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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#281

Post by ptr2voidStar »

pmarreck wrote: post #205
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…

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#282

Post by golemiprague »

awild wrote: post #233
JamesBarney wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical…

That's seems to be more of a comment about semantics and language. Yes, language is a construct in which we classify certain phenomena but you can still argue that the phenomena itself is not a social construct but rather something with some intrinsic "natural" truth, a truth we describe by using language or sometimes we don't because we are afraid to loose our jobs.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#283

Post by scarby2 »

naasking wrote: post #266
wwalexander wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t admit I have any qualifications to speak about biology, and I know HN is known for proposing reductive “solutions” based on oversimplified models of reality. That being said, it seems to me that it makes sense that a species would include the entire connected graph whose nodes are members and whose edges represent the ability to have fertile offspring. I found [1] which is an interesting example of a very lar…

> They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place. That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justifie…

> That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justified as any classification of species, and just as with species, not all of those properties need apply to every single member in that category

I think this is the thing people misunderstand about race being a social construct, is that race is a bucket, by nature there need to be correlations between people in that bucket in order to actually place people into that bucket in the first place.

There will likely be other correlations between people in said bucket, who are in this cause usually more closely related and share more recent common ancestors.

The size of that bucket and how we put people in it is arbitrary, but the fact that correlations exist when you put people in buckets isn't.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#284

Post by sangnoir »

JamesBarney wrote: post #247
awild wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical…

I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?

> What are they trying to communicate about race?

That the hard racial boundaries are unscientific (despite attempts to make it so), and that it's artificial and depends on consensus, and therefore is subject to change, and is typically subjective to the involved social group: the "one drop rule" is an example of how arbitrary this can get.

As sibling pointed out, in the United States, Italians and Jewish folk used to be not white, but are now widely considered to be white, despite not having any genetic or cultural changes in the interval between the shift in categorization.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#285

Post by mcguire »

oh_sigh wrote: post #276
mcguire wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that my previous comment was tongue-in-cheek; I found it interesting that the two numbers were so close. To make up for it, I'll try a more serious response. I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race". To put the two int…

> And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, With all due respect, I don't believe you're being honest here. And that goes to my point about people wanting race to not be a social construct. I believe you're lying to yourself(or just lying to me) that you wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case. > But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be re…

Ok, so race is real.

What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Africa for every one everywhere else?

And then, what do you do with that information? I'm Irish, she is Southeast Asian, Ted over there is Mayan-German. Does it improve life in any significant way?

If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. — Bokonon

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#286

Post by [deleted] »

goto11 wrote: post #144
maininformer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#287

Post by ceejayoz »

HideousKojima wrote: post #279
ceejayoz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that an AI model might be able to glean race on a probabilistic basis from x-rays. This specific model's ability to do it from a 64 pixel version of said x-ray makes me skeptical it's doing so successfully.

That's 1/4 the size of the texture of a Minecraft block. An AI could easily be trained to identify the block type of a Minecraft block based on an 8x8 subsample of one of its textures, and there's no reason something similar couldn't happen with biological race. Unless you a priori assume all racial differences are socially constructed and/or only skin deep.

Every Minecraft block of a particular type is identical.

The same is... not remotely true for humans, or even two chest x-rays of the same human.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#288

Post by IshKebab »

uniqueid wrote: post #82
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…

if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? I could divide people into 'tall', 'medium' and 'short' buckets. Someone else could categorize them all into just two categories (eg: 'tall' and 'short') instead, and someone else might argue that I've chosen bad cutoffs, and tell me I incorrectly put a bunch of 'medium' people in the 'short' bucket. Peop…

That is only true if the distribution of things within the continuum is not "lumpy". For height it isn't, but for other things it is. For example gender is highly bimodal, yet still a continuum. Would you say that "male" and "female" are subjective socially constructed categories? Of course not.

Race is probably somewhere in-between. There are people all over the spectrum but there are pretty clear large groups with sparsely populated gaps in-between them.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#289

Post by nomel »

mcguire wrote: post #224
throwaway894345 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label th…

So which "race" is the child mentioned above, German or Irish? Sure, they have aspects of both, but they can be in only one cluster. The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.

> but they can be in only one cluster

I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and intermingling world populations. I've seen many people describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the number of basis vectors required to accurately describe a person is increasing with time, but it seems that medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all that surprising, considering not even women were represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#290

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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