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Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

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Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#241

Post by donmcronald »

dmurray wrote: post #222
donmcronald wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since computers are unbiased, the idea is that machine learning is also unbiased. However, that's not true and, if anything, it actually re-enforces a lot of bias. I've never done any, but my understanding is that machine learning is just correlation. It's good at figuring out "what", but not "why". Consider training an algorithm to recognize horses by feeding it millions of pictures of horses. Eventually, the algori…

> Now, apply the same kind of idea and feed an algorithm mugshots of all criminals. It's going to develop the same bias and tell you that a black person is more likely to be a criminal than a white person. No. Nobody training an ML system to detect criminals would train it only with pictures of criminals. And if you somehow did, it wouldn't determine that black people are more likely to be criminals, but that humans…

How would you even start to build a ML training dataset that isn't biased by the discriminatory policing the US has seen for the last 50 years?

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#242

Post by donmcronald »

vngzs wrote: post #165
donmcronald wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since computers are unbiased, the idea is that machine learning is also unbiased. However, that's not true and, if anything, it actually re-enforces a lot of bias. I've never done any, but my understanding is that machine learning is just correlation. It's good at figuring out "what", but not "why". Consider training an algorithm to recognize horses by feeding it millions of pictures of horses. Eventually, the algori…

I share your concerns. I am of the opinion that we shouldn't be using machine learning algorithms to make decisions of consequence in people's lives without filtering those decisions through human operators. You can use machine learning to assist these human operators and empower them to do much more work than without the technology. But at the end of the day, you still have someone to hold responsible, and you still…

> You can use machine learning to assist these human operators and empower them to do much more work than without the technology. But at the end of the day, you still have someone to hold responsible, and you still have checks on the ML doing something profoundly unethical.

I would, but the people in charge won't. Some of my family members MUST chat with a crappy bot before they can get support from their mobile phone provider and that's in Canada where we pay an astronomical amount of money for our phones/plans.

A penny saved is a penny earned, even if it costs someone else a dollar.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#243

Post by mschuster91 »

to11mtm wrote: post #159
mschuster91 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that healthcare workers, firefighters and police should be the first ones to get the shots - and directly after them, politicians should, and that mandatory . Get the shot or lose your seat. There are large parts of the population who say they won't get vaccinated because they're afraid that politicians exploit them as "guinea pigs" (especially the PoC community has a really bad history, e.g. Tuskegee syphili…

I like your list. I really hope to see a program where 'front-line workers' (i.e. grocery store workers/etc as opposed to 'first responders') are given priority -and- financial assistance to receive the vaccine if they so choose to.

> -and- financial assistance to receive the vaccine if they so choose to.

A decent government should fund vaccinations out of taxpayer money. It's simply way more cost-effective than having people around who want but can't afford vaccination and then society has to pay many orders of magnitude more for treating the illness...

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#244

Post by asQuirreL »

bosswipe wrote: post #149
fragmede wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As computer scientists and adjacent, we have a whole taxonomy for algorithms. It should be noted that "sort by salary" is an algorithm.

If the set of rules are defined by humans and then those rules are coded into a SQL statement is it really an algorithm? If the humans define the rules and later they realize the rules are bad it's not the sorting algorithm that caused the problem.

I've got to be honest, I answered yes to both your rhetorical "are these algorithms?" questions, which I'm guessing was not your intention. It would help if you gave some examples of what is missing in each case (in your eyes) disqualifying them.

With the SQL example:

I don't think a set of rules is disqualified from being called an algorithm if it's implemented using some other tool or process, because we do this all the time: when programming, we split up implementations into functions, or we could have used the standard library's sort function too -- I would still consider it an algorithm no matter how the "sort the results" step ended up being implemented.

If the result is wrong, it is not necessarily because the implementation of SQL's ORDER BY is incorrect (it could be but it's unlikely for a popular SQL implementation), and if you know that the the rules are incorrect then I agree, I definitely wouldn't blame the sorting algorithm (at least initially, although it's possible it's also be wrong).

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#245

Post by jahaja »

WalterBright wrote: post #188

Under 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.

A socialist system adamantly defending their intellectual property to prevent poor countries from developing generics? Sounds pretty rare.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#246

Post by jrochkind1 »

reaperducer wrote: post #160
bosswipe wrote: post #118

Earlier 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 guess they do deserve some credit for prioritizing food service workers and such who are in high-contact situations, not just medical workers!

In addition to having a bug for residents without designated units (which again, how did they not test it on a sample set including residents?), it sounds like they maybe weighted age (or department?) too much compared to job description. It doesn't seem like an older physician that is working from home should be weighted higher than nearly anyone working every day in the hospital, regardless of age or if other people in their department working in the hospital got sick already.

It seems like amount of contact with patients should have been weighted far higher than anything else (patients for elective procedures are required to get a virus test first, so amount of contact with untested patients like in ER, or covid+ patients like those who need to care for them, even higher). But I'm not a doctor or medical ethicist. If Stanford has a reason for not doing that, they can, well, explain it, if they want to look better. It makes me figure it was just not done very carefully.

It seems to me that formula was just not very good. While it's technically an "algorithm", sure, I think most of us in the field would just call that a "formula" not an algorithm. I think they use the phrase "algorithm" precisely because to the layperson it seems more mysterious, more sophisticated, more complicated, harder to question, less obvious that was just something humans did, possibly not very carefully.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#247

Post by edmundsauto »

ghaff wrote: post #182
edmundsauto wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were there?

No. But I have been in a great many meetings where decisions were "designed."

What makes you believe your experience is generalizable to other situations?

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#248

Post by raadore »

Here’s another algorithm screwup: https://www.who.int/news/item/14-12-2020-who-information-not...

Oh, wait, no more need for false PCR tests, we have vaccines now. Forget testing, they’re wrong anyway, everyone get in line for a dose of nothing.

The good news appearing in media recently are the high percentage of people all over the world against being vaccinated, it means the human reason algorithm is still top notch.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#249

Post by derbOac »

reader_mode wrote: post #190
derbOac wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right -- I didn't mean to imply that... I just meant that there's some predictive information in the bias the algorithm can take advantage of.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#250

Post by jtbayly »

koeng wrote: post #21
jtbayly wrote: post #11

Why should residents who are young and very low risk be a high priority? The answer is simple. They shouldn’t. This is absurd to complain about. Lots of other people should be higher priority. Edit: I’m not surprised at the downvotes, but I’m just laughing. It’s like everybody’s brain has turned to mush! How on earth do you expect them to prioritize these vaccines if not based on age and other risk factors?

“ Residents are doctors in training, who have graduated from medical school.” It’s because you didn’t read the article. Residents are doctors in training, not just people living there - and they are interacting with sick people.

I’m fully aware of what a resident is, which is why I assumed that nearly all of them are young. Mostly they are under 30 because they just finished medical school.
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