Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction

Post by darawk » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

Firstly, I just started listening to EconTalk and it is truly excellent. Even though I don't always agree with the host, he's always thoughtful and willing to listen and seriously consider alternative points of view, and seems to be genuinely interested in understanding the issue he's discussing.

That being said, I took issue with the discussion at the end of this episode regarding Google's ad targeting being used for 'bad' products like payday loans or for-profit online universities. Even though they appeared to be on opposite sides of the issue, neither addressed what seemed to me to be the core point. Which is, why is it better if rich people have to see ads for payday loans too? She seemed to be suggesting that Google's targeting somehow makes this problem worse by focusing these ads on vulnerable people. And while that may be true, if the thing is harmful when sprayed across un-targeted media, why is it so much worse when it's targeted? Just because it gives these people a better ROI on their spend? It just seems like a total red herring issue to me.

I totally agree that things like sentencing or policing using machine learning algorithms will strongly tend to reinforce the status quo. But ad-targeting just doesn't fit into that mould, IMO.

Post by grinnbearit » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 9:10 AM UTC

mcherm wrote: post #9

pliny wrote: post #7

Cathy's use of 'problematic' seems to paper over any need to actually go into an analysis of cost and benefits of using statistics and statistical learning in sentencing, personal banking etc. In the business of making credit decisions (specifically, who to extend credit to, and at what rates), preventing banks from using better information only harms people who would have been the subjects of erroneous decisions in…

> In the business of making credit decisions (specifically, who to extend credit to, and at what rates), preventing banks from using better information only harms people who would have been the subjects of erroneous decisions in their favour I disagree. For instance, in the credit-card business a key factor in the ability of a bank to be successful is the ability to assess the likelihood of a person defaulting on the…

That doesn't makes sense, the only reason race would matter is if we're not using all other available information

For example, imagine if income perfectly explained default rates. Then in that case, the race of the person wouldn't matter at all given income.

P(default | race, income) = P(default | income)

The only time this equality would be false is if race was being used as a proxy for another variable that isn't being collected.

Imagine If incomes were lower for certain races, in that case the algorithm would be biased in favour of those discriminated people, not against them.

P(default | discriminated race, income = X) this article goes into more detail https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...

Re: Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction

Re: Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction