101–110 of 388 posts
It’s more clear to me than ever now that the left and the right do not use the word “racist” the same way. The left thinks of racism in terms of outcome and the right thinks of racism in terms of intent. We could benefit from better language around these concepts, and honest dialogue about them too.
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> "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…
Cults don't write about how to avoid being a cult, while the LW crowd has reams of texts and blog posts about how they are purposefully avoiding trying to become a cult.
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> There is no design of AI that can be simultaneously utilitarian, procedurally fair, and representatively fair. AI is just tools of humans. Any system that can be achieved with humans can also be achieved with AI. These AIs take us backwards from our existing human systems in addition to being much harder to correct later. The supermarket theft example in the slides you linked to is a prime example. In what store in…
> Any system that can be achieved with humans can also be achieved with AI. I hope you meant it the other way around.
Don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that discrimination doesn't exist or that we live in a society with no biases. I'm saying there is no valid reason why AI should take us backward in that regard.
Computers are extensions of the will of man. Our AI researchers and developers should ask themselves what kind of society they want to create. Whether they choose to turn a blind eye to discrimination and bias, or choose to actively combat it, then that will determine the result. Civil rights didn't just happen; there were people fighting for it actively. The same has to occur in the digital world if the same result is desired.
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Thinking of racism in terms of the intent is a way to take the issue less seriously, to force the issue into the realm of opinions and beliefs. If the intent of the perpetrator is the deciding factor, then it is always arguable that perpetrator's intent was not specifically racist; perhaps it was driven by a misunderstanding, etc. Since it was informed by misunderstanding, it isn't racist. And so on. It's an old tact…
Racism is discrimination based on race, everything else is not racism.
I thought we got over "the computer is never wrong" fallacy by the end of the 90s. Anyone involved with computing should know GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out.
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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…
The problem is the self-reinforcing, external factors that these algorithms don't take into account. If you feed a ML algorithm crime stats, it will conclude crime is directly correlated to being black, or being a former criminal. But this correlation only exists because of how we've chosen to conduct the policing of black communities and treatment of ex-cons upon release that produced the the training data in the fi…
isn't this how it already works? young males cause a disproportionate amount of insurance claims so they get assessed higher rates. they'll even bump your premiums for driving the performance version of a given car. being a young male, I certainly don't like it, but I'm not sure I would call it unfair.
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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…
Maybe don't split groups on genetics/biology/birth. Also make sure the data you use is not a proxy for the above criteria
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
This is not wrong, but it boils down to "don't make mistakes when optimizing functions". It's offensive because it's coming from someone who has nothing to contribute except "do your job better". It's like saying we have a problem with planes crashing, so engineers have a moral duty to build better planes. As though they weren't trying to build planes that stay in the air already. You can make serious sounding statements, or you can impose fines, or you can randomly pick people to publicly shame, but none of those things are positive contributions to hard problems.
It’s more clear to me than ever now that the left and the right do not use the word “racist” the same way. The left thinks of racism in terms of outcome and the right thinks of racism in terms of intent. We could benefit from better language around these concepts, and honest dialogue about them too.
Thinking of racism in terms of the intent is a way to take the issue less seriously, to force the issue into the realm of opinions and beliefs. If the intent of the perpetrator is the deciding factor, then it is always arguable that perpetrator's intent was not specifically racist; perhaps it was driven by a misunderstanding, etc. Since it was informed by misunderstanding, it isn't racist. And so on. It's an old tact…
Are you saying that this is racism. Most people would define what you outlined as not rascist.
There 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…
This sounds an awful lot like voting impossibility theorems (Arrow's and its generalizations)... are they related?
Arrow's theorem is a more domain specific and elegant proof regarding political properties that can be simultaneously held.