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No it is not. At least not with sufficient reliability to be useful. P = 0.5 might be enough to publish if you're working in a particularly "soft" academic field but it don't mean shit in the real world.
Where the hell are you getting p=0.5 from? Do you even know what a p value is? A p value is the probability of observing a result at least as far from the mean by random chance if the null hypothesis (in this case the hypothesis that all demographics commit shoplifting equally) was true. We have a ton of data on shoplifting. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of incidents spanning decades all across the country. The data shows a very clear trend that certain age groups (teens and 20's) and certain races (blacks) commit shoplifting at much higher rates than other ages or groups. This isn't some tiny marginal difference that only shows up on large datasets. We're talking double, triple, quadruple the rates. If you were to calculate a p value for this effect it would be astronomically tiny due to the huge sample size and large effect size.
I do and that's the joke. Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics. ;-)
What I'm suggesting is things like "evasive body language" and "baggy coat on a summer day" are far more indicative of "shoplifting" than any demographic quality, but because people raised in a upper-middle class progressive milieu have an underdeveloped sense of social awareness they are less able to read such signals.
That's not what you said. You said "demographically, no" when asked whether it was possible to reason probabilistically about who was more likely to shoplift. There is a huge difference between saying that behavioral data gives more information than demographic data and saying that demographic data gives no probabilistic information at all. It sounds like you're backtracking here.
No, it's exactly what I said. An unreliable indicator is not a reliable indicator at all.
we my not agree on much, but I agree here. I'm not sure where Isometric is getting his data (he supplies none)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104590/#:~:text=Native%20Americans%20had%20higher%20odds,increased%20the%20risk%20for%20shoplifting.
This is a dead thread months later, but here. Incident reports and shoplifting records from retail firms paint a clear picture.
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It was explicitly asking about probabilistic reasoning, in which case an unreliable indicator is exactly that—an indicator that tells you something, adjusting the probability, but not enough to be confident in a thing.
That contradicts what you said.
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I think the line gets blurry because you often have people using demographics and race as a proxy for behavioral cues, associated with subcultures that cluster around race. If you see a black suburban teenage you've never seen before in your store, it's easy to pile on and associate with them common behaviors you find in that cultural cohort (often criminal and deviant).
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