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US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

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Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#271

Post by godelski »

hot_gril wrote: post #266
godelski wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'd consider that part of the system. You could also train your model to debias by using a cost function that incorporates race and minimizes the KL divergence between different ethnicities. (Obviously it would be best to use interpretable models and/or causal ones) A Mahalanobis distance might also be good here. But when training your model you might want to PCA it and if race isn't an included factor then you ca…

I don't assume this is easy or even possible to solve. If the model is trying to determine something like the applicant's level of adversity based on whatever info college admissions has, of course the result will have a divergence between races, and historical racism will have shaped some of your input variables (like high school) to some degree that we'll never fully understand. Using some statistical difference be…

> Using some statistical difference between races as a cost function wouldn't be satisfactory either.

So how do you expect the expert to de-bias the system without some cost function?

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#272

Post by jmull »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #235
jmull wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anti-meritocratic How do you measure merit, though? People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason. I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair? People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defi…

But we can for sure say what is not merit. Choosing or discriminating against a person for their race is not merit

Dodging the question.

People want “merit” to be the determining factor… but they don’t want to express or discuss what merit actually is.

As someone has plenty of the characteristics commonly associated with merit, but who also has a strong sense of fairness, I’m awfully skeptical of the faith (and I used that word deliberately) people put in the concept. Why the hell do the talents I was born with or advantages I was given make me any more deserving of material wealth than anyone else?

That’s all I see anyone doing with “merit”… it’s used as a “drop the mic” concept that to justify self-serving criteria for conferring material advantages.

Personally, I think ability should confer obligations more than advantages. (A wildly radical concept, I know, in the morally retarded era we live in.)

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#273

Post by hot_gril »

godelski wrote: post #271
hot_gril wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't assume this is easy or even possible to solve. If the model is trying to determine something like the applicant's level of adversity based on whatever info college admissions has, of course the result will have a divergence between races, and historical racism will have shaped some of your input variables (like high school) to some degree that we'll never fully understand. Using some statistical difference be…

> Using some statistical difference between races as a cost function wouldn't be satisfactory either. So how do you expect the expert to de-bias the system without some cost function?

I meant a cost function that the model trains on. The expert can look at the cost function to double-check whether the inputs are appropriate. Maybe the applicants' names got in there by mistake, and the names serve no purpose other than giving away their ethnicities.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#274

Post by orangepurple »

tsimionescu wrote: post #96
orangepurple wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people don't care about what doctor they get. I have heard endless stories from doctors that see patients all day where so many patients don't care about their own health to the point of having limbs amputated and shrugging it off like its no big deal. Or having complications from diabetes and declining free-to-them care. Not taking medication. There are so many of these people. They seem to be mostly on Medi…

Are you claiming that only the 3.9 GPA Harvard doctor is able to function in their profession?

No

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#275

Post by colinmhayes »

jimbokun wrote: post #238
jmull wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anti-meritocratic How do you measure merit, though? People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason. I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair? People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defi…

> People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Both of those have predictive value for success in university. So if "merit" means "well prepared to learn the material in a university curriculum", these are both useful measures for predicting it.

I’m not sure success at university is what they’re optimizing for though. Feel like it’s probably “expected lifetime donations”

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#276

Post by colinmhayes »

pcurve wrote: post #45

How well you do academically is influenced predominantly by genetics. It’s unfair to idolize these institution as something to aspire to and worship. Doing so is a gross misallocation of precious resources as a society. Instead they should be viewed as trade school for academically gifted. We should find different ways to harness the remaining 95 percentile. Striking it down would be the step in the right direction

How well you do academically is influenced primarily by parental involvement.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#277

Post by godelski »

hot_gril wrote: post #273
godelski wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using some statistical difference between races as a cost function wouldn't be satisfactory either. So how do you expect the expert to de-bias the system without some cost function?

I meant a cost function that the model trains on. The expert can look at the cost function to double-check whether the inputs are appropriate. Maybe the applicants' names got in there by mistake, and the names serve no purpose other than giving away their ethnicities.

> I meant a cost function that the model trains on. The expert can look at the cost function to double-check whether the inputs are appropriate.

Okay, but how is the expert going to judge that the outputs of the model are appropriate? What techniques do they use?

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#278

Post by hot_gril »

godelski wrote: post #277
hot_gril wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant a cost function that the model trains on. The expert can look at the cost function to double-check whether the inputs are appropriate. Maybe the applicants' names got in there by mistake, and the names serve no purpose other than giving away their ethnicities.

> I meant a cost function that the model trains on. The expert can look at the cost function to double-check whether the inputs are appropriate. Okay, but how is the expert going to judge that the outputs of the model are appropriate? What techniques do they use?

If the output seems to strongly favor some races over others, the expert debugs the inputs by temporarily swapping some out and rerunning. This is only a second line of defense beyond checking the inputs manually. Maybe the expert doesn't realize that some factor has a huge correlation with race without saying much about the candidate's merit.

Beyond that, if there's a divergence between races, it is what it is. The expert shares what factors are being considered, and it's politics at that point.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#279

Post by [deleted] »

dixie_land wrote: post #113
CJefferson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two students are under consideration to get into University to become surgeons. One student went to the most expensive private school and had private tuition. They recieved AAABB. Anothers student went to a poor school and never had private tuition and recieved ABBBB. Which should be accepted for a single University place?

The one with more As. Standardized tests are actually one of the most fair ways to evaluate two candidates. y = mx + b regardless of your skin color or family wealth. Is it perfect? no; is it more fair than the alternatives? I think so

[deleted]

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#280

Post by godelski »

hot_gril wrote: post #278
godelski wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I meant a cost function that the model trains on. The expert can look at the cost function to double-check whether the inputs are appropriate. Okay, but how is the expert going to judge that the outputs of the model are appropriate? What techniques do they use?

If the output seems to strongly favor some races over others, the expert debugs the inputs by temporarily swapping some out and rerunning. This is only a second line of defense beyond checking the inputs manually. Maybe the expert doesn't realize that some factor has a huge correlation with race without saying much about the candidate's merit. Beyond that, if there's a divergence between races, it is what it is. The…

> If the output seems to strongly favor some races over others,

You'd typically do this with a cost function.

> the expert debugs the inputs by temporarily swapping some out and rerunning.

The best way to do this is to use that cost function to optimize your parameters.

> Of course, could do this without race data just by proofreading.

I thought I've adequately demonstrated why this is much easier said than done.

> Beyond that, if there's a divergence between races, it is what it is.

Except it isn't. It depends if the divergence is because you've trained a model on poisoned data (i.e. the historical racism gives momentum to your model). These things are rather tricky.

It really feels like we're going in circles here and I'm trying to get you to understand why we do what we do, but you're avoiding getting specific to support your assumptions. I work with data all day every day. I'm sure you've done some data analysis too, but to do high quality work you have to consider a lot of factors. It's okay to not have this domain expertise. You're a general software engineer and probably far better than I am at that. But it is a bit naive to argue with domain experts about something that isn't in your domain. It would be naive for me to argue with you about your expertise. That's okay though. Our world is highly specialized. No one can know everything. But that's why I wrote so much before, because this is a toxic pattern in our culture that we need to curb.

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