4 ms·

I think it's useful to figure out why there are discrepancies between two groups. For example, let's take blacks in the US. The data tells you that a black per

by tomp 10y ago

I think it's useful to figure out why there are discrepancies between two groups. For example, let's take blacks in the US. The data tells you that a black person is more likely to be a criminal than a white person. There are two possible reasons for this: (1) blacks are more prone to crime, or (2) blacks are more likely to live in circumstances that make them criminals. With access to only anecdotal data, I strongly believe that (2) is true, and that if you took into account enough circumstances (e.g. single parent, school district, income level, parents' wealth) you'd be able to remove race from your model and still arrive to the "equal opportunity" result. That way, you wouldn't discriminate based on race, but you would still help the people most needy of help (poor, uneducated, etc.). I think the same applies to colege applications and sex wage gap, which is why I strongly oppose any kind of affirmative action. Life expentancy sex gap might be a different case. IIRC, men die earlier because of some behavioural/social tendencies (working dangerous jobs, supressing emotions, risky behaviour (speeding, smoking)), so maybe there are some non-discriminatory (or at least less-discriminatory) ways of determining life expectancy (e.g. testosterone level, job description, ...). However, there are also biological differences that seem very strongly linked to the quality of being male (i.e. the Y chromosome). E.g. prostate cancer is less lethal than breast cancer, and women are more likely to get MS than men. These particular examples suggest that men should live longer, but I'm guessing there might be other gender-specific ilnesses that might reduce their (our) expected lifespan. If that's the case, I don't think it's too discriminatory to have different insurance fees for different sexes. In all such scenarios, however, there could still be broader societal goals that would override specific instances of (non-)discrimination. For exapmle, AFAIK women's health is more expensive (because of pregnancy), but having more children benefits everyone in the society (in the West), so it makes sense to "discriminate" against men by letting women pay less for their health insurance.

