201–210 of 388 posts
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How does that address the parent commenter’s assertion? Discrimination, whether intended or not, has the same outcome for the discrimated party.
Statistical differences in outcome cannot be automatically attributed to discrimination, though they frequently are
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.
So you are saying any data for which any input feature is correlated with race or sex is garbage. That's going to make doing useful data science incredibly difficult with anything involving humans.
Sex is easy to incorporate. Race is more difficult because vanishingly little work has been done with a concept of race based on anything resembling real population genetics, but it's not impossible in theory. Hint: if you really care about human biodiversity, you'll spend most of your time in Africa and some isolated islands, not looking at brown people in the west.
The issue is GxE, where we see loads of racists and sexists just patently forget about 'E' and conclude that women or brown people are genetically inferior. Some will try to gussy that up as 'different' rather than inferior, but the dog-whistles may as well be air-raid sirens.
'Data science' is fine if you're AB testing websites. When you try to do real science, you'll find that the utter lack of research experience is .. a bit of a problem. Caring about PhDs isn't credentialism, it's wanting a plumber that has worked with pipes before. You have to actually perform research to get decent at it. It usually takes about a decade before you can honestly do it independently. If you can look back at what you did a year ago without cringing, you're not making that progress.
Some schmuck with PANDAS and a Bio101 class 8 years ago isn't a scientist.
I'm glad to see a representative actually know things like this. Too many of our representatives are technologically illiterate.
ahem Maybe you would be interested in something like term-limits for Congress?
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There's plenty of "systemic" racism/sexism/etc. coming from the left, though. Social engineering in general is a recipe for every kind of unintended consequences at the "systemic/institutional" level, and the left is huge on social engineering.
"Systemic" doesn't even have to be left/right though, that's the point. It can simply be well-meaning people that keep ignorantly doing things they way they did before, unaware that their system has racist/sexist impact. I don't know what you mean by social engineering, by the way. I've only heard it in the context of hacking, like calling customer support and pretending to be someone else to try to get their mother'…
For example, Harvard admitting less Asians because they are over-represented compared to other races. If you take your view that racism is an emergent phenomenon that you can spot based purely on the outcome, then Harvard was exactly correct to deny more Asians admission than other races, yes? If Harvard didn't do that, then the outcome of their admission process would've been "racist."
Many would disagree with that interpretation of racism.
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.
Broad statements about the left and right are divisive, ignoring the spectrum of beliefs, and this is not a good summary. Just as two examples, housing and education policies are frequently designed with the intent of segregation, though it is impossible to prove intent in most cases. And so, the actual outcomes need to be used in courts to demonstrate racist intent. No one will ever openly admit that they don't want…
we move, I go back to a more diverse school. fights, my graphing calculator stolen... what’s the possible benefit of having poor people in your school? until social programs make it so my lunch doesn’t need to be stolen to feed a kid, I fail to see how the non poor students are better off.
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Yes they can, because that's what "discrimination" means: differences in outcome due to uncontrollable irrelevant factors like race. Discrimination is an effect, not an intent. Racist intent is called "prejudice". Discrimination can be caused by prejudice, or it can be caused by something else, like a poorly considered algorithm.
No, that's pseudo-social-science because it falsely assumes outcomes are solely determined by external variables and is completely ignorant of internal variables, such as differing cultural values. Some cultures value family life over money, others value money over family life, for example.
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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…
Surely their high SAT scores and over-representation at Harvard compared to the general population are both caused by some heretofore unidentified analogue of white-privilege - what other explanation is there?
The answer is that asian immigrants are a self-selected subset of 1.5B asians in asia.
The social justice mental toolkit doesn't have an answer to this anomaly. American census numbers and the assumption of a normal distribution within them don't square with the highly-motivated subset of Asians who immigrated.
The 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…
The "meat" of interest here for those too lazy to click (I encourage people click through, though, really, and maybe even take a glance at https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577) is probably this long parenthetical:
> (But taking Roko's premises at face value, his idea would zap people as soon as they read it. Which - keeping in mind that at the time I had absolutely no idea this would all blow up the way it did - caused me to yell quite loudly at Roko for violating ethics given his own premises, I mean really, WTF? You're going to get everyone who reads your article tortured so that you can argue against an AI proposal? In the twisted alternate reality of RationalWiki, this became proof that I believed in Roko's Basilisk, since I yelled at the person who invented it without including twenty lines of disclaimers about what I didn't necessarily believe. And since I had no idea this would blow up that way at the time, I suppose you could even read the sentences I wrote that way, which I did not edit for hours first because I had no idea this was going to haunt me for years to come. And then, since Roko's Basilisk was a putatively a pure infohazard of no conceivable use or good to anyone, and since I didn't really want to deal with the argument, I deleted it from LessWrong which seemed to me like a perfectly good general procedure for dealing with putative pure infohazards that jerkwads were waving in people's faces. Which brought out the censorship!! trolls and was certainly, in retrospect, a mistake.)
Edit: this plus more is all covered by the LW wiki's page someone else linked, check that out too if you really care. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
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…
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, but we know blatantly unfair algorithms when we see them. And we see them.
e.g. Remember the AI recruiting tool that automatically rejected women because that's what it learned from the input data?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-t...
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Unequal outcome is not indicative of racism, it is racism. That's the point: racism is an outcome, not an intent. An unknowing, unfeeling beurocratic system can be racist, even if there isn't a speck of racial bias in the hearts of the practitioners and designers, simply due to historical quirks as you point out, or design mistakes.
So your argument is that Harvard is racist if it doesn’t discriminate against Asian applicants? So that they are not overrepresented among the student population?!