There's a tendency in the media to 'clean up' the silly things that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez consistently says, to make them sound half rational.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
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Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it is possible to make one that is representatively fair first and foremost, with procedurally fair and utilitarianism at 2nd and 3rd priorities.
But you have to be sure the groups you are equalizing across are fair and valid and comprehensive groups.
I've been advocating for the rights of my own group "left handed 1/64 cherokee Americans with hazel eyes and slighly wavy brown hair" forever and I've been STUNNED at how quick people are to ignore the systemic bias against us. Some other categories of people seem to be doing much better than us, which is only explainable from systemic bias. Unless we are down with being complicit in a "right handed non partially cherokee non slightly wavy brown hair and hazel eyes" supremacist system, our society needs to start addressing this right away.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#43Besides the obvious, this gives me hope that the newly emerging generation of leaders might not be as painfully technologically illiterate as the current generation, and we might finally be able to see intelligent, educated decisions and laws about technology start to appear.
If AOC is an example of this new generation, we're in trouble.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#44Breaker is long-form clickbait. It's an interesting format and I'm curious how they pay for it.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#45Besides the obvious, this gives me hope that the newly emerging generation of leaders might not be as painfully technologically illiterate as the current generation, and we might finally be able to see intelligent, educated decisions and laws about technology start to appear.
If AOC is an example of this new generation, we're in trouble.
Why's that?
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is. But if you're designing an algorithm that assesses credit risk and you do this, you will lose money compared to a company that does not do this.
You might even cause a financial crisis along the lines of the 2008 disaster.
As long as you're too big to fail and get bailed out, it's someone else's problem.
EDIT: I didn't say this was just or right, just the current state.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#47There is no design of AI that can be simultaneously utilitarian, procedurally fair, and representatively fair. I'm going to repeat this again, since many people struggle with this. It is _literally impossible_ to achieve the best utilitarian outcome, the most procedurally fair outcome, and a representatively fair outcome. Anyone designing algorithms will have to make tradeoffs along this frontier. For a far better ar…
The problem here is, we don't even know what "fair" means. What do we mean by fair? Say we want to base fair on group outcomes, in which ways should we divide people into groups in order to perform some sort of balancing? Is hair color or texture a relevant way of subdividing people for instance? Are we being "fair" to red haired people? What if red haired people for some reason seem to be less likely to pay back loa…
> Is hair color or texture a relevant way of subdividing people for instance? Are we being "fair" to red haired people? What if red haired people for some reason seem to be less likely to pay back loans?
Machine learning is going to be very good at identifying proxies for features we don't like, even if we don't directly provide those features. Weighting red hair color could be a proxy for the Irish, targeting hair texture could be a proxy for african americans, targeting zip codes has always been a proxy for race, etc.
If we want machine learning to ignore these kind of things it's probably going to have to be a separately weighted training goal that racial groups and so on need to have equal outcomes in the final results.
That's really what AOC is going for here. The black box will happily learn racist ways to weight things all on its own, we can't just throw up our hands and say oh well, if the algorithm is denying black people for home loans then we just have to accept it.
Because, in the short term, being racist is an effective greedy strategy. It's not your business's problem that, say, black people have higher rates of default (or whatever, example). But it also leads to bad social outcomes in the aggregate, and we've agreed that shouldn't be a factor in home loans. And we have to find a way to make sure that The Algorithm (tm) doesn't just find a way to machine-learn redlining or some other proxy for race or other protected characteristics.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#48The replies on the original tweet are pretty good: https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1087627739861897216
Particularly this reply: https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1087841319219802113 Which shows that the original criticism of AOC was entirely disingenuous anyway.
not really, manipulating it via human intervention, like he is claiming, makes it opposite of "driven by math".
He wants no human intervention in both cases.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#49Besides the obvious, this gives me hope that the newly emerging generation of leaders might not be as painfully technologically illiterate as the current generation, and we might finally be able to see intelligent, educated decisions and laws about technology start to appear.
If AOC is an example of this new generation, we're in trouble.
In terms of tech literacy, which was my point, give this example I think she seems like she's doing quite well, regardless of her personal politics.
Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms
#50The second half of the article that talks about Yudkowsky, rationalists, and Roko's Basilisk is absolute trash and a gross mischaracterization of the actual positions taken. >Yudkowski has for more than a decade pursued the possibility of perfect human reasoning His website is literally called "Less Wrong". It's fundamentally a quest for improvement , not perfection. >His system of coldly logical reason, it turned ou…
> "This is because of the regretful (but understandable) decision to censor discussion of it on Less Wrong, which backfired spectacularly." Can you explain the (understandable) rationale behind Less Wrong censoring discussion of Roko's Basilisk? I've been lead to believe it was censored out of fear that discussing it could somehow inspire its actual creation. Honestly from a distance Less Wrong has always struck me a…
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