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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#171

Post by padastra »

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…

Blue is a color. Yellow is a color. The fact that green exists doesn’t mean those colors aren't real.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#172

Post by pessimizer »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #74
andrewzah wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That doesn't mean race doesn't exist" Exactly, although not in the traditional sense. There are many many overlapping genetic aspects in humans; We subdivide for political or social reasons, not strictly biological ones. To make the height comparison more fair, it would be as if we divided people into "bigs" or "littles" arbitrarily and formed political parties around it, etc. Height is one biological aspect and eve…

But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a stance that fails to account for the original context. It wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such thing as being biologically tall.

But no one would argue that the definitions of "tall" and "short" weren't social constructs, even as the fact of human length from heel to crown clearly is not a social construct.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#173

Post by naasking »

pessimizer wrote: post #160
naasking wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 a…

I admire the confidence of someone who can say in the same paragraph that there are 24 different definitions (constructions) of "species," then deny that they are a social construct at all.

I fundamentally disagree with a definition of "social construct" that would have to exclude species as a meaningful category.

Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being socially constructed, all of the people calling race a social construct have utterly failed to make the case that we should stop using it.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#174

Post by burkaman »

naasking wrote: post #145
packetlost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

A modern definition of "species" generally gives a set of objective criteria that you can use to determine if two organisms are the same species (such as "can they produce fertile offspring"). Is there any definition of race like this? Genuine question, I don't think I've ever seen a definition of race more specific than "a collection of people with similar physical characteristics" or something like that, and I can't find one now. There's lots of definitions of what all the different races are, but none of what a "race" actually is.

Is there any definition of race where, given two people, you can apply some criteria to determine whether or not they are the same race? The criteria can't be "look at the definitions of each race and categorize the two people" because that's circular, how were those particular categories chosen? With species, you can determine that a bird and a fish are different species without knowing what birds and fish are.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#175

Post by esyir »

andrewzah wrote: post #76
anotheraccount9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because race is not a social construct.

I initially had this same belief, but I realized I had such a limited understanding of race after reading the wikipedia article on it [0]. That we divide not based on actual genetics but visible markers makes it a social construct. And the way we've chosen to look at race politically has changed over time. "Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and earl…

A more accurate view would be that it really is both.

It's a social construct, but it's not fully arbitrary, being historically (and currently) used as a proxy for ancestry, and thus genetics.

>That we divide not based on actual genetics but visible markers makes it a social construct

This is going too far towards the other end. Physical characteristics stem from genetic variations, and consistent patterns in appearance are often linked to some shared ancestry. It's not the end-all, but it's hardly without cause either.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#176

Post by wwalexander »

naasking wrote: post #145
packetlost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The second sentence of the Wikipedia article for “species” reads:

> A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.

This is the definition I’ve always heard, and it’s certainly more rigorous than any definition of “race” that I’ve encountered, and makes no reference to any arbitrary social constructs.

Conversely, the definition for “race” is explicitly arbitrary and social:

> A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#177

Post by esyir »

curiousllama wrote: post #23
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…

I think everyone would agree that there are some pretty obvious biological racial markers that differentiate racial groups. Skin color comes to mind :) The social construct argument just says that the specific categories and lines we draw are fairly arbitrary. Why is an afghani middle eastern (white?) but a Pakistani south-Asian? Is a Russian from Vladivostok really more closely related to a brit than a Mongolian? Id…

The funny thing is that it isn't really arbitrary at all.

It's location based. Humans only recently gained the ability to travel vast distances, and in the past lived (and bred) within a small, localized region. The "arbitrary" location based ethnicities actually do reflect that genetic ancestry

Of course, really wide ones like black/white/asian lose some of their meanings.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#178

Post by pessimizer »

HWR_14 wrote: post #164
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…

From what I understand, race is a social construct doesn't mean that there can be no physical differences. After all, humans have been able to tell* what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. It's making a claim the important aspects of race are a social construct. If the defining physical differences between races is both melanin and sternum width, that doesn't seem to be more relevant than just skin melanin…

> humans have been able to tell* what race someone is with their stupid human eyes.

It's more that humans have been able to define, with significant disagreements, what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. Race is nothing but a collection of these judgments. I'm not brown because I'm black, I'm black because I'm brown.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#179

Post by hgial »

ceejayoz wrote: post #78
dexen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the AI might have found some other indicator, like filenames in the data set The paper quite explicitly goes into testing and disseminating what exactly the AI detects. Two observations: - the classification clearly was primarily based on the visual content rather than spurious metadata, because various transformations of the visual content had the expected impact on classification correctness - the classification c…

The faster-than-light neutrino experiment similarly went "we've tried to account for everything we can think of and still can't figure it out" when they published. It turned out to be a measurement error. The same may be true here, and I think it's the most likely explanation. I'd be interested in whether the same model can be trained to predict patient wealth, hair color, style of clothing, religion, etc. from the s…

Forgive me if I don't consider "you can tell someone's race from physical features" to be quite as extraordinary a result as "particles can travel faster than light".

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#180

Post by naasking »

wwalexander wrote: post #176
naasking wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 a…

The second sentence of the Wikipedia article for “species” reads: > A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. This is the definition I’ve always heard, and it’s certainly more rigorous than any definition of “race” that I’ve encountered, and makes no reference to an…

> This is the definition I’ve always heard

It's not as precise as you think, because fertility isn't transitive. Consider members of a species, M1, M2, F1, F2. M1 might be fertile with F1, M2 with F2, but M1 may not be fertile with F2. Are they all really members of the same species?

Read up on the species problem for more information (there are now 26, not 24):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept

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