Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms • Hacker News Board

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#331

Post by dvtrn » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:08 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #322

gdy wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a point, though.

It seems like a shallow and obvious one to me, but if I'm mistaken and there's more there there, it deserves to be expressed substantively and respectfully. Otherwise the only effect is to rile up agreers with positive charge and disagreers with negative charge—just what we don't need.

It seems like a shallow and obvious one to me

That's really unfortunate.

I could go on quite a bit about how, as a man of color, it gets fatiguing having certain conversations or trying to express certain points of view in these types of socio-political debates lately (to my dismay sometimes right here on HN-a forum that holds itself to a certain standard of debate but seems quite eager to throw it out, convenience permitting), but looking around at a lot of other comments in this very thread that seem to run contrary to whatever personally defined "truths" are out there, it'd probably just get downvoted and flagged as well.

I'll just leave it like this, if it seems "shallow", to you-dang-then probably it's time for some deep personal introspection because like gdy, I think shadowbained's point isn't wrong and I don't fault him for the fatigue that's probably in his soul which results in a delivery style that doesn't fit a mold of pretend decorum. A mold manifested and curated by political-egotists, IMO. (This last point made as broadly as possible)

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#332

Post by billy_beef » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:17 AM UTC

fiter wrote: post #327

billy_beef wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if the data contains proxies for race and/or unexamined racialized bias, then yes it can. Police presence has often been kept higher in zipcodes with mostly non-white residents. This results in higher arrest rates in an area because of increased eyes, not necessarily because of increased rates of law-breaking. If an algorithm were to be designed to determine where to allocate police officers using this data, it…

My apologies for not linking to the other thread, but as far as I can tell, there are no proxies for race used to calculate FICO scores.

Without the data, I have a hard time believing this. Especially since I had to explain the concept.

Even if that were the case, you're still left with a small set of conclusions about race and its correlation to FICO score. 1) Non-white people are worse at maintaining credit scores because of something inherent to the condition of non-whiteness. This conclusion quickly points in the direction of racist psuedo-science. 2) Social and economic forces do not act equally on people of different skin colors. This is easily proven true by the example discussed by AOC and ta'nehisi coates of people of color being explicitly excluded from provisions the New Deal, an issue that has compounded the inequality between people of different racial backgrounds. This is directly applicable to FICO scores as white people are more often able to access generational wealth to pay of debts and avoid low credit scores whereas people of color are not.

Sooo, in the case of FICO, even if the score doesn't contain subtle proxies for race which I doubt, it is still predicated preserving a system that contains intense racial bias.

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#333

Post by stmfreak » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:21 AM UTC

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #213

tomp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In order to create a situation where people have equality of opportunity, it's often necessary to ensure that the individual had an equal outcome that creates the necessary starting state.

Why? There are many, if not the majority, of examples of mobility across outcomes. People don’t have to be born rich to become rich. Nor poor to remain poor. So many millions of people have taken advantage of equal or even unequal opportunities to create better outcomes for themselves and their descendants, why now are those successes all invalid and only by shoveling equality of outcome onto the “disadvantaged” are we able to make things fair?

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#334

Post by yourbandsucks » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

csa wrote: post #320

yourbandsucks wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do their admissions numbers line up neatly into racial buckets that match exactly what a social justice person would like to see? I'm not saying you're wrong, but when their internal paperwork seems to indicate an ASTOUNDING difference in "personality" for blacks vs Asians, at a large-numbers level.. I mean do we really buy that? Can we even just consider for a moment how racist that sentiment is? Against bo…

1. Asians are over-represented by ~4x versus their percent of the population (5.6 in US and 22.9 at Harvard)... not that this is a useful metric. Is this a stat that SJWs are happy about? I genuinely wonder. 2. Affirmative action is a thing. If you stop the so-called “Asian quota” (e.g., by going race blind), then any slots gained will most likely result in losses for slots from other ethnic minorities. Some people b…

Thanks for your response.

I can't tell if you're disputing my assertion that they first decided what their racial buckets "should" look like, then stack ranked within each bucket and fudged the numbers to make it look less discriminatory.

It's that last part that I have a real problem with. If Harvard wants to say, "we want x% black and y% Asian, etc".. ok, I guess, but if they're going to say "black people have lots of personality to make up for their lack of science skills", and vice versa to Asians, that's just racist as hell to everybody involved. Own your decisions.

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#335

Post by billy_beef » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:43 AM UTC

adlkjnndnnd wrote: post #326

billy_beef wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces? Unless there is some physics based reason it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do feature detection against black skin, then yes something racist is going on. The tools/cameras that we've designed have historically been meter…

Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living to…

[flagged]

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#336

Post by sam0x17 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

Domenic_S wrote: post #330

sam0x17 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, private industry has been lucky up until this point that anything other than your financial history has been allowed to factor into your credit score or credit worthiness __at all__. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets limited to solely financial factors by regulation within the next 10-20 years. In terms of regulations, I think by regulation they shouldn't be allowed to give the algorithms anything but loan…

I'm not sure what you mean; are you saying an otherwise-creditworthy person could get denied a loan based on other factors?

Right now yes companies are starting to use things like your facebook profile as a basis of denial.

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#337

Post by candybar » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #213

tomp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In order to create a situation where people have equality of opportunity, it's often necessary to ensure that the individual had an equal outcome that creates the necessary starting state.

Doesn't this mean Harvard should accept everyone? If equality of outcome is important - and I'd argue that it is to a much greater extent than most people would consider acceptable - doesn't it stand to reason that we should care about it at the level of individuals, not merely populations? What's strange to me is that people seem to think that equality is only important when talking about small differences across arbitrary social constructs, while entirely ignoring much larger gaps in individuals.

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#338

Post by manfredo » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #106

jstarfish wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Interestingly, though, in many insurance industries it's illegal to offer different rates based on gender. Health insurance is one example.

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#339

Post by Domenic_S » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 3:54 AM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #336

Domenic_S wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean; are you saying an otherwise-creditworthy person could get denied a loan based on other factors?

Right now yes companies are starting to use things like your facebook profile as a basis of denial.

That’s madness, do you have a link?

Re: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

#340

Post by ahartman00 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #148

perl4ever wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." 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 pla…

The consequences of a poorly designed algorithm are far less visible than those of a poorly designed airplane. Oftentimes they are deliberately kept secret. How many banks do you know that publish their loan qualification source code? Mechanical engineers are taught from the beginning of their careers to think carefully about the consequences of their decisions. Computer engineers, not so much. We're taught how to op…

"they're almost never program requirements"

Wrong. We had two courses at my school. From the ABET Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Technology Programs: "(e)Include topics related to professional and ethical responsibilities".

The issue here is proxy features, and that it isnt as obvious if your statistical model is doing something wrong. You identified zip code and race. What about number of cats? Would you have a particular gender and marital status in mind if a given data sample had a large value in the numberOfCats column?

So you ban making decisions based on number of cats. But amountOfKittyLitterPurchased, numberOfCatPicturesViewed, numberOfDislikesOnDogPictures, etc could be used as a proxy for numberOfCats. Try to come up with an exhaustive list of all features which could be used as a proxy for some protected class. Starting with politically incorrect jokes will get you part way there, assuming you possess an exhaustive list of all politically incorrect jokes. But you will need to be pretty creative to come up with more.

https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...