they've obtained, how much of their previous work is in Denmark, previous salaries they've earned and whether they're willing to take a lower paid job etc are all less important than whether they're non-Western and what their highest level of education is...
Admittedly, it's also the type of model you'd expect someone working back from very limited available data to come up with, but I struggle to believe it's a particularly accurate model
They could well be the few factors that, in aggregate at a population level, give the greatest explanatory power. And which have then been roughly calibrated.
The resulting model can be well be accurate in aggregate for informing policy decision tradeoffs. Just totally irrelevant for an individual's particular circumstances...
Suspect if they're getting more explanatory power from which part of the world their family originated from than any kind of indicator of actual employment history, it's because they either don't have enough usable employment history data or they badly misspecified the employment history indicators. Agree that the macro model they have might nevertheless be relevant to certain policy decisions, but not individual ones.
I doubt it is a real ML algorithm, there is some discussion of the algorithm in the comments, so it seems the one currently in use is very downgraded from an earlier one that had more variables but not quite sure about that part.
In IT it's different. 9/10 software development, DevOps, System/Network/Security Engineering, and so forth jobs I've seen have required just a bachelors degree. Other fields are likely different.
It's not like its impossible to get a job with a bachelor. Almost all companies and institutions will just automaticity look for master graduates, and you might have to educate them about the benefits of getting the same capabilities for a lower pay.
I don't have any statistics on this, but when I studied computer science 20 years ago, nobody stopped at the B.Sc. Depending on the university, it's basically only another year, writing one or two papers, and then a year, either doing the same or the equivalent of a minor, where you're just doing the first year of the B.Sc. in some other field.
One issue you might encounter is that Danish IT companies are obsessed with hiring people with a masters, even if the job doesn't even require a B.Sc. Most of the jobs in the industry could be fulfilled by people from trade-schools or other shorter educations. Companies just seem to have this idea that they need engineers or people with a masters in computer science, even if their product is just some CRUD application.
Things have changed. You can get far with just a bachelors degree, if you are open to working other places than Big Four and corporations with tens of thousands of employees. I have anyway, and I'm only 10 years behind you. If you move into InfoSec the requirements for degrees are even smaller, at the end of the day.
Also how much is a masters degree even worth after a handful of years of relevant experience anyway? Not much...
36,000 DKK. before taxes give or take 2000 is the average starting salary for people fresh from university, in Software Development, System/network engineering, DevOps, Security and those kinds of IT areas. The nerdy stuff.
They might be afraid their algorithms would be too easy to manipulate if you knew all of it's factors. Since testing the all of the possible factors would be cost-prohibitive for most, it's not exactly 1:1 with software development
Maybe I used the wrong wording. There may be legitimate reasons for keeping it vague, because designing tamperproof public metrics for credit approval has huge risks involved, or they may be designed so conservatively that a lot actually qualifying people would now be unable to get a loan. I've personally been bitten by the latter despite making nearly six figures.
Similarily I've not really seen any sites which publish how their anti-spam filters work or what the treshold values are either for similar reasons. They're possible to figure out, but cost a lot more.
Maybe a better solution would be to somehow guarantee that they're consistent with their own rules, and regularly audited so that they're also compliant with the current law?
Me too, not sure if I should be worried or if the algorithm is a bit wonky. I am in my mid-30s, graduated with university degree in a STEM field, and have been continuously employed since I left university but filled it out as if I had just quit. The summary after I entered everything showed the following decision tree:
How quickly do you believe you will get a job: "Don't know" (I've enough savings to carry me a couple of years, no rush)
Origin: "Western immigrant"
Verdict: high risk of long-term unemployment.
If the little summary is to be believed, there are no other important factors. Changing my "Don't know" to 3 months reduced me to "low risk of long-term unemployment". So if I’m not mistaken, the main factor for their estimate for how long you will be unemployed … is your estimate on how long you’ll be unemployed?
It might be a case of the algorithm not being designed for your case. If you work in IT, you most likely only have to deal with the unemployment office is you've been hit by stress and is trying to recover. The unemployment office almost exclusively deal with people who are very reluctant to seek employment or have other issues that might prevent them from functioning in the job market (lack of education, mental issues, health issues, language barriers and so on). That does leave them with some funny interactions when someone outside those categories show up.
A friend of my took a spent month, after getting hit masters degree in CS, finding the right job. That meant that he need to show up at the unemployment office. They where only able to offer him a forklift certification, which he didn't need or want. In the end they just left him alone for a month and he found the job he wanted.
Overall the Danish unemployment office is remarkably bad at finding jobs for people or even help them get better qualifications. There's an entire book written about it (based on one journalists experiences). In the book the only person, that particular office found a job for is one they hired themself.
How far is this demo from the real algorithm ? In the demo it seems they use a very simple decision tree just based on very few criterion (In order : Self-perceived ability to get a job, Origin, Age, Recent employment rate).
