My county's homeless shelter uses an algorithm to pick who gets a bed each night

I volunteered there last month and saw it give priority to someone with a job over a mom with a toddler because of how it weighed "sustainability scores." Has anyone else seen similar cases where these systems miss the human element?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyg141mo ago

It's tough because efficiency has to factor in somewhere when there's only so many beds to go around. The algorithm saw the job holder as more likely to become self-sufficient long term, even if it missed the immediate need of that mom. The real failure is the system creating that algorithm, not the math itself.

daniel_gonzalez1mo agoMost Upvoted

@nancyg14 you hit it with "the real failure is the system." I feel that. As a math guy myself I gotta admit the algorithm is just doing what it was told. It's like when I try to fix my sink with a hammer and then blame the hammer for the leak. The math is dumb but honest. The problem is the people who fed it bad priorities. And yeah efficiency matters when there's limited beds but maybe we should ask why there's limited beds in the first place.

the_rowan1mo ago

Have you noticed how this same thing plays out everywhere, not just in housing? Like when schools rank teachers by test scores, or when insurance companies use some formula to deny claims. The math just crunches numbers, it doesn't see the person behind them. @nancyg14 you're right that fixing the algorithm is just a bandaid. The real problem is we keep shoving all these human problems into systems that were never designed to handle them in the first place. We're so obsessed with measuring things that we forget some things just can't be measured.