I have one question: was the "algorithm" an excel scorecard? I bet it was
Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
181–190 of 251 posts
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#182Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#183> "[A]lgorithms are made by people and the results ... were reviewed multiple times by people," You got that right. The way they talk about "an algorithm did it" makes it seem as as if they think that somehow explains it, like there was only one algorithm possible handed down from god or something. We'll be seeing more and more of this of course. "We can't be blamed, it was an algorithm! We can't be blamed for trusti…
My pet peeve is when people present averages with no care. If the average is is the result they want to see they assume everything is fine under the hood.
There's so many lessons why that is terrible, like the fighter cockpit design history, and yet it's super common for people to stop all inquisition when the average shows them what they hope is true across all subgroups.
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way they used machine learning here. My guess it was some simple rules like older doctors go first. I wouldn't even call it an algorithm. I think algorithm is a weasly way for the administrator to make it sound more complicated then it was.
My guess it was some simple rules like older doctors go first No need to guess. "It used an algorithm that assigned each person a crude risk score, taking into account factors such as age, job description and the number of coronavirus cases that had been detected in their hospital department. That resulted in personnel like environmental services workers, food service workers and older employees being shuttled to the…
I really don't think you can call that an algorithm, it's a set of human defined rules. You could call it a formula, but an algorithm implies a series of steps which are not present here.
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#185Evidence like this suggest that medical leadership for the most part care very little about house officers (residents), and that is pretty universal. Our institution built a new billion dollar hospital and did not include call rooms. Great job.
Not surprising, unfortunately. Our "call room" in one hospital during residency was a utility closet. There are mandates of what to do, but hospitals routinely ignore them. Who will report problems? No resident wants to have their program lose accreditation.
Our program director (in psychiatry) always pointed out that psychiatry had one of the highest rates of people going over the 80 hour-per-week limit in the health system. It was much more uncommon for us than for most of our colleagues, but we tended to report it on the rare occasion it happened. My surgical colleagues who went over the limit were asked to meet with their program director when it happened, and it was much easier just to "round down."
Glad I did a residency, but mine was relatively easy. I probably wouldn't have made it through some programs.
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
An algorithm is clearly a virtual scapegoat. They’ll need to interview those who were involved in coding it. Dig deeper to find out why.
The quoted explanation sounds pretty complete to me. They used "assigned location" to determine who was working with COVID patients, but residents don't have an "assigned location", so they were incorrectly passed over even though they do in practice work with COVID patients. Maybe that doesn't completely exonerate the administrators from blame, because someone should have sanity checked the plan, but it also seems l…
They had time to build the algo but no time to proof check the selection?
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The takeaway is the model has bias. It’s up to humans to decide what to do with that information. Depending on the input “homemaker” may be a technically reasonable output. Should we use such a model to suggest career paths to high school students? Or should we reevaluate the methodology?
Who cares about ML when we already do that: https://www.slideshare.net/yuyomajadero/jobs-occupations-pro...
The danger is in thinking ML can magically see past human biases and/or is not subject to it’s own types of bias.
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#188Under a capitalist system, resources are allocated to those most willing to pay for it.
Under a socialist system, resources are allocated to those with the most political power.
Under an anarchist system, resources are allocated to those with the most firepower.
The vaccine is being distributed under a socialist system. Nobody should be surprised at the results.
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#189Under a capitalist system, resources are allocated to those most willing to pay for it. Under a socialist system, resources are allocated to those with the most political power. Under an anarchist system, resources are allocated to those with the most firepower. The vaccine is being distributed under a socialist system. Nobody should be surprised at the results.
didn't know stanford was located in a socialist country, or does it have an anti-capitalism force field around it?
Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not a native speaker and I don't think I understand the quote. What should "money laundering for bias mean"?
Money laundering is a crime in which one takes money or goods taken through criminal activities (e.g., theft) and sends it through some process, usually a cover, like a business or something, to make it appear legitimate. More generally, it refers to the process by which money or resources obtained through ethically questionable means is passed through layers of other activities so as to obscure its original source.…
> You set up some algorithm that relies on the bias to make predictions or classifications. Now you can say it's not you that's biased, it's just the algorithm.
It's not that you set up the algorithm to rely on the bias - ML trains on data produced by a biased system and ends up building a model containing the same biases - you don't need to "set-up" anything - if you're fine with the existing biases you can "launder" them through ML.