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A Way to Detect Bias

paulgraham.com

201–210 of 224 posts

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#201
In which a crowd of overwhelmingly white male American SW engineers tries to find a mathematical explanation to bias...

"For Bourdieu, cultural capital is the status culture of a society's elite insofar as that group has embedded it in social institutions, so that it is widely and stably understood to be prestigious. Schools take it as a sign of native academic ability but do not themselves impart it, performing acts of social alchemy that transform class privilege into individual merit."

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#202
post #137

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)…

I like your proposal in theory but I doubt it works in practice. I'll try to explain: in practice what First Round has done is measuring post investment performance. I'm pretty sure that if the sample is big enough you will have an "all male" startup and a "with female" startup that failed thus the min being zero in both case. This doesn't mean there's no bias. The point is that when you decide which company you fina…

I discuss in a different comment the effect of additive noise. I admit I haven't worked out the details of the min statistic and additive noise yet. But I'm actually fairly bullish on it - this problem is mostly just simple statistics.

I also suspect that first rounds data is useless. PG is being too credible about it - I suspect he is just being political and making his post more PC, since he doesnt seem that statistically naive. (Taking a lesson from Sam Altman most likely.)

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So if Americans from race A commit ten times more violent crime than others and the police consequently accuse and manhandle vast numbers of innocent Americans of race A, there's nothing unjust about that? The vast majority of citizens of race A are innocent of all offenses but deserve constant suspicion and low level official humiliation and violence in a just world for no reason other than being the same color as s…

accuse and manhandle vast numbers of innocent Americans of race A

One doesn't need to advocate accusing and manhandling to think the police should use statistically valid inferences in the name of justice. I myself am a member of a minority group—men—that is responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of crime, especially violent crime. You could mandate that cops ignore this reality and treat men and women with equal suspicion, but the result would be worse policing. For example, if you look at the statistics for New York's supposedly racist "stop-and-frisk" policy, you'll find that the disparity between whites and blacks is smaller than the disparity between men and women—indeed, smaller even than the disparity between white men and black women. Why have you never heard stop-and-frisk described as "sexist"?

This inconsistency is best explained politically: complaining about racial injustice against blacks is an effective route to power; complaining about gender injustice against men is not. It's the same reason you hear constant complaints about how white tech is, but not about how black sports are. Jesse Jackson can effectively shake down Apple and Intel [1], but there is no white equivalent shaking down the NFL. (Can you imagine if "increasing diversity in the NFL" meant "increasing the relative proportion of white players"? It would be a different world—not, incidentally, one I would particularly want to live in.)

Being male means people will infer based on a superficial assessment that I'm more likely to be a criminal than, say, my sister. But that inference is correct. Being a member of such a group is my lot in life, and complaining doesn't change what is.

[1]: See, e.g., http://www.mercurynews.com/census/ci_29048321/q-jesse-jackso...

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#204

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…

A straightforward application of evolutionary biology to Homo sapiens yields group differences as the null hypothesis. You've done nothing but construct a ridiculous strawman to refute this. Moreover, discrimination and group differences aren't mutually exclusive—it's possible that Group X's underrepresentation in Field Y is the result of both discrimination and group differences. The only way to know for sure that i…

Thanks for literature and links. Hope I'll find the time to read this. The article from vdare.com seems really emotional to me. Not very reputable.

"Don`t believe any of this. It`s merely a politically-correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out to keep his life`s work — distinguishing the races of mankind and compiling their genealogies — from being defunded by the leftist mystagogues at Stanford."

"As you can imagine, this finding could get him in a bit of hot water if the campus thought police ever found out about it."

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#205
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Favoring fair outcome over having fair rules is against everything I believe. We should not strive for a participation trophy culture.

"Favoring fair outcome over having fair rules" Which essentially no one does? People favor fair outcome because they don't think the rules are, or can be, fair and often as a proxy for rules becoming more fair.

I disagree. Rephrasing the tradeoff a little, Westerners are not willing to accept bad outcomes as a matter of course. It is probably objectively fair for individuals to stop wearing seatbelts or to "responsibly" pursue a meth habit, but those things are still illegal.

