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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#211

Post by JohnWhigham »

RattleyCooper wrote: post #194
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…

The idea of a social construct is just a social construct man

Or rather, a spook.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#212

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#213

Post by soldehierro »

screye wrote: post #184
esyir wrote: post #153

Earlier 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…

"Latin American" and "Hispanic" aren't race markers. They're a regional identity and an ethnicity, respectively, which exist alongside race.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#214

Post by ttyprintk »

knicholes wrote: post #5

I wonder if it has anything to do with the machines that are being used to take the images. Maybe some groups have access to one type of imaging machine where other groups have access to some other type of imaging machine.

Or some scans are ordered for a diagnostic that’s more common in one group over another. I hope that the details show that treatment and diagnostic quality are indistinguishable between race classifications.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#215

Post by throwaway894345 »

heywherelogingo wrote: post #196
throwaway894345 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not following.

"the definitional distinction".. ?

I don’t know what point you’re making, but my “definitional distinction” remark meant that “sex” is more or less defined by the ability of one group to bear children (fertility issues aside, of course). Not sure if that addresses your concern.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#216

Post by mcguire »

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…

As someone pointed out in another reply, "races" are buckets people are distributed into, frequently based on physical aspects. The point of saying "race is a social construct" is the nature of those buckets.

Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and Eastern Europeans (or rather people descending from those areas) differ in a number of physical aspects. Are they different races? For those who think race matters today, it seems not---they are all "white". Back in the heyday of scientific racism in the first half of the 20th century, they absolutely were---that is why the US had different immigration limits for different parts of Europe. Are native Australian people the same race as Africans?---there's no especially close genetic relationship as far as I know.

Physical differences exist. How you use those differences to divide people into groups and, more importantly, how you treat people of those groups is a social construct.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#217

Post by zepto »

tpm wrote: post #210
zepto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would like to agree with that, since I would like to believe race is a construct that we can dispense with at some point.

That said, assuming the paper is just wrong is simply bias.

If there is an identity associated with race, there is no reason to think it doesn’t impact biology. There is no reason to assume it’s genetic.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#218

Post by bordercases »

andreyk wrote: post #156
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, 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…

This fails to capture why the term of "social construct" has to be brought in instead of just talking about physical differences across a threshold. In these discussions, one may want to use the term "social construct" instead of "physical classification" because it implies an arbitrary degree of freedom for discounting a term based on its social and pragmatic significance.

This then lets you argue about the value of certain kinds of physical evidence over others when making social judgements, without having to consider the direct consequences of such evidence. In that sense calling the distinction between tallers and shorters a "social construct" does more than you let on when you are just subbing it for "shorthand definition for a rough threshold of height". It means you can give non-epistemological grounds for ignoring physical evidence.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#219

Post by mcguire »

oh_sigh wrote: post #187
andreyk wrote: post #156

Earlier 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).

The heritibility of human height is 79% (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y). The heritibility of human skin color is 82% (https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228).

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#220

Post by ceejayoz »

hgial wrote: post #179
ceejayoz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The point is less "they're equally significant conclusions" and more "sometimes the thing you thought you discovered isn't a thing".
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