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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#21

Post by torben-friis »

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…

Race in the context of physical differences does not map to the social concepts of race.

For example, US documents usually include Latino as a possible race, even though Latin Americans are white, black, indigenous Americans, or a mix - and Spaniards are what usually would be classified as white. If you check older forms you'd see Italians and Irish people categorized as a different (non white) category, etc.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#22

Post by roflc0ptic »

ceejayoz wrote: post #17
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 can be both real physiological differences and a social construct, as "what level of bone density tips you from x to y" becomes a question, as does "is an x person with calcium deficiency actually a y person" sort of things that are obviously not the case.

As someone with a scientific bent who is of the left, I always find it incredibly frustrating when people say “x is a social construct”, because it’s technically true, but also utterly elides the dual nature of the category. Race is a social construct that can be used to infer true things (probabilities) about the real world! Other social constructs that have this property: sociology, economics, physics…

This isn’t to say a lot of people who are into race science don’t wildly overstate their claims, but there isn’t literally nothing to it.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#23

Post by curiousllama »

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…

I think everyone would agree that there are some pretty obvious biological racial markers that differentiate racial groups. Skin color comes to mind :)

The social construct argument just says that the specific categories and lines we draw are fairly arbitrary. Why is an afghani middle eastern (white?) but a Pakistani south-Asian? Is a Russian from Vladivostok really more closely related to a brit than a Mongolian? Idk - but, to me, the social construct argument just says “who cares? The specific groupings are pretty arbitrary anyway”

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#24

Post by jghn »

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…

"race" as we use it colloquially is a lot less fine grained than biological differences between humans. For instance there's not a monolithic genomic signature around "black" or "white" and yet those are categories we use for "race".

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#25

Post by dahfizz »

happytoexplain wrote: post #19
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…

Yes, some anatomical differences are certainly affected by environment, but the quoted phrase is typically used in the context of treating races differently based on behavior ("X people are immoral", "Y people are stupid"). It's meant to encourage people to treat each other with equity and consider that such observed differences may be distorted by news, your like-minded cohorts, sociological conditions, etc, which a…

> since clearly the idea that races have anatomical differences is not contested by anybody

This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this article by the scientific american[1]:

> Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning.

This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine race from an x-ray.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#27

Post by 542458 »

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…

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 cultural context) perceptions most of the time, but that doesn't make it a rigid natural phenomenon.

For example, I could build a classifier that looks at household finances and decides if people are lower, middle, or upper-class. I'd bet that I could get it good enough that most people off the street would agree with the results most of the time. However, that doesn't make "social class" some sort of objective, unchanging, universal truth. Somebody from 100 years ago would probably find us all to be upper-class. Somebody from the far-flung future would (hopefully) find us mostly to be near-destitute.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#28

Post by sillyquiet »

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…

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 heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'.

Putting it another way, if we were alien visitors, and had in front of us a representative sample of dead bodies from the entire world, we would be hard pressed to sort those bodies into 'races' based on biological features.

For example, we currently use melanin levels as a key indicator of 'race' today, but an alien, lacking the social context of the significance of say, high levels of melanin, may well consider it a secondary feature since its shared with otherwise unrelated people

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#30

Post by ceejayoz »

dahfizz wrote: post #25
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, some anatomical differences are certainly affected by environment, but the quoted phrase is typically used in the context of treating races differently based on behavior ("X people are immoral", "Y people are stupid"). It's meant to encourage people to treat each other with equity and consider that such observed differences may be distorted by news, your like-minded cohorts, sociological conditions, etc, which a…

> since clearly the idea that races have anatomical differences is not contested by anybody This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this article by the scientific american[1]: > Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological mean…

> This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine race from an x-ray.

Not necessarily; they could easily reflect societal differences. Bone density could be affected by diet, or medical care received, or environmental factors in poor neighborhoods, which might easily vary by race without there being a genetic cause for that variance.

If it were a simple "all black people have a bone density of 3; all white people have a bone density of 2" you could pretty solidly conclude a biological component, but we're in the realm of small variances and probabilities that confound things quite a bit.

I think the most likely explanation for these results is something like https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-fr..., personally. Especially with the 8x8 pixelation example.

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