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> You think race realism is accurate but we should ignore No, I do not think race realism is accurate. I just think that race realism is not an adequate defens

> You think race realism is accurate but we should ignore No, I do not think race realism is accurate. I just think that race realism is not an adequate defense of racial discrimination, AND ALSO that race realism is inaccurate. Pessimizer and I agree. > Many examples in the article don't fit your description of the problem at all You asked me what I think the problem is, not what I think the article's author thinks the problem is. The fact that I emphasize different things is not proof that I misunderstand the article's author. > The only thing that I argued is that the imprecise language used by Techcrunch is confusing people and that this is bad. Who, exactly, is supposed to be confused? Subject matter experts should know the difference, and if they don't, that's really their own problem. The public at large doesn't even know what statistical bias is, so why in the world would they be confused? No matter how confusing the current state of affairs is, it would be far more confusing if suddenly everyone starting using bias to mean statistical bias. Mostly because 99.9% of the people using the term wouldn't have an adequate grasp of mathematics to even know to which object they are referring. So if your priority is clarity, then keeping around the messy moralized and politicized vernacular notion of bias is far preferable. > I didn't argue in favor of or against your mysterious "vernacular-discrimination" - how could I when I don't even know what it is? Not everything in the world can be mathematically formalized. Most things don't even have fixed meaning over time. If your criticism is genuinely about imprecision, you've got a lot of much lower hanging fruit than "discrimination" and "bias"...

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The precise problem is that things like skin color etc. often have strong predictive power...Notice that an algorithm can exhibit this behavior without being (statistically) biased. - throwaway729, 2 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159539 No, I do not think race realism is accurate. - throwaway729, 22 minutes ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160709 Whoops! The fact that I emphasize different things is not proof that I misunderstand the article's author. Fine - what do you believe the author thinks "bias" means? I.e. what is the underlying concept behind all his examples? Who, exactly, is supposed to be confused? Pessimizer, for one, who thinks the problem is inaccurate predictions. 2 hours ago you disagreed with this, but 22 minutes ago you agreed. I'm getting kind of confused. If your criticism is genuinely about imprecision, you've got a lot of much lower hanging fruit than "discrimination" and "bias"... Sure, but this is my field. I give talks about misuse of p-values and the multiple comparison problem, even though there might be other issues worth worrying about. It's just what interests me. The fact that bigger problems exist doesn't mean we shouldn't fix this one.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  > Whoops! I take race realism to be the sort of thing that posits an inherent relationship between skin color/other physical features, and other innate/intrinsic/genetic properties such as intelligence or criminality -- especially as a prior and when the trait is normative and negative. So "dark skinned people are less intelligent" is race realism, but "dark skinned people are treated poorly by the political establishment" is not race realism. (We're far afield, I don't mean for this thread to devolve into a definition or debate about race realism -- I'm just saying what I take race realism to mean.) The important point isn't a precise characterization. Rather, the important point is this: It's possible for race to be predictive without there being inherent differences between people of different physical attributes. Setup a system in which I take away all green people's life savings at the end of the day with probability .99 if they don't have a house and .5 if they do have a house. Both numbers are .2 for purple people. An unbiased lender can choose not to lend to green people without exhibiting statistical bias -- in fact, color has huge predictive power. But that predictive power comes from the social system we setup specifically to screw green people, not from inherent differences that are causally related to color posited by race realism. But this is an extremely obvious observation, so perhaps you meant something different by race realism? In any case, I don't think the disagreement you posited really exists. The rest of the points you're making are covered elsewhere. I deal with Real numbers every day, but I don't barge into discussions of epistemology and demand my axioms be used in discussions of a vaguely related but definitely different topic. And I'm careful in pop lectures to point out that Real numbers are just a mathematical object and no more more "real" than natural numbers. If people in your statistics lectures don't know what bias means, then you should account for this in your teaching and lecturing. I know my statistics lecturer did.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

The precise problem is that things like skin color etc. often have strong predictive power...Notice that an algorithm can exhibit this behavior without being (statistically) biased. - throwaway729, 2 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159539 No, I do not think race realism is accurate. - throwaway729, 22 minutes ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160709 Whoops! The fact that I emphasize different things is not proof that I misunderstand the article's author. Fine - what do you believe the author thinks "bias" means? I.e. what is the underlying concept behind all his examples? Who, exactly, is supposed to be confused? Pessimizer, for one, who thinks the problem is inaccurate predictions. 2 hours ago you disagreed with this, but 22 minutes ago you agreed. I'm getting kind of confused. If your criticism is genuinely about imprecision, you've got a lot of much lower hanging fruit than "discrimination" and "bias"... Sure, but this is my field. I give talks about misuse of p-values and the multiple comparison problem, even though there might be other issues worth worrying about. It's just what interests me. The fact that bigger problems exist doesn't mean we shouldn't fix this one.

throwaway729 10y ago
> Whoops! I take race realism to be the sort of thing that posits an inherent relationship between skin color/other physical features, and other innate/intrinsic/genetic properties such as intelligence or criminality -- especially as a prior and when the trait is normative and negative. So "dark skinned people are less intelligent" is race realism, but "dark skinned people are treated poorly by the political establishment" is not race realism. (We're far afield, I don't mean for this thread to devolve into a definition or debate about race realism -- I'm just saying what I take race realism to mean.) The important point isn't a precise characterization. Rather, the important point is this: It's possible for race to be predictive without there being inherent differences between people of different physical attributes. Setup a system in which I take away all green people's life savings at the end of the day with probability .99 if they don't have a house and .5 if they do have a house. Both numbers are .2 for purple people. An unbiased lender can choose not to lend to green people without exhibiting statistical bias -- in fact, color has huge predictive power. But that predictive power comes from the social system we setup specifically to screw green people, not from inherent differences that are causally related to color posited by race realism. But this is an extremely obvious observation, so perhaps you meant something different by race realism? In any case, I don't think the disagreement you posited really exists. The rest of the points you're making are covered elsewhere. I deal with Real numbers every day, but I don't barge into discussions of epistemology and demand my axioms be used in discussions of a vaguely related but definitely different topic. And I'm careful in pop lectures to point out that Real numbers are just a mathematical object and no more more "real" than natural numbers. If people in your statistics lectures don't know what bias means, then you should account for this in your teaching and lecturing. I know my statistics lecturer did.