191–200 of 487 posts
Its not the first example of unethical behaviour using this technology. Alcohol gets targeted to Alcholics, Gambling gets targets to problem gamblers.
Targeted advertising for certain purposes should be illegal, including employment ads, alcohol ads, gambing ads and any kind of political ad. There's just too many ways it can go wrong with these kinds of ads.
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Not really, because it's a question of principle: is it okay to target to a specific demographic, or not; and does that vary based on whether we are discussing a legally-protected class? The significance of what is being advertised doesn't exactly change the definition of right and wrong. If we're being honest, cosmo is probably as accurate a filtering mechanism for white, middle-aged, middle-class women as facebook…
Quit conflating the issue. The poster you're defending (and, frankly, the whole argument) was trying to make the point that "targeted ads", as a category and devoid of context, was a good thing because you reach the target you want to reach. Fair enough. But if it's an employment ad, and you only want to reach upper class white males, well, that's discrimination. Period. If your "principles" enable that, well there y…
Let's take the flip side. Pretend I am one of the many companies which have adopted discriminatory hiring practices in favor of certain minorities. I want to hire more of said minorities. I target facebook ads towards them. Is that any better or worse? As far as I'm concerned, they are the same; but many people I know would say that's fine.
I have mixed feelings about this. I am absolutely aware this can be a means to intentionally exclude specific groups due to prejudice and can be a polite way to do terrible things. I get that. But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there m…
I have mixed feelings about this. I am absolutely aware this can be a means to intentionally exclude specific groups due to prejudice and can be a polite way to do terrible things. I get that. But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there m…
1) they keep thinking about gender and age as qualifiers for jobs for which those factors have absolutely zero relevance (girls are bad at math! Old people can't learn new things!), or
2) They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave! oldster can only do Cobol, they'll never learn Python!).
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> there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is. For the higher paying specialized jobs, it’s called a network. But networking is even more biased than formal recruiting approaches.
Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring people recommended to me by others that I trust.
Probably in several ways, along with a gender bias in your network there's probably a high likelihood that there's a racial bias, a class/wealth bias and an age bias.
Your network probably has a strong contingent of people you went college with, people with a shared interested in your sports (which can be a proxy for class and race) and people with a similar background.
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Yes. If you are, for example, placing rental or property ads that filter by race, age, or gender that is the official description of it.
and yet, by having a profile of the user, it is quite possible to "easily" find proxies for the above traits, and target those proxies instead, and thus dodge the legality issue. For example, using income.
Even by advertising on Facebook in the first place, you could argue they're discriminating against people who don't use Facebook. I'm sure you could find a protected demographic with lower-than-average Facebook usage to support this.
Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but bec…
The negligible ROI improvements you get by discriminating are not worth the costs to society.
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That kind of thing is why the doctrine of disparate impact was developed. There are a lot of messy edge cases (everything has some correlation with one or another protected class), but if I end up never advertising to men the fact that I'm using a neural network won't protect me.
So then are algorithmic approaches to advertising for employment off limits? Facebook and google then really shouldn’t go near this kind of work since their tech is legally inappropriate.
Not if what the algorithm optimizes is a measure provably closely linked to job performance.
In fact, as the array of protected classes and the statistical means available will probably over time allow proving prohibited disparate impact for any hiring method other than an algorithmic method optimizing a true job performance measure, algorithmic methods may soon be practically mandatory.
OTOH, algorithmic methods targeting any figure of merit that isn't provably tightly linked to job performance are going to be problematic, sure.
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Except the existence of laws against racial/age discrimination in housing and employment are not arbitrary. Those laws were passed in response to actual and widespread discriminatory behavior in the mid 20th century.
OK, maybe arbitrary isn't exactly the right word. I meant that there's no indisputable link between ethics/morality and law. You say that they "were passed in response to actual and widespread discriminatory behavior". That's true. But they wouldn't have been passed, notwithstanding discrimination, without enough political support (of one sort or another). I mean, there's also been discrimination in health insurance…
There is plenty of ways to lawfully discriminate in this country. You can even still have discriminatory policies in employment if you can show it directly relates to the job.
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Quit conflating the issue. The poster you're defending (and, frankly, the whole argument) was trying to make the point that "targeted ads", as a category and devoid of context, was a good thing because you reach the target you want to reach. Fair enough. But if it's an employment ad, and you only want to reach upper class white males, well, that's discrimination. Period. If your "principles" enable that, well there y…
Conflating the issue with what? Let's take the flip side. Pretend I am one of the many companies which have adopted discriminatory hiring practices in favor of certain minorities. I want to hire more of said minorities. I target facebook ads towards them. Is that any better or worse? As far as I'm concerned, they are the same; but many people I know would say that's fine.