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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms

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

#361

Post by ForrestN »

changchuming wrote: post #345
ForrestN wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow! Yes, that's very easy! Let me count the ways. First of all, Obama's daughters are much more likely to be murdered, abused or falsely accused by police than they would be if they were white. Even iconically famous black people are sometimes mistreated by police officers who don't recognize them. I'd say being at a high risk of murder counts as a disadvantage! I don't even need to draw a line back to ancestral…

> First of all, Obama's daughters are much more likely to be murdered, abused or falsely accused by police than they would be if they were white. I don't think this is true. If you compare Obama's daughters against Bush's sons, probably. But against a random white person with no media exposure, unlikely. > they would have been far wealthier if they'd been born to a comparably wealthy white family. Again, why are we c…

If you want to understand how anti-black bias affects even wealthy African Americans, you have to use methods like this. The GP was saying, basically "if the Obama's succeeded, it doesn't matter that their competitors were cheating." You can be disadvantaged and still be successful.

Why would it be useful to compare the most famous and rich African Americans against "a random white person?" Is that the way we prove that African Americans are not disadvantaged, by comparing an anomaly from one group to the average of another? We are comparing comparably wealthy people in order to eliminate other forms of difference so we can see just the effects of ethnicity...

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

#362

Post by ForrestN »

ForrestN wrote: post #312
tomp wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain how Obama’s daughters are disadvantaged based on ancestral violence? The point is, racist discrimination, even if “positive”, produces unfair outcomes. Obama’s daughter don’t need even more advantages. If you want to help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds (and I think that’s a worthy cause, even if you ignore “fairness”, simply because it increases the odds of finding the next Ramanujan and i…

Oh wow! Yes, that's very easy! Let me count the ways. First of all, Obama's daughters are much more likely to be murdered, abused or falsely accused by police than they would be if they were white. Even iconically famous black people are sometimes mistreated by police officers who don't recognize them. I'd say being at a high risk of murder counts as a disadvantage! I don't even need to draw a line back to ancestral…

The responses to this, articulated and expressed as downvotes, are extremely telling.

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

#363

Post by dang »

gdy wrote: post #351
dang wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're taking into account how frequently these things get repeated. Anything so frequently repeated becomes tiresome.

Many more things are repeated just as frequently, but somehow they don't result in banned accounts.

Sure, but it's not hard to understand why. Race war is one topic, array indexing is another. Which is the greater risk to this site? If the answer isn't obvious, please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

#364

Post by billy_beef »

adlkjnndnnd wrote: post #350
billy_beef wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You should perhaps begin by educating yourself to the actual role that Germany did play in the colonization of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire . I would not call this particularly far in history since it only ended in the 1910s.

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

#365

Post by [deleted] »

billy_beef wrote: post #364
adlkjnndnnd wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You should perhaps begin by educating yourself to the actual role that Germany did play in the colonization of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire . I would not call this particularly far in history since it only ended in the 1910s.

[deleted]

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

#366

Post by billy_beef »

adlkjnndnnd wrote: post #350
billy_beef wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves).

Yeah, that's gonna be a yikes from me dawg.

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

#368

Post by arcaster »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #260
arcaster wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to be "morally" right you have to have an ample understanding of what is and is not explicitly fact that's actually based in reality. Otherwise, the consensus of what fact is becomes irrelevant and the guise of morality simply becomes little more than barbed wire or nails wrapped around the baseball bat of which ever narrative or ideology our leaders intend to pursue... Even as a very progressive young person, AO…

> what is and is not explicitly fact that's actually based in reality It's incredibly difficult to split apart explicit fact from our own biases though. There wasn't a time too long ago that facts, as certain national and cultural groups understood them to be, were used to commit terrible atrocities.

Thanks for replying in a civil way - while I agree that scientific and academic consensus is an evolving ever moving target - to dismiss our current state of the art or state of fact because "we might be wrong compared to the future" is a moot point at best. Consensus never seeks to define absolute truth - there is no such thing as absolute truth - consensus seeks to normalize bias and maximize benefit for those involved in a given decision.

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

#369

Post by arcaster »

arcaster wrote: post #89
shadowbained wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of critique are you trying to make of "this community?" Are the words "he is right" in our vocabulary?

I agree this is a double standard - maybe we as educated people in this forum can move past arguing gender semantics in 2019? Can't wait for someone to try and guess my gender through HN... Maybe we should add a HN eula that states users must assume all other users are of a non-binary gender identity...

Can HN please add a "GMG" or "GMSO" category? I'll leave it to other HN users to decipher what that acronym might stand for...

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

#370

Post by Veelox »

hannasanarion wrote: post #197
crowdpleaser wrote: post #34

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…

> If bias increases accuracy/precision, it's not bias. 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…

Here is a somewhat modified situation. Say you use a machine learning algorithm to recommend if a person currently accused of a crime should be allowed bail. The fitness function should be to maximize the number of people who are allowed bail and minimize the number of people who miss their court date.

Say that the model allows X% of people to have bail and makes sure only Y% fail to show up.

The model then adds race as an input to the model. This improves the model so that it allows X+5% of people to have bail and makes sure that only Y/2% fail to show up. It also has the effect that it increases the chance that a black person is denied bail and increases the chance that a white person is allowed bail.

Do you think the inclusion of race is bias? Should race be removed from the input to the model?

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