The "fair" rules would probably be to let people do stupid things and accept their own consequences, but Western culture is not willing to let houses burn down because people didn't buy into the local fire department co-op.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A charitable interpretation of what he or she said is this: don't evaluate bias by looking at outcomes of the average applicant, look at the outcomes of the borderline applicants. That is fine, that is what he was saying. The point is that his solution is completely impractical for the original goal of finding an objective, statistically valid way of measuring whether bias exists. "Borderline" cannot be measured obje…

PG and I are assuming a measurable outcome, which the selection process is explicitly supposed to predict. I made no claims about practicality - right now all I have is a little bit of measure theory showing that pg's algo is, in principle, fixable. I fully agree that the first round capital data he cites is inadequate (and also wrong, due to the unjustified exclusion of uber, which they explicitly note would alter t…

OK I missed that you meant "easily fixed" in the strictly mathematical sense, not in the practical, real-world application sense.

With statistics on human affairs, 99% of the hard part is not the math, it is applying that math to a complicated, heterogenous, and difficult to measure underlying phenomena. And in most cases, statistics alone will never give you a straight answer, the best they can do is supplement and confirm qualitative observations. Failing to recognize this is how you get all those unending media reports about how X is bad for your health. PG's post was at the level of one of those junk health news articles.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#207
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bob: Can you give me an example? nl: Sure. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of blind' auditions with a screen' to conceal the identity of the candidate from the jury. Female musicians in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are 25% today. We ask wh…

I didn't say there are no valid examples of bias, just that many people assume unequal outcomes must result from unequal opportunity, ignoring the possibility of real group differences. Surely you know many real-life Alans who see bias every time a particular Group X is underrepresented in Field Y. Moreover, the values of X aren't random; you'll almost never hear complaints of bias regarding, say, trash haulers, or N…

Speculative explanations - i.e. assumptions - are not uncommonly offered in support of the proposition that there is no underlying bias. Nl provides a rare example of the assumptions being systematically investigated.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A straightforward application of evolutionary biology to Homo sapiens yields group differences as the null hypothesis. You've done nothing but construct a ridiculous strawman to refute this. Moreover, discrimination and group differences aren't mutually exclusive—it's possible that Group X's underrepresentation in Field Y is the result of both discrimination and group differences. The only way to know for sure that i…

Thanks for literature and links. Hope I'll find the time to read this. The article from vdare.com seems really emotional to me. Not very reputable. "Don`t believe any of this. It`s merely a politically-correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out to keep his life`s work — distinguishing the races of mankind and compiling their genealogies — from being defunded by the leftist mystagogues at Stanford."…

This may be a better place to start -- https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... and https://jaymans.wordpress.com/about/. VDare tends to preach and agitate to the already converted, that is the peril of having to survive on donations. That said, while Steve Sailer is snarky, he is also reputable. He takes good care to not get things wrong. I've been following him for a while, and when some bit of news comes out, or some new policy gets announced, and the NY Times says one thing, and Sailer says another, Sailer almost always ends up getting proved right.

If you want a book length treatment, Michael Hart's Understanding Human History is the complete opposite of the typical, Jared Diamond, environmentalist accounts of human society. It is worth perusing - https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/har...

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#209
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Favoring fair outcome over having fair rules is against everything I believe. We should not strive for a participation trophy culture.

This well-circulated image shows that making everyone a winner has merit in some circumstances. http://static.themetapicture.com/media/funny-equality-justic... The left hand side is fair rules, the right hand side shows a fair outcome

It's really more like this version of the image: http://i.imgur.com/DqKXPF3.png

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In practice, measure the weakest male and weakest female to be accepted in your sample set, or some similar approximation. In practice, where do you get these definitive unbiased measurements of the expected return of investing in an individual (or graduation probability or some other score)?

This test can be used after the fact, so you're not measuring expected return but actual return. It's pretty easy to measure actual return (or actual graduation rate, or actual GPA, etc.).

What test? We're talking about computing the minimum of what before-the-fact EV should be (based on what set of information?) here, not computing what the mean EV should be (for which you can add up the outcomes and divide by N).
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