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I'm very aware that I'm a HN novice, but can I ask why my post title was edited? The new title is much less descriptive, and x-rays are different from medical images, after all.
(Also, the paper covers other kinds of medical images, not just X-rays.)
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…
Why would these narcissists even publish results this bad?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 heavil…
That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do…
Further features that seem very important to us like the shape of our eyes or skin tone may seem irrelevant to a creature which doesn’t have a face and sees the world in a different color spectrum than we do. They might group based on smell or habitat marking groups of urban, suburban, and country dwellers.
I'm very aware that I'm a HN novice, but can I ask why my post title was edited? The new title is much less descriptive, and x-rays are different from medical images, after all.
I don't know what the original title was, but in general the original title of the web page or paper is preferred (see the HN guidelines page). (Also, the paper covers other kinds of medical images, not just X-rays.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do…
> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the grouping we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. An alien taxonomist, perhaps. We humans go "bug! whale! snake! cow!" most of the time even for species found here on our own planet.
We would even name the sub-groups firstly the artifacts that differentiate them physically.
Blue Whale, Grey Whale
Black Bear, Brown Bear.
As we develop a better understanding, we'd also probably later determine that the genetic differences may not map very well to the physical attributes ... but due to historical groupings based on visual cues, we'd continue to overstate/understate the differences in the textbooks and in pop culture.
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…
If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture are typically conflated into just race, then "race is a social construct" is fairly logical.
I'd say that that only occurs in the odd case of 'Latino'. For some reason Spanish-speaking got amalgamated into a thing it didn't belong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? What do you mean, not working? That the AI was randomly choosing the correct race 82% of the time by luck? I'm confused by what your implying because it would seem to me that the authors went through many steps to try to pinpoint how the AI was doing this identification and how baffling it was to everyone that even with a lot of x-ray information removed (8x8 pixels compared to say 4k), it somehow was still corr…
> That the AI was randomly choosing the correct race 82% of the time by luck? No; as with the article I linked elsewhere in the thread ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-fr... ), that the AI might have found some other indicator, like filenames in the data set, or metadata in the images that included patient name, or differences in the length of patient name (often redacted by black rectangle…
The paper quite explicitly goes into testing and disseminating what exactly the AI detects. Two observations:
- the classification clearly was primarily based on the visual content rather than spurious metadata, because various transformations of the visual content had the expected impact on classification correctness
- the classification clearly wasn't based on one specific feature of the visual content but rather on multiple factors in the visuals, because various transformations to features (including masking out specific features like bone density) produced results matching expectations (usually gradual decrease in accuracy, with some thresholds).
Conversely, if the classification was primarily based on factors other than the visual content, the visual transformations would have had negligible effect - possibly up to a threshold, and then would throw the AI completely off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I'm not sure how your link applies to this situation. That refers to an interesting way an AI encoded data in an image. The issue here is that this data _exists in the first place_. Whether the AI learned to compress the racial data into an 8x8 picture is besides the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 heavil…
That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do…
Whatever categorization they came up with would most certainly not resemble what we consider racial categories today.