Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue • Hacker News Board

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#111

Post by platz » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 6:40 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #35

My only objection to this is a semantic one -- the word "algorithm" is not being well-served here. The correct word for this sort of thing is "heuristic". The concern isn't that algorithms themselves are incorrect, the concern is that the problem they are trying to solve is a heuristic one, not a formal one. Saying "let's write an algorithm to improve search results" is meaningless; "let's design and implement a heur…

talking machines had an episode on the difference between algorithms and models, and how the general public understands the meaning of the word "algorithm". In general these are conflated terms which is hard to be absolutist about, at the very least

The general public (& journalists) use the word 'algorithm' to mean any computerized process that "does things to them", such your facebook news feed, or what a credit agency does.

This is a different meaning from how social scientists use these words.

http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2017/9/22/the-long-vi...

In the episode, he talks about how even something like Principal Components Analysis (PCA), which is something that normally we would call an algorithm, which follows a discrete sequence of steps, can also be thought of as resting on something that resembles a model

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#112

Post by jordigh » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #35

My only objection to this is a semantic one -- the word "algorithm" is not being well-served here. The correct word for this sort of thing is "heuristic". The concern isn't that algorithms themselves are incorrect, the concern is that the problem they are trying to solve is a heuristic one, not a formal one. Saying "let's write an algorithm to improve search results" is meaningless; "let's design and implement a heur…

I don't think there's a correct word here. He's talking about widely differing things and using a vague word to try to relate those things. The correct thing is to reject the relation and treat each of the notions he's talking about (such as web search results, government policy, and economic models) as the distinct things that they are.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#113

Post by Chaebixi » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

gmfawcett wrote: post #78

AlexandrB wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout most of history rules and laws were enforced by a combination of "the letter of the law" and "the spirit of the law". The latter being shorthand for the role of human discretion. Algorithms completely obliterate the latter - increasingly turning previously flexible systems into the equivalent of zero-tolerance-policy schools, where human discretion has no role to play. This is a problem because many laws o…

I write a faulty policy that harms people. I encode it as an algorithm, implement it as a program, and deploy it on a wide scale. Now it's automated and distributed, and it is harming people. Where is the fault --- in the program? in the algorithm? Or in the policy? Where do we fix the problem? IMO, we are quick to blame inanimate constructs, when people and their policies are the source of fault. Vilifying "algorith…

> Vilifying "algorithms" only serves to distract from root causes.

But that's the goal of some actors. They want to misdirect attention and responsibility away from themselves when their creations misbehave.

The root cause is no-one is really at the wheel once the algorithm goes into production to provide human discretion. For instance, pretty much the entire consumer facing apparatus of Google and Facebook consists of "algorithms" and there's no one empowered to call when they go wrong. Fixing that would cost money that the tech giants don't want to spend.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#114

Post by PeterisP » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

noxToken wrote: post #90

andrewla wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. A (bad) heuristic for search results might be "rank the documents by the total number of occurrences of each search term in that document". That's not an algorithm -- that's a desired result. Similar to how "sorting a list" is a description of a class of algorithms; it gives no description of how a machine can accomplish that goal. The difference between the heuristic above and "sort a list" is that…

> "rank the documents by the total number of occurrences of each search term in that document" I fail to see how this is not an algorithm. The heuristic (rank search results from most to least relevant) is backed by an algorithm (find occurrence of word, sort document based on occurrences). I like to approximate the two by thinking of heuristics as an approach to solving a given problem while algorithms are actions t…

There's an algorithm to rank the documents by an arbitrary metric. And there's an algorithm to calculate the number of occurrences of each search term in that document.

However, those are insignificant implementation details - all the logic (and all the good and bad results) comes from the arbitrary decision to use the number of occurrences as meaningful for measuring the relevance, from the choice of heuristic.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#115

Post by cujic9 » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

packetslave wrote: post #105

sukilot wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O'Reilly's in an interesting story. He became fabulously wealth by selling partly/mostly closed-source books about open-source software, in the short time-window when opens source existed while it was also possible to make money selling books (before Internet samizdat became cheap as free)

WTF is a "closed-source book"?

The opposite of an open source book.

I'd assume the parent is thinking of something like the "Pro Git" book, available on Github as code and licensed under creative commons. https://github.com/progit/progit2

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#116

Post by PeterisP » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 6:57 PM UTC

gmfawcett wrote: post #78

AlexandrB wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout most of history rules and laws were enforced by a combination of "the letter of the law" and "the spirit of the law". The latter being shorthand for the role of human discretion. Algorithms completely obliterate the latter - increasingly turning previously flexible systems into the equivalent of zero-tolerance-policy schools, where human discretion has no role to play. This is a problem because many laws o…

I write a faulty policy that harms people. I encode it as an algorithm, implement it as a program, and deploy it on a wide scale. Now it's automated and distributed, and it is harming people. Where is the fault --- in the program? in the algorithm? Or in the policy? Where do we fix the problem? IMO, we are quick to blame inanimate constructs, when people and their policies are the source of fault. Vilifying "algorith…

The point seems to be that is you limit your policy to something that can be reasonably be encoded as an algorithm and implemented as a program then you're by definition limited to write faulty policies that can't be flexible enough and will harm people.

