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Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

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Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#171

Post by joe_the_user »

bosswipe wrote: post #118
smnrchrds wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Machine learning is like money laundering for bias" https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/744595961217835008

There's no way they used machine learning here. My guess it was some simple rules like older doctors go first. I wouldn't even call it an algorithm. I think algorithm is a weasly way for the administrator to make it sound more complicated then it was.

Of course it wasn't using machine learn, there wasn't anything to learn here.

But the point that machine learning has become an ideal package for existing biases still is worth mentioning because machine learning becomes an ideal way to present mistakes involving values, such racism, as mistakes that are simply technical and can't be helped and this allows regular algorithms to also get this kind of pass.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#172

Post by moocow01 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

> "[A]lgorithms are made by people and the results ... were reviewed multiple times by people," You got that right. The way they talk about "an algorithm did it" makes it seem as as if they think that somehow explains it, like there was only one algorithm possible handed down from god or something. We'll be seeing more and more of this of course. "We can't be blamed, it was an algorithm! We can't be blamed for trusti…

I'm more curious why there was an algorithm involved at all. Based upon the number of doses they had, they should have immediately been given to as many staff on first responder units, like ER, ICU, etc as would take it. My wife works at a hospital as a nurse and this is what they have done for the first phase of vaccination. After that I can see a need for an algorithm to determine who is most at need but there is no excuse for the administrators for what happened at Stanford.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#173

Post by joe_the_user »

edoceo wrote: post #42
davidf560 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff I don't understand why society is putting up with this. Right now if you're not in a daily COVID-facing role (i.e. an actual front line medical worker) or in a nursing home you should not be getting the shot. This makes my blood boil. There should have been laws passed regarding ordering of the distribu…

And all is plebs do is comment on their actions. If they have no consequences why would they stop screwing us?

Yep,

Stanford resident acted. Health care workers at those other hospitals are apparently silent. That makes the difference.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#174

Post by sqrt17 »

organsnyder wrote: post #157
mattkrause wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy thing didn’t entirely hold up: the original demonstration was constrained not to return the same word in the prompt, so “man is to woman as doctor is to ____” had to return something that’s close to, but not the same as “doctor” in the embedding space. Hence, it returns nurse. Ironically, this makes the original point nearly as well: we need to evaluate the hell out of machine learning systems to make sur…

I wonder what it would return for "Woman is to doctor as man is to ___". I'd bet money on the result not being "nurse".

It highly depends on the corpus and you can check for yourself.

I'm being lazy, but the results for Gutenberg books you can check online at http://labs.statsbiblioteket.dk/dsc/

- man is to woman as doctor is to reprovingly (nurse is the first noun, on position 4) - woman is to man as doctor is to snodgrass (after a couple nonsense/rare words)

The most important thing that teaches us is that big corpora (bigger than PG) are essential for this method.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#175

Post by [deleted] »

lopmotr wrote: post #169
mulmen wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The takeaway is the model has bias. It’s up to humans to decide what to do with that information. Depending on the input “homemaker” may be a technically reasonable output. Should we use such a model to suggest career paths to high school students? Or should we reevaluate the methodology?

Who cares about ML when we already do that: https://www.slideshare.net/yuyomajadero/jobs-occupations-pro...

[deleted]

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#176

Post by pmoriarty »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #81
jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

> "[A]lgorithms are made by people and the results ... were reviewed multiple times by people," You got that right. The way they talk about "an algorithm did it" makes it seem as as if they think that somehow explains it, like there was only one algorithm possible handed down from god or something. We'll be seeing more and more of this of course. "We can't be blamed, it was an algorithm! We can't be blamed for trusti…

In general, blaming the algorithm is an indirect way of blaming software engineers. From Facebook to the VW emissions scandal to Stanford’s vaccine allocation, people love narratives that blame engineers. I suspect this trend will only get worse as the general public realizes that engineers are now a highly compensated professional, similar to how lawyers are the butt of so many jokes.

Engineers have bosses, and they generally do what their bosses tell them to do.

So the responsibility should lie, as usual, with the people at the top, who set the direction for the company, not for low-level peons like engineers, who might be highly compensated, but the engineers don't set the direction for the company nor make the ultimate decisions regarding these algorithms.

But part of the tragedy of organizations is that responsibility tends to be diffused, so it's really hard to ultimately blame any one person.

There was a documentary (maybe called "The Corporation" or something) which showed some protestors outside some CEO's home, and the CEO's wife went out with some tea and cookies or something and invited the protestors inside their home to have a chat, and the CEO talked to the protestors and told them how helpless he himself was, as he was just part of the system with relatively limited ability to change it.

I'm not sure I buy that, and not sure the protestors did either, as the CEO still has enormous power. At the very least the CEO has the ear of the board of directors, and quite a lot of leeway as to how to run the business. They might not be able to change it all, but they can change a lot. Still, there's no denying that especially in a large organization no one person knows everything that's going on and can be accountable for absolutely everything, but leadership still exists and still is ultimately responsible.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#177

Post by Pfhreak »

This is going to be how it goes broadly, at a national and international level.

I guarantee you that you'll see access for the wealthy much sooner than you'll see access for the folks at highest risk. I don't know how to help with this, but I'd much rather see farm workers, grocery store clerks, the homeless, bus drivers, etc. get access after we take care of the medical staff (who are exposed to patients) and the elderly (and others in extremely risky environments.)

Yet I'm sure that's not how this will go.

How long before testing and vaccination becomes an employment perk at a FAANG company?

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#178

Post by cbanek »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

> "[A]lgorithms are made by people and the results ... were reviewed multiple times by people," You got that right. The way they talk about "an algorithm did it" makes it seem as as if they think that somehow explains it, like there was only one algorithm possible handed down from god or something. We'll be seeing more and more of this of course. "We can't be blamed, it was an algorithm! We can't be blamed for trusti…

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

- Dune

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#179

Post by mattkrause »

organsnyder wrote: post #157
mattkrause wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy thing didn’t entirely hold up: the original demonstration was constrained not to return the same word in the prompt, so “man is to woman as doctor is to ____” had to return something that’s close to, but not the same as “doctor” in the embedding space. Hence, it returns nurse. Ironically, this makes the original point nearly as well: we need to evaluate the hell out of machine learning systems to make sur…

I wonder what it would return for "Woman is to doctor as man is to ___". I'd bet money on the result not being "nurse".

You can monkey around with it here: http://bionlp-www.utu.fi/wv_demo/ (choose the English Google News model, but this may not be exactly the same set/model as the original report).

Man is to Woman as Doctor is to ___ gives 1) gynecologist 2) nurse 3) doctors 4) physician 5) pediatrician

Woman is to Man as Doctor is to ___ gives: 1) physician 2) doctors 3) surgeon 4) dentist 5) cardiologist

These are just generally near "Doctor" though: the ten nearest terms are physician, doctors, gynecologist, surgeon, dentist, pediatrician, pharmacist, neurologist, cardiologist, and nurse.

Some gender differences may persist (nurse is #2 for `woman`, but #68 for `man`, but it's also near `woman` generally and you could imagine it gets a bit of a boost from the verb ("to feed a baby") being attached exclusively to women too.

Anyway, my point is not that there's no bias (there certainly can be--seed GTP-3 with a prompt about Muslims) but that one should be wary of thinking they know what the model is doing.

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