Does this simplistic (racist and ageist) model have been derived from real data and is in use, or is it just some kind of propaganda (from CopenHagen University?) and the real model they use is much more complex.
Random forests can be made much bigger and match data quite well provided they are big enough, but the bigger they get the harder they are to explain.
It seems to be the result of analyzing 152.000 unemployment case histories. While the outcome is rather coarse grained I have a feeling it wouldn't be too far of reality for a quick risk assessment.
You can say e.g. the resulting model surfaces 'ageist' rules, but isn't that just a reflection of reality? Jobs chances for the average >56,5yo are indeed pretty slim, and not just in Denmark. Should the model lie about that?
The general problem with all this "algorithmic" (lazy-arse avoidant)
jiggery-pokery is that it entrenches a bunch of extant values. An
"expert system" - what this is - is nothing but the sum of historical
expertise minus the human wisdom lost encoding it.
I know nothing about this particular "algorithm" or how it is used, other than that it was to my knowledge meant for use in job centers - i.e. it applies to someone who is already unemployed and unable to find work on their own for whatever reason (we should not judge, every life is different). In some cases, those on social benefits are also forced to job centers despite their condition, which might negatively affect this crude "algorithm" as well.
In other words, it does not represent the job market or life in Denmark as a whole. With a 2.5% unemployment rate that should be more or less obvious.
Of course our job market has a degree of ageism, sexism and racism (with the rather racist nationalist parties being popular in some regions), unfortunate as it may be. A male, white Dane in their 20s is likely going to have an easier time getting jobs than a female foreigner in their early 30s, where the language barrier, additional paperwork for work visa and non-zero risk of maternity leave (can easily be 50 weeks, which is costly in industries where the standard is full rather than partial salary) may make a small company uncomfortable.
But while I cannot speak for industries I have never worked in, industries that we are familiar with here on HN are fully internationalized and would hire a foreigner in the blink of an eye, and such a person would is unlikely to ever discover a job centers.
> industries that we are familiar with here on HN are fully internationalized and would hire a foreigner in the blink of an eye
Small correction: Foreigners from within the EU. Many of the Danish software companies have contracts with e.g. banks and government organisations, that makes them nervous about taking in people from outside the EU.
It depends very much on the company. It should be easy enough to find someone willing to hire you, but many won't.
> Many of the Danish software companies have contracts with e.g. banks and government organisations, that makes them nervous about taking in people from outside the EU.
I actually meant outside EU. I do not know of any places that would exclude foreigners due to government contracts. I see no lack of foreign hires within fintech and medical, and the usual government contract dumpsters (KMD, Netcompany, that sort) also hire foreigners. I myself work in a place that employs a lot of engineers from India on-site for example, and I know many companies like it.
Foreigners from within EU will have easier paperwork and living situation though.
Maybe it is to bring about it's simplicity, or a sarcastic tounge-in-cheek jab at it. The word "algorithm" doesen't really distinguish it's complexity in any way. It's just a sequence of steps.
Just a fun fact: ~90% people outside academia I ever knew had jobs unrelated to their formal education so the questions about education level and field always seemed pointless to me.
Why isn't anybody trying to fix the system so it would be more efficient at directing people to the jobs they would be actually good and happy at? To me it seems this (using the human resources the optimal way) becomes more and more important nowadays. And I believe the formal education one has completed can only serve as a hint to what the best job for him is and not a direct definition of that.
Dane here. Disclaimer: I can't say I really know much about this, but here is a bit of background info:
STAR is acronym for Styrelsen for Arbejdsmarked og Rekrutering (English: Agency for Labor Market and Recruitment).
They have a note describing the system (in Danish) at [1]. I copy/pasted a few relevant sections to Google Translate at [2].
TL;DR:
Algorithm is a decision tree based on questionnaires and outcomes of about 152000 cases.
The note states a precision of 70% and a recall of 32%.
There is no mention of a split between modelling and test data.
Instead of a specific question that most of the working sector is unfamiliar with, the form goes only by the field of study to guess where you're working
.svg){kind=link}
If you input that you expect to be unemployed for a short/long time, it returns that assumption. Only if you say you don't know...
Immigrant/descendant: High risk of long term unemployment, right away. (Edit: Apparently except non-western immigrants, based on the source code!)
Age is the next check that can classify you as high risk, I didn't look for the threshold (Edit: 56, according to the source). As long as you're below that, the deciding factor is...
How long were you employed out of the past 36 months? 12 months is apparently good. (Edit: <2 is the threshold).
It seems like most of the questions don't seem to be considered (if the visualization is to be believed) and it's a very simple "if x return foo" style algorithm, not some fancy scorer/ML.
Look for function setValues() in https://ledighedsalgoritmen.dk/p5vis.js