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A Way to Detect Bias

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#171

Post by drumdance »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #130
superuser2 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apply Occam's Razor to these supposed group differences. Which do you think is a more plausible reality? A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men. B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men. To look at the present (incomplet…

Which is more plausible? a) the action of natural selection, sexual selection, and the hormone environment magically stop at the blood-brain barrier, or b) there are real group differences between human populations? We've already eliminated all overt discrimination. If you continue to cry discrimination, you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy. I find the idea wildly implausible. It's much simpl…

Women musicians started getting orchestra positions in much greater numbers after auditions were made blind.

If biases affect how a professional musician hears music, is it so shocking to think unconscious bias might affect someone's judgment a candidate based on multiple fuzzy factors like ability, culture, and personality?

And that's just for job applications. You really think the criminal justice system has removed unconscious bias?

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#172

Post by gammarator »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #130
superuser2 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apply Occam's Razor to these supposed group differences. Which do you think is a more plausible reality? A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men. B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men. To look at the present (incomplet…

Which is more plausible? a) the action of natural selection, sexual selection, and the hormone environment magically stop at the blood-brain barrier, or b) there are real group differences between human populations? We've already eliminated all overt discrimination. If you continue to cry discrimination, you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy. I find the idea wildly implausible. It's much simpl…

> you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy

Let me introduce you to the extensive scientific literature on implicit bias: http://www.aas.org/cswa/unconsciousbias.html

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#174

Post by grayclhn »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #96
tprice7 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MattHeard understood this and his point was that the weakest man will realistically have quality C + epsilon + random, and the weakest woman will have quality C + K + epsilon + random. The random term arises because no evaluation process is going to perfectly tell you how people are going to end up performing. But yeah, this seems fixable also, by averaging some number of the lowest performing members of each…

I'm not 100% sure how to deal with noise + extremal statistics. But I've got a 12 hour plane ride ahead of me tomorrow, so I can probably work out a fix.

I suspect the math is easier if you reframe the hypothesis to be about the derivatives: adding one more person from either group should have the same marginal effect on outcomes. As you get more observations you get more in a neighborhood of the cutoff which gives a consistent estimator of the derivative.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#175

Post by rewqfdsa »

pygy_ wrote: post #168
rewqfdsa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baseball game in the image wouldn't be worth if equality of outcome were the rule for baseball team tryouts. The entire game is based on fair competition under the rules pushing participants toward excellence. Inequality of outcome is the entire reason we see baseball played at a high level. When you demand equality of outcome regardless of talent or effort, you're asking for society to stagnate. You're asking fo…

You're beating a straw man. He said in some circumstances .

Yet he didn't list any or describe any criteria for evaluating them. The "in some circumstances" bit was just a way to weasel out of potential objections.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#176

Post by rewqfdsa »

gammarator wrote: post #172
rewqfdsa wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is more plausible? a) the action of natural selection, sexual selection, and the hormone environment magically stop at the blood-brain barrier, or b) there are real group differences between human populations? We've already eliminated all overt discrimination. If you continue to cry discrimination, you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy. I find the idea wildly implausible. It's much simpl…

> you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy Let me introduce you to the extensive scientific literature on implicit bias: http://www.aas.org/cswa/unconsciousbias.html

If the bias reflects a real Bayesian prior, it isn't the kind of bias that's unjust.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#177

Post by azakai »

eoi wrote: post #73
WildUtah wrote: post #20

On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…

The article defines bias as follows: > Want to know if the selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. It's what bias means. Under that definition, you have been biased against A. [edit: on reflection I see this as a weakness of his definition. I missed that your selection process does in fact select the best c…

>> This is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. It's what bias means.

> Under that definition

That's not a definition. It's a claim about what the term "bias" means.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#178

Post by Tarrosion »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #33

People, most of whom clearly are not that good at math, are being really harsh on Paul Graham. Graham is mostly right, but slightly incorrect. In particular, suppose group A has the distribution f(x) and B has the distribution g(x). If f(x) and g(x) are shaped significantly differently past the cutoff , then mean(H(x-C)f(x)) and mean(H(x-c)g(x)) might not agree even though there is no bias by construction. (Here H(x)…

In a grandchild comment, you note that how close the min of each group is to the cutoff depends on sample size. This is true, but I think it's deal-breakingly true.

Suppose we have to input groups, A and B. Members of each group are distributed as Exp(1), ie same underlying distribution. Our selection procedure is totally fair as well: we take everyone without question.

However, there are 9x as many people in group A as group B. So the min of group A accepted (= the min of all group A) will be distributed as Exp(9 * |B|) and the min of group B accepted will be distributed as Exp(|B|).

So in expectation the min from group A will be smaller than the min from B, and indeed this happens 90% of the time. (Aren't exponentials nice?)

Of course in this case we can note that this effect is from differences in sample size and exactly correct for it. But normally we will not know how to do this correction properly because we don't know the true underlying distribution or the acceptance criteria.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#179

Post by skj »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #176
gammarator wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy Let me introduce you to the extensive scientific literature on implicit bias: http://www.aas.org/cswa/unconsciousbias.html

If the bias reflects a real Bayesian prior, it isn't the kind of bias that's unjust.

Not so. Priors/posteriors are only as good as the model they're based on. For instance, if you choose parental income as the feature it will can be a stronger signal than skin color, even though both may be good predictors. But the correlation between the income and skin color can account for the predictive power of one feature when the other features is the true cause.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#180

Post by zodiac »

vog wrote: post #115
WildUtah wrote: post #20

On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…

> But we haven't been biased against A. [...] It was just their prior distribution that was different. This is why that isn't a counter example. Right at the beginning, the article clearly states that this method is only applicable if the prior distribution is equal: | You can use this technique whenever (a) [...], (b) [...], and (c) the groups of applicants you're looking at have roughly equal distribution of abilit…

AFAIK pg added that to the article after WildUtah made his comment, and pg acknowledges this in a reply to WildUtah
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