corey_moncure 10y ago
> The data tells you that a black person is more likely to be a criminal than a white person. There are two possible reasons for this: I'd like to add a third possible reason for your consideration. Since "criminality" i.e. guilt of committing a crime is determined after a process engaging the law enforcement and justice systems, we have to examine whether there are inherent biases in those systems that result in skewed statistics. For instance, do police officers selectively target blacks for monitoring and investigation? Are blacks discriminated against in the courtroom as a result of procedure or human nature?
- zmoreira 10y ago
  This is studiable and has been studied. A study regarding police killings, for example: Do White Police Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189&download=yes https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189&... Using a unique data set we link the race of police officers who kill suspects with the race of those who are killed across the United States. We have data on a total of 2,699 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect. For the estimates where we know the race of the officer who killed the suspect, the ratio of the rate that blacks are killed by black versus white officers is large — ranging from 3 to 5 times larger. However, because the media may under report the officer’s race when black offic-ers are involved, other results that account for the fact that a disproportionate number of the un-known race officers may be more reliable. They indicate no statistically significant difference be-tween killings of black suspects by black and white officers. Our panel data analysis that looks at killings at the police department level confirms this. These findings are inconsistent with taste-based racial discrimination against blacks by white police officers. Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    There are a lot of different questions here, though. This study only addresses one. There are lots of ways for the system to be racially skewed/biased without being a product of personal bias - so many that I think the focus on "racist police" makes it hard to recognize a lot of easily-provable problems. Stop-and-frisk is my go-to example of a system that produces bias regardless of the race or biases of the officers involved. In theory, it's an efficient use of limited police resources, it can be implemented race-blind, and it "only catches criminals". There's room to talk about harassment of non-criminals, but at least regarding the people who get arrested its an understandable idea. In practice, criminality is a product of conviction. Stop-and-frisk mostly catches 'possession' crimes like personal-use drugs and illegal weapons (and since a 3-inch pocketknife is illegal in many cities, we shouldn't mistake this for violent intent). As a result, living in a stop-and-frisk area massively increases your odds of being charged with a low-grade crime - it's not as though carrying marijuana or a Leatherman is rare among un-policed groups. Even if you attempt a crude race-blind implementation, like policing based on neighborhood crime rate, you end up with a vicious cycle where crime rates are high because enforcement is high. So I think we do a disservice when we limit our discussion and investigation to officer bias. Even when it's not present, it's still easy to build an unequal system.
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SerLava 10y ago
>if you took into account enough circumstances (e.g. single parent, school district, income level, parents' wealth) you'd be able to remove race from your model and still arrive to the "equal opportunity" result. That way, you wouldn't discriminate based on race, but you would still help the people most needy of help (poor, uneducated, etc.). This is pretty much the only way to help people who were born addicted to meth inside a trailer in the mountains who also happen to be blessed with being white.
FT_intern 10y ago
(2) is not completely true because some impoverished communities are more prone to commit crimes than others. Biologically, (1) is not true. Culturally, it may be true. Impoverished black people idolize and preach a culture that encourages crimes and the precursors that make criminal actions more likely.
- chronic6l 10y ago
  Say what you want about biological plausibility. But in other cultures/countries around the world, Blacks consistently underperform (any metric you like: marriage success, salary, mortality rate, graduation, etc.) compared to other ethnic groups. What will convince you it is in fact a biological difference? Despite what the American declaration of independence says (whether you are American or not), no, not all people were born or created equally. Additionally, of the ones born equally, they do not have equal rights or opportunities to pursue of happiness.
mspeedy 10y ago
> if you took into account enough circumstances (e.g. single parent, school district, income level, parents' wealth) you'd be able to remove race from your model and still arrive to the "equal opportunity" result. The problem is, when given access to a large number of classifiers, some of which have inevitably been affected by a pre-existing racial bias, a black box machine learning algorithm will likely become discriminatory as well if race is not in some way represented and equalized. For instance, many justice systems in the U.S. use machine learning software to determine the likelihood that a criminal will reoffend, and use that prediction to determine sentencing. Race is never used explicitly as a classifier, but the program ended up being significantly more likely to rate blacks as more likely to reoffend [1]. Classifiers like "had parents with previous criminal convictions" can be misleading when blacks are more likely to be convicted for the same crime as whites. It doesn't mean that the white person's parents didn't engage in criminal activity or other reprehensible behavior that might cause their child to become a violent, repeat offending criminal - just that they were able to get away with it more easily because of a biased system. Machines end up just as biased as the data they've been trained on, so if we are going to use computers to judge things that have such a significant impact on people's lives, we can't risk racism slipping through the cracks. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The problem is, when given access to a large number of classifiers, some of which have inevitably been affected by a pre-existing racial bias, a black box machine learning algorithm will likely become discriminatory as well if race is not in some way represented and equalized. This is simply not true. Black box machine learning algorithms will have the tendency to correct bias in their inputs. Insofar as they do systematically deliver wrong answers, this is actually called "variance" and has no particular sign. It's just as likely to be biased in favor of $protected_class as against that class. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_and_discriminatory_algorithms.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_... Also, you do know that Pro Publica's R script actually found no bias, right? The bias was actually in the selection of anecdotes in their article, which obscured the fact that their statistical analysis could not reject the null hypothesis. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....

by tomp 10y ago

corey_moncure 10y ago

> The data tells you that a black person is more likely to be a criminal than a white person. There are two possible reasons for this: I'd like to add a third possible reason for your consideration. Since "criminality" i.e. guilt of committing a crime is determined after a process engaging the law enforcement and justice systems, we have to examine whether there are inherent biases in those systems that result in skewed statistics. For instance, do police officers selectively target blacks for monitoring and investigation? Are blacks discriminated against in the courtroom as a result of procedure or human nature?

