141–150 of 180 posts
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Race, in terms of physiology has never been regarded by science to be a social construct. In fact it can be medically harmful to think this way.
One of the reasons certain communities were hit harder with Covid was vit D deficiency as a consequence of skin color.
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One of the reasons certain communities were hit harder with Covid was vit D deficiency as a consequence of skin color.
That is one hypothesised cause for the disparity, social factors in those cases need to be controlled for. A better discussion is around sickle cell anaemia[0] which is exclusively carried by people of African or Afro-Caribbean descent. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
> Models trained on low-pass filtered images maintained high performance even for highly degraded images. More strikingly, models that were trained on high-pass filtered images maintained performance well beyond the point that the degraded images contained no recognisable structures; to the human coauthors and radiologists it was not clear that the image was an x-ray at all. What voodoo have they unearthed?
It's a whole field of research, and it's pretty trivial to generate them for most classes of ML models. It's actually quite difficult to create robust models that DON'T have this problem...
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There is no scientific, consistent way to define race. The groups we put people into is fairly arbitrary. They don't correlate to appearance, genetics, country of origin, etc. An interesting question in the U.S. is "who is considered white?" There was a Supreme Court case in which someone who was literally from the Caucasus was ruled not white. This is why it's sociological, not scientific. https://www.sceneonradio.o…
Alloco 2007 looked at random locations of single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs) and found that, using random SNPs, you still get very good correspondence between self-identification and best fit genetic cluster. Using as few as 100 randomly selected SNPs, they found a roughly 97% correspondence between self-reported ancestry and best-fit genetic cluster. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17349058/
What does this mean in terms of race being a social construct/concept?
I'm just going to abandon the term race because nothing constructive is going to come from it. It is not contentious that there are various physiological developments among groups of humans.
This is a very contrived way to say that people share characteristics with other people. The real question is why people don't say that I belong to the six-foot tall bad-knees race.
Not too surprising that physical differences across ethnicities are literally more than skin deep. It wouldn’t be shocking that a model could identify one’s ethnicity based on, for example, a microscope image of their hair; why should bone be any different? I’m more surprised that the distinguishing features haven’t been obvious to trained radiographers for decades. It would be cool to see a followup to this paper th…
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It still is. Just because it includes physical signifiers that can be measured doesn't mean it isn't still a social construct. To give a contrived example; if I say people with ring fingers over 3 inches long are Longfings and people wkth ring fingers 3 inches or less are Shortfings, and then out society treats people differently based on being Longfing or Shortfing, this is a social construct that is causing problem…
What if shortfings tend to be drastically taller, and the longfings are complaining that they're overrepresented in jumpball?
What does it mean for shortfings to be dramatically taller? Are you saying that shortfings must transmit height along with finger length; some sort of race invariance? Or are you saying that most shortfings you meet are also tall?
If a black person is a pale as a white person, they're still considered black (and may share many other characteristics that many black people have.) If some of your shortfings have long fingers, does the distinction still make sense as a scientific category?
> the longfings are complaining that they're overrepresented in jumpball?
Is admission to jumpball determined by finger measuring, or through social factors?
"This issue creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging: if an AI model relies on its ability to detect racial identity to make medical decisions, but in doing so produced race-specific errors, clinical radiologists would not be able to tell, thereby possibly leading to errors in health-care decision processes." Why would a model rely on its ability to detect racial identity to make decision…
Let's say you're trying to train an model to predict if a patient has a cancerous tumor based on some imaging data. You have a data set for this that includes images from people with tumors and people without, from all races. However, unbeknownst to you, most of the images from people of race X had tumors and most of the images from people of race Y did not have tumors. If the AI is also implicitly learning to detect…
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I'm just going to abandon the term race because nothing constructive is going to come from it. It is not contentious that there are various physiological developments among groups of humans.
> various physiological developments among groups This is a very contrived way to say that people share characteristics with other people. The real question is why people don't say that I belong to the six-foot tall bad-knees race.
I'm not here to tell you what to do. Use race then. I offered up why I think this article is only generating interest is because race is a loaded word, and if it weren't used, it'd be passed over.
> The real question is why people don't say that I belong to the six-foot tall bad-knees race
This is an article about ML accurately predicting self-identified race. This is not even on the spectrum of real questions.
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I could be entirely wrong here, so if you've got more context in this area by all means correct me. Consider an "AI" that rates the probability of recidivism for prisoners nearing their parole date. That score would then be presented to the parole board, and taken into consideration in determining whether or not to grant parole. If this AI were accidentally/incidentally accurately determining the race of the prisoner…
At the risk of discussing sensitive topics on a platform ill-suited: If, in your hypothetical recidivism case, an AI "accurately" determined that a pattern of higher recidivism-related features was correlated to race, and was able to determine "accurately" that the specific subset of recidivism-related features predicted race, why would it be wrong to make parole decisions using those recidivism-related features?
edit: imagine I was a teacher who systematically scored people with certain physical characteristics 10% lower than people who didn't have them. Let's say, for example, that I was a stand-up comedy teacher that wasn't amused by women.
If I used an AI trained on that data to choose future admissions (assuming plentiful applicants), I would end up with an all-male class. If this happened throughout the industry (especially noting that the all-male enrollment that I have would supply the teachers of the future), stand-up comedy would simply become a thing that women were seen as not having the aptitude to do, although nobody explicitly ever meant to sabotage women, just to direct them into something that they would have a better chance to succeed in.