191–200 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.
Is a robot arm that kills anyone who stands near it a murderer?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are Asians underrepresented at Harvard? Or if you’re referring to something else, can you elobarate?
As I understand it, Asians are "underrepresented" at Harvard relative to what they would be if Harvard judged candidates based on SAT scores, scholastic achievement, and other seemingly-objective-and-reasonably-sensible metrics. They're "underrepresented" relative to the pool of candidates who are qualified to be at Harvard. But they are "overrepresented" compared to the general population of the United States. Which…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the neoreactionary bit. I literally paused on that in total surprise. As a long-time LW lurker - yes, the rationalist community plays with plenty of non-mainstream ideas and try to work them in both directions (up from first principles, and towards extreme conclusions). But characterizing rationalists as equal to neoreactionaries? That's a complete mischaracterization of the community.
If you don't see the NRs in the rationalist community, you're not looking. Ultimately I agree that they're not equal; I think many people involved in LW or SSC are good-faith rationalists. But there's also a strong segment that has adopted - post hoc - a crazy set of priors to support NR views. What strikes me is how antithetical this post-hoc "pick your priors, any priors!" is to the rationalist ideal, but it doesn'…
I'll grant something the first half of the first statement: sure, the values encoded into algorithms are not necessarily the values we want them to have ('right'). We want and need to do better at modeling our values.
Even the 'or even rational' part has some merit, some of the time. Like when our models don't reflect reality accurately enough to make helpful predictions about what to expect. Sure, the models are still rational -- but flawed.
But the last sentence is self-comforting intellectual garbage. It's a way to say "don't bother with the hard work of knowing things". It's a gateway for denial. It's saying "if the facts don't line up with what you want, that's ok, sometimes logic doesn't work".
Rationality is precisely what it is cracked up to be: the work of aligning your expectations with reality. It is only as useful as its practitioners are good at it. If you want to summarily write it off as 'considered harmful' then that's your choice. You can deal with the consequences of running headlong into your misunderstandings when they happen, but those of us with work to do will continue to try and get to the bottom of things, even if the problems are complicated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How'd you like paying more for insurance than your parents because some system decided men are bad drivers, and doubly so when they're young? Triply so when they happen to be driving a red car? 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…
It does. That's the problem. Take an 18-year old with a red Mustang and a 58-year old with a midlife crisis and a 3-series. Both drive like assholes. Both will inevitably cause an accident. The latter is more likely to be wealthy enough to be able to pay cash for repairs and keep the entire incident off the radar. No insurance claim, no citations, no evidence. The 18-year old has no choice but to make an insurance cl…
a better argument would be something like: suppose we detect a gene that indicates probability 1.0 of disease that causes the person's left arm to fall off.
it's then not a matter of "insurance" but a matter of "are we as the pool willing and able to pay for this?" recall company needs some profit as well as cost of coverage to maintain overhead so it's a different argument now.
I really wish people would at least skim the wikipedia page to figure out the vocabulary of the field they're about to opine on. The left-progressive use of the word 'bias' is completely different than the way statisticians use the word. If bias increases accuracy/precision, it's not bias. The more interesting question is this - is it permissible for models to consider protected characteristics if those characteristi…
Yes it is. It's bias in your fitness function.
Accuracy and precision are not handed down by the gods. We write the functions that evaluate our models, and it's our job to make sure that the values they promote match up with the real-world outcomes we desire, and to constantly monitor and re-evaluate those outcomes.
Fancier machine learning techniques will never be able to avoid Goodheart's Law: "Any measurement, no matter how reliable, when regarded as a target, ceases to be a good measurement."
I'm glad to see a representative actually know things like this. Too many of our representatives are technologically illiterate.
Does her tweet really imply any knowledge of it? Maybe she just read in the newspaper about the Google face recognition labeling a black woman as a gorilla?
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…
More to the point, “procedural fairness” or “equality of opportunity” (if I understand it correctly) is directly opposed to “representative fairness” or “equality of outcome”. In many situations, prioritising one will compromise the other. As an example, Harvard admission of Asian students. Perspectives differ on which one is more important. Personally, I’m absolutely for the former, but it increasingly seems I’m a p…
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...