Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?
But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.
I don't see how.
AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
201–210 of 357 posts
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Racism - judging people by the colour of their skin - has been on life support for a long time [1] in most liberal republics/democracies but nefarious actors are attempting to revive it in the name of identity politics. It is this type of race which can be detected using X-rays. The same group tends to support the doctrine of cultural relativism [2]. Claiming all cultures are equally valid they call criticism of beha…
> Racism - judging people by the colour of their skin - has been on life support for a long time You would think so, but the proliferation of affirmative action among tech companies and prestigious universities says otherwise.
Affirmative action had a place just after desegregation. Now, it is just one of the examples of identity politics, pushed in a doomed attempt to placate the deconstruction crew. Given that deconstruction of societal institutes is a stated goal for these people they do not care whether it actually achieves anything productive for either those who are given positions based on identity categories, for the affected institutes of for society as a whole - as long as it creates strife the purpose has been fulfilled.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I understand, the definition of a social construct is a bit nuanced, and it's possible to both believe race is a social construct and that it correlates with things. As a metaphor, let's say we create two categories in the world for all people - tallers (people above six feet in height) and shorters (people below six feet in height). Human height objectively exists, but these categories are social construct…
But with the taller/shorter, you would commonly have two tallers producing a shorter, or two shorters producing a taller. If we were talking about husbandry, we would say that tallers and shorters don't "breed true". But with race, you never have two white people produce a black person, or vice versa (and no, a black person with albinism is not a white person).
That's actually an interesting observation, though perhaps a bit besides the point for an analogy that wasn't meant to be perfect. Regression to the mean does not seem to apply the same way to skin color, even though presumably it is also a polygenetic trait to quite some extent.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#204Please 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…
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. 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 heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'.
Exactly. One of the people I'll always point to as evidence that race is a social construct is Barack Obama. He was the "first black president". In reality he is, genetically, as "white" as he is "black". We still call him black because of the color of his skin.
If people insist for long enough that racial categories are inherently biological you'll eventually end up in one-drop judgement territory. Not a great place to have a discussion.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#205Please 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…
If the software is told of the existence of race via an attribute in its ML training, then it will see race in additional data. Otherwise, it won't, IMHO.
Also, due to omission of many other variables (such as culture), those variables are being conflated with race. I personally think a lot of what is commonly accused of being racism, sexism etc. is really just "culturalism" or "preferentialism"... let me think of an example... Given two bars, one filled with rap music and the other filled with techno music, and I pick the techno one every time... am I racist (assuming the predominant race in these 2 bars differs)? Or just preferentialist, culturalist or (frankly) "techno-ist" (if that were a thing)?
Because I think it's much harder to get angry about preferences than it is to get angry about racism, I think that given a choice, we need to consider the less-triggery inputs to a perceived problem
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#206Earlier 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…
In principle yes, but did you read the paper? They do a lot of completely crazy things like blurring the image until it's just fuzzy blobs, or doing a high-pass filter on it until it just looks like noise (they comment that a human could not even guess that it's an x-ray picture), and they still get very high accuracy. Basically no matter what they try they can still get the race out, with slightly lower percentage n…
>crazy things like blurring the image until it's just fuzzy blobs
That... that doesn't influence one of the presumed ways the NN categorizes images: the trend in bone geometry. The "blobs", while fuzzy, still largely retain the relative proportions to each other. Or, in other words, proportions of image elements are invariant for operations of scaling and of blurring.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#207Please 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…
You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies! 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 subjective thing, particularly at the margins. We can build classifiers that can match most people's (in our current cultur…
>Somebody from the far-flung future would (hopefully) find us mostly to be near-destitute.
I love thinking about future historians view of today, I think it's better and more useful than futurism.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly dislike (almost despise) this argument. Race is a surrogate variable for genetic history. The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.
> The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. I would dispute that claim. Due to population bottlenecks among the first 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish person than various african subpopulations are to each other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse than the rest of the world, in a g…
>There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.
There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me uses are expensive at scale. Race, imperfect as it is, serves as a low-cost, reasonably effective proxy in many (but not all) cases.
Remember, for medical logistics, it's not about getting perfect care (are you sequenced yet?). It's about getting cost effective care, lest you bloat costs to high heaven.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#209Please 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, the definition of a social construct is a bit nuanced, and it's possible to both believe race is a social construct and that it correlates with things. As a metaphor, let's say we create two categories in the world for all people - tallers (people above six feet in height) and shorters (people below six feet in height). Human height objectively exists, but these categories are social construct…
So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social construct?" What would it be?
It seems like the definition from your comment would be "Could we take this labeling system, and define different labels or the labels differently?"
I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is kinda silly. But this is something we do all the time, with hypertension, diabetes, disabled, Alzheimer's, the 1%, capitalism, Canadian, etc...
And many of these categories are far more continuous than something like sex and gender which as far as categories go are pretty discrete.
Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct.
Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that races have anatomical differences is very much contested, and rightly so.
That’s what the study calls into question.
More often than not, AI/ML finds some surprising shortcut. I am pretty sure this will be the case too, because "races" and their (hypothetical) biological or genetic foundations don't map at all.