I.e., that if you're choosing to use an algorithm for your policy, then this means that you will write harmful policies, and the choice to use an algorithm at all, any algorithm, is morally flawed and should be vilified - to motivate you and others to write policies that include appropriate flexibility, arbitration, human evaluation, overrides and thus can't be implemented as a scalable algorithm/program. Well, not unless we get superhuman general AI systems.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#117

Post by dbingham » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:02 PM UTC

zghst wrote: post #11

"why capitalism is like a rogue AI" These people seriously need to take a step back. At some point you cross the bridge between reporting and actively advertising someone's personal views. I can't ever trust or read people who constantly try to push an agenda, it's disingenuous. Even more so, when reporting, engaging in personal exchange without the discussing data and statistics, i.e. the facts, you are just allowin…

Everyone had an agenda of some kind. Whether conscious or unconscious everyone has their own opinions and belief systems which color their perceptions of the world. That includes their perceptions of hard data. There's no such thing as objective reporting -- it's simply not possible for humans to remove their own opinions and feelings from their perception of an event or an issue and report on it in an unbiased way. No matter how hard they may try, their bias will slip in.

This is why I prefer intentional debate as a way of understanding the world rather than poor attempts at "objective" reporting. I always feel far more informed about a topic after I've listened to people with opposing agendas duke it out on an intellectual stage than I do when I've read a supposedly "neutral" article by someone either masking feelings on the topic or who doesn't care about it much. Intelligence Squared US is fantastic for this and I really wish there were more outlets like them.

With that in mind, if you think this article has an agenda, then -- instead of complaining about it -- go find one with the opposite agenda and read that. Then compare their points and arguments.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#118

Post by rsync » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:03 PM UTC

mathgenius wrote: post #13

The financial system is a giant message passing algorithm. It is pretty much just a min-sum algorithm [1] whose sole purpose is to answer the question "what should we do?". Anyone who has played around with these algorithms for solving decoding problems knows that they are fabulously powerful. But these message passing algorithms have two weaknesses: (A) When there is more than one solution (B) When there are small l…

"(B) When there are small loops in the message network"

Can you elaborate a real-world example of this for the layperson ? 50k foot view is fine :)

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#119

Post by smallnamespace » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #112

andrewla wrote: post #35

My only objection to this is a semantic one -- the word "algorithm" is not being well-served here. The correct word for this sort of thing is "heuristic". The concern isn't that algorithms themselves are incorrect, the concern is that the problem they are trying to solve is a heuristic one, not a formal one. Saying "let's write an algorithm to improve search results" is meaningless; "let's design and implement a heur…

I don't think there's a correct word here. He's talking about widely differing things and using a vague word to try to relate those things. The correct thing is to reject the relation and treat each of the notions he's talking about (such as web search results, government policy, and economic models) as the distinct things that they are.

We already have a great word that exactly describes our approach to capitalism though: ideology.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#120

Post by rsync » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:10 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #50

mfoy_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An "algorithm" is simply a way to do a thing based on a set of rules to be followed... of course it's ambiguous. Getting scared of anything that generic is silly. Might as well fear the outside because anything can happen out there!

Throughout most of history rules and laws were enforced by a combination of "the letter of the law" and "the spirit of the law". The latter being shorthand for the role of human discretion. Algorithms completely obliterate the latter - increasingly turning previously flexible systems into the equivalent of zero-tolerance-policy schools, where human discretion has no role to play. This is a problem because many laws o…

"Now imagine this kind of algorithmic enforcement applied to traffic laws"

We already have this in the form of red light cameras which have been shown to cause rear-end accidents at traffic lights:

"There have been concerns that red light cameras scare drivers (who want to avoid a ticket) into more sudden stops, which may increase the risk of rear-end collisions."[1]

"the authors of the study found a statistically significant, but still smaller, reduction in angle and turning injury crashes by 15 percent, as well as 'a statistically significant increase of 22 percent in rear-end injury collisions."[2]

In short, there situations where the humans involved would all agree on what a "correct" driving response would be, but the presence of the algorithm (the camera, the ticket, the court, etc.) forces another action - and sometimes that action can be bewildering to other participants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera

[2] http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/study-red-light-cameras-ineffec...