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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#141

Post by heywherelogingo »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #118
soundnote wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite: Sex is very clearly split into two distinct mechanisms. There's definitely sex-linked distributions of different traits, like male and female typical ranges of height, or agreeable personality, risk-seeking/risk aversion and so on, where both sexes operate the same mechanism. Races are mostly clusters in variation within one mechanism - eg. skin color is largely a gradient of more or less melanin, and what…

To advance your point, the ability to bear children is kind of the definitional distinction from which all of these biological distinctions derive as well as tons of social distinctions. Race has no such analogue.

How about cat vs dog?

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#142

Post by drocer88 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #137

Never mind the images; who was deciding what 'race' the training data matched against? In this modern age of globalism, they must have searched hard to find anyone with any kind of historically-categorized dna. I'm guessing, they just used folks' self-identification for race on some form. Which is largely a social construct.

From the preprint ( https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2107/2107.10356.pdf ) : " In this work, we define racial identity as a social, political, and legal construct that relates to the interaction between external perceptions (i.e. “how do others see me?”) and self-identification, and specifically make use of the self-reported race of patients in all of our experiments. "

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#143

Post by michaelscott »

benjaminjackman wrote: post #113
btbuildem wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked. White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart very well. Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have the same prejudices associated with that mark…

Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don’t know that they would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with which they can sense t…

The alien is hypothetical, a proxy point of view that's theoretically unbiased and has no awareness of human social context, history, etc.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#144

Post by goto11 »

maininformer wrote: post #140
goto11 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Race is a social construct” does not mean that inheritable biological differences between groups people does not exist. It means that the categories we use to classify people into races are cultural. For example the "black" and "white" categories in the US.

Isn't that ethnicity? Race: biological category Ethnicity: Cultural category

Both race and ethnicity are cultural categories. Example: Barack Obama is considered black in the US even though he has a white mother. This is a consequence of American culture, the historical "one drop" rule.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#145

Post by naasking »

packetlost wrote: post #105
phkahler wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in…

I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that…

> "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best.

The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days.

That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#146

Post by throwaway894345 »

runako wrote: post #121
throwaway894345 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies! Agreed, and upvotes too! It seems like I've struck upon something people have been interested in talking about. > The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like to note that "race is a social construct" refers to how "races" aren't really objective categories (What defines if somebody is "white"?) and more of a subject…

> when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost always in the context of denying biological differences between the races in the same way that some extreme (though mainstream and influential) Racial segregationists in the Americas literally had to write laws delineating races based on factors external to that individual (e.g. their parentage). That is: even people who believed in a racial hierarchy also believ…

But is this only because they lacked a theoretical understanding of genetics (including an understanding of which combinations of genes that express the features that we attribute to race, which we still presumably lack by-and-large) and sequencing technology?

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#147

Post by throwaway894345 »

heywherelogingo wrote: post #141
throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To advance your point, the ability to bear children is kind of the definitional distinction from which all of these biological distinctions derive as well as tons of social distinctions. Race has no such analogue.

How about cat vs dog?

I'm not following.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#148

Post by at_a_remove »

phkahler wrote: post #97
sillyquiet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's because it's very dubious the AI is doing what the paper is maintaining it's doing. People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Every individual has a set of biological features inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavil…

>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in…

Don't forget Sinodonty.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#149

Post by makeworld »

IshKebab wrote: post #39
sillyquiet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's because it's very dubious the AI is doing what the paper is maintaining it's doing. People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Every individual has a set of biological features inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavil…

> Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'. That doesn't mean race doesn't exist any more than the fact that height is a continuum doesn't mean that short people and tall people don't exist.

Race is socially constructed, just like the idea of who is short and tall is. The objective things in each case are genes and height, which are not socially constructed.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#150

Post by kgwgk »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

Everything is a social construct depending on how you look at it. Some people say that biological sex is a social construct.
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