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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#121

Post by runako »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #117
542458 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies! Agreed, and upvotes too! It seems like I've struck upon something people have been interested in talking about. > 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 subject…

> when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost always in the context of denying biological differences between the races in the same way that some extreme (though mainstream and influential)

Racial segregationists in the Americas literally had to write laws delineating races based on factors external to that individual (e.g. their parentage). That is: even people who believed in a racial hierarchy also believed it was not possible to objectively identify a person's race without knowing e.g. the races of that person's parents.

Race has never been considered a generally observable fact about a person.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#122

Post by OneEyedRobot »

goatlover wrote: post #115
OneEyedRobot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture are typically conflated into just race... I'd say that that only occurs in the odd case of 'Latino'. For some reason Spanish-speaking got amalgamated into a thing it didn't belong.

It happens for Europeans too. White has come to mean everyone of European descent, even though there's tons of ethnic, historical and regional differences across the continent. Asia even more so. Africa is also very diverse when you take into account Northern Africa. The whole Mediterranean area had lots of groups moving around for thousands of years across three continents.

>White has come to mean everyone of European descent

I'd be surprised if anyone in Europe even thought of themselves as 'white' until (perhaps) the post-WWII era. Wogs begin at Calais.

>Africa is also very diverse when you take into account Northern Africa.

I suppose that you could consider North Africa as a separate continent given the bordering desert. My understanding is that sub-Saharan Africa has more real-deal genetic diversity in human populations than the rest of the world put together (which makes sense given it's age).

Obviously race is a real thing. Either a giant tree of relatedness with clusters of appearance + small construction differences or simply a way to form self-interested groups (go to any prison for 10 minutes). The fascination with it as of late is unfortunate, but I'm not sure if it's a reflection of resource depletion/overpopulation, a wave of quasi-religion, or people simply forming up teams for a big fight.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#123

Post by foldr »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #109
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…

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…

Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discriminated against on the basis of their race.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#124

Post by soundnote »

ggggtez wrote: post #59
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…

It's not a surprise that race effects how someone looks. It doesn't take a genius to see things like different colored skin, different nose, or height differences... The question is what about the looks of a chest X-ray are connected to race. I agree with the research here, it's non obvious what is being extracted by the AI. If I had to guess, maybe something about the quality of the scan itself. Perhaps one race was…

Or: Race is a rough proxy for breeding populations that have been separated for long time, and subject to different environments' selection pressure. Over time, selection and blind luck build up all manner of small differences, which both observably exist at the surface (so why not inside the body) and that you'd expect to exist from basic evolutionary principles. You'd expect a Norwegian forest cat, a Saharan desert cat and a Burmese to be different in innumerable small ways because they grow up in totally different environments. You'd also expect there to be a lot of overlapping, well, catness to them all. Lions purr, after all. There's nothing complicated about any of it, humans just tie themselves into knots when it comes to humans in a way they don't when it comes to cats.

With that said, the simple explanation is that the AI picks up on these small patterns in a way humans don't. The brain and neural networks are fundamentally pattern-recognition engines. The AI is just seeing something we don't either notice or can't see.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#125

Post by commandlinefan »

jollybean wrote: post #44
sillyquiet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do…

> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today

I wonder about that... I can't tell the difference between, say, a male octopus and a female octopus, but octopi can. Maybe the differences that seem so obvious to us are actually almost imperceptible outside of our species.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#126

Post by commandlinefan »

sillyquiet wrote: post #70
jollybean wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do…

> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. Whatever categorization they came up with would most certainly not resemble what we consider racial categories today.

"I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus." -- Agent Smith

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#127

Post by ceejayoz »

soundnote wrote: post #124
ggggtez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a surprise that race effects how someone looks. It doesn't take a genius to see things like different colored skin, different nose, or height differences... The question is what about the looks of a chest X-ray are connected to race. I agree with the research here, it's non obvious what is being extracted by the AI. If I had to guess, maybe something about the quality of the scan itself. Perhaps one race was…

Or: Race is a rough proxy for breeding populations that have been separated for long time, and subject to different environments' selection pressure. Over time, selection and blind luck build up all manner of small differences, which both observably exist at the surface (so why not inside the body) and that you'd expect to exist from basic evolutionary principles. You'd expect a Norwegian forest cat, a Saharan desert…

> Lions purr, after all.

They do not, actually. Incapable of it; cheetahs are the only big cats that can do it.

https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/1995/Questio...

> Purring ability, rather than size or behavior, is one of two chief distinctions between the two main genera of cat, Felis and Panthera.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#128

Post by shadowgovt »

This is probably a great time to remind everyone that the reason the blood types are A, B, AB, and O (as opposed to, say, A, B, C, D or another nomenclature) is that when the first blood type experiments were run, only people with A and B protein configurations were available for testing in the lab where the tests were executed.

I'd be very cautious drawing sweeping conclusions from research like this. The researchers have a heavy burden to prove that what they don't mean is "recognizes race in this training dataset."

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#129

Post by desktopninja »

Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AI%20has%20the%20worst%20super...

Personally think 'race' is nothing more than a fantastical vanity construct. Really its tribalism. Furthermore, I find it hard as well to comprehend how it holds weight in the medical industry. Race is not real science. Race is entertainment science. AI is mostly entertainment science.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#130

Post by heywherelogingo »

sillyquiet wrote: post #108
btbuildem wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked. White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart very well. Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have the same prejudices associated with that mark…

No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a feature. For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans, Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs, etc etc.

But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?
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