zmoreira 10y ago
This is studiable and has been studied. A study regarding police killings, for example: Do White Police Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189&download=yes https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189&... Using a unique data set we link the race of police officers who kill suspects with the race of those who are killed across the United States. We have data on a total of 2,699 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect. For the estimates where we know the race of the officer who killed the suspect, the ratio of the rate that blacks are killed by black versus white officers is large — ranging from 3 to 5 times larger. However, because the media may under report the officer’s race when black offic-ers are involved, other results that account for the fact that a disproportionate number of the un-known race officers may be more reliable. They indicate no statistically significant difference be-tween killings of black suspects by black and white officers. Our panel data analysis that looks at killings at the police department level confirms this. These findings are inconsistent with taste-based racial discrimination against blacks by white police officers. Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  There are a lot of different questions here, though. This study only addresses one. There are lots of ways for the system to be racially skewed/biased without being a product of personal bias - so many that I think the focus on "racist police" makes it hard to recognize a lot of easily-provable problems. Stop-and-frisk is my go-to example of a system that produces bias regardless of the race or biases of the officers involved. In theory, it's an efficient use of limited police resources, it can be implemented race-blind, and it "only catches criminals". There's room to talk about harassment of non-criminals, but at least regarding the people who get arrested its an understandable idea. In practice, criminality is a product of conviction. Stop-and-frisk mostly catches 'possession' crimes like personal-use drugs and illegal weapons (and since a 3-inch pocketknife is illegal in many cities, we shouldn't mistake this for violent intent). As a result, living in a stop-and-frisk area massively increases your odds of being charged with a low-grade crime - it's not as though carrying marijuana or a Leatherman is rare among un-policed groups. Even if you attempt a crude race-blind implementation, like policing based on neighborhood crime rate, you end up with a vicious cycle where crime rates are high because enforcement is high. So I think we do a disservice when we limit our discussion and investigation to officer bias. Even when it's not present, it's still easy to build an unequal system.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

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SerLava 10y ago

>if you took into account enough circumstances (e.g. single parent, school district, income level, parents' wealth) you'd be able to remove race from your model and still arrive to the "equal opportunity" result. That way, you wouldn't discriminate based on race, but you would still help the people most needy of help (poor, uneducated, etc.). This is pretty much the only way to help people who were born addicted to meth inside a trailer in the mountains who also happen to be blessed with being white.

FT_intern 10y ago

(2) is not completely true because some impoverished communities are more prone to commit crimes than others. Biologically, (1) is not true. Culturally, it may be true. Impoverished black people idolize and preach a culture that encourages crimes and the precursors that make criminal actions more likely.

chronic6l 10y ago
Say what you want about biological plausibility. But in other cultures/countries around the world, Blacks consistently underperform (any metric you like: marriage success, salary, mortality rate, graduation, etc.) compared to other ethnic groups. What will convince you it is in fact a biological difference? Despite what the American declaration of independence says (whether you are American or not), no, not all people were born or created equally. Additionally, of the ones born equally, they do not have equal rights or opportunities to pursue of happiness.

mspeedy 10y ago

> if you took into account enough circumstances (e.g. single parent, school district, income level, parents' wealth) you'd be able to remove race from your model and still arrive to the "equal opportunity" result. The problem is, when given access to a large number of classifiers, some of which have inevitably been affected by a pre-existing racial bias, a black box machine learning algorithm will likely become discriminatory as well if race is not in some way represented and equalized. For instance, many justice systems in the U.S. use machine learning software to determine the likelihood that a criminal will reoffend, and use that prediction to determine sentencing. Race is never used explicitly as a classifier, but the program ended up being significantly more likely to rate blacks as more likely to reoffend [1]. Classifiers like "had parents with previous criminal convictions" can be misleading when blacks are more likely to be convicted for the same crime as whites. It doesn't mean that the white person's parents didn't engage in criminal activity or other reprehensible behavior that might cause their child to become a violent, repeat offending criminal - just that they were able to get away with it more easily because of a biased system. Machines end up just as biased as the data they've been trained on, so if we are going to use computers to judge things that have such a significant impact on people's lives, we can't risk racism slipping through the cracks. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The problem is, when given access to a large number of classifiers, some of which have inevitably been affected by a pre-existing racial bias, a black box machine learning algorithm will likely become discriminatory as well if race is not in some way represented and equalized. This is simply not true. Black box machine learning algorithms will have the tendency to correct bias in their inputs. Insofar as they do systematically deliver wrong answers, this is actually called "variance" and has no particular sign. It's just as likely to be biased in favor of $protected_class as against that class. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_and_discriminatory_algorithms.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_... Also, you do know that Pro Publica's R script actually found no bias, right? The bias was actually in the selection of anecdotes in their article, which obscured the fact that their statistical analysis could not reject the null hypothesis. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....