5 ms·

I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but, I've heard from people who have that it's STILL extremely common for black customers to be considered undesir

I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but, I've heard from people who have that it's STILL extremely common for black customers to be considered undesirable. I.e. a server will get upset at a host(ess) if they get "too many" black customers assigned to their tables. Why? Servers claim that black customers - on average - tip less. I don't know how prevalent this belief on the part of servers is. And I don't know how much of a numerically accurate basis in reality it has. But, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that there exists an identifiable group [black people, star trek fans, old people, dentists, ...] that are likely to lead a server to go home with less money at the end of the night. There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism". Where it gets even more complicated is that there might be variables which are not expressed as "is the customer black" which ultimately predict/are highly correlated with the question "is the customer black" - but are also predictive of the question "is the customer profitable".

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism". There's no line. Learning and bias are the same thing.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  The question is whether the bias is actually justified by experience.
  - geofft 10y ago
    Should it be legal to discriminate against a race if you have data indicating that they're economically disadvantaged?
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Society's answer to that is a resounding "sometimes".
geofft 10y ago
I don't think there's a line between machine learning and bias. In the example I gave (black Americans in the 1960s), I'm pretty confident that any working machine-learning algorithm would conclude that this population is economically disadvantaged and therefore a less-profitable target market. Such a conclusion would also reinforce structural racism. And that's the way we treated this in the 1960s. The government didn't ask Woolworth whether they had legitimate economic reason to refuse to seat those black college students, or whether their objection was based on them being college students, or because they only ordered coffee and not a meal, or anything else. As long as the effect of your policy was that you were discriminating on race, it became illegal. It doesn't matter whether you had valid reasoning based on race and economic status being correlated, or you were a card-carrying Klansman. A good-faith policy that discriminated on race is still illegal. It seemed to work pretty well, and I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions. The fact that we can now offload these decisions to algorithms (which aren't likely to be "racist" in the conventional sense) instead of humans shouldn't change things.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions It's probably worth pointing out that the restaurateurs didn't have the ability to make those decisions; that was the point of the Jim Crow legal regime. Left to themselves, they kept wanting to serve blacks.
  - geofft 10y ago
    Hm. At least for the Woolworth sit-in, my impression was that this was store policy, and I'm not finding any source saying that Woolworth was in violation of any law when they gave into the boycott and dropped their policy. But you're right that Jim Crow laws involved mandatory segregation, and that the sit-in was a protest against those laws. Good point, I'm not entirely sure what happened there!

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism". There's no line. Learning and bias are the same thing.

Dylan16807 10y ago
The question is whether the bias is actually justified by experience.
- geofft 10y ago
  Should it be legal to discriminate against a race if you have data indicating that they're economically disadvantaged?
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Society's answer to that is a resounding "sometimes".

geofft 10y ago

I don't think there's a line between machine learning and bias. In the example I gave (black Americans in the 1960s), I'm pretty confident that any working machine-learning algorithm would conclude that this population is economically disadvantaged and therefore a less-profitable target market. Such a conclusion would also reinforce structural racism. And that's the way we treated this in the 1960s. The government didn't ask Woolworth whether they had legitimate economic reason to refuse to seat those black college students, or whether their objection was based on them being college students, or because they only ordered coffee and not a meal, or anything else. As long as the effect of your policy was that you were discriminating on race, it became illegal. It doesn't matter whether you had valid reasoning based on race and economic status being correlated, or you were a card-carrying Klansman. A good-faith policy that discriminated on race is still illegal. It seemed to work pretty well, and I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions. The fact that we can now offload these decisions to algorithms (which aren't likely to be "racist" in the conventional sense) instead of humans shouldn't change things.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions It's probably worth pointing out that the restaurateurs didn't have the ability to make those decisions; that was the point of the Jim Crow legal regime. Left to themselves, they kept wanting to serve blacks.
- geofft 10y ago
  Hm. At least for the Woolworth sit-in, my impression was that this was store policy, and I'm not finding any source saying that Woolworth was in violation of any law when they gave into the boycott and dropped their policy. But you're right that Jim Crow laws involved mandatory segregation, and that the sit-in was a protest against those laws. Good point, I'm not entirely sure what happened there!