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The shameful history of "redlining" (housing segregation) was driven by policy, not market forces. Black people weren't being judged non-credit-worthy, they we

The shameful history of "redlining" (housing segregation) was driven by policy, not market forces. Black people weren't being judged non-credit-worthy, they were being explicitly prohibited from borrowing and buying by FHA policy and housing covenants. So this history, while awful and something that we should not repeat, does not speak to my point that making rational decisions about credit-worthiness is good business sense. > Following the same line of thought, would you be ok with an AI system... You didn't answer my question. I asked it because I want to know if the people most vocally arguing that de-biasing is a moral imperative will admit even one case where there might be a compelling reason to see the world as it is, even if that association is considered "problematic". If people will admit this, then we can argue over where the line should be. But many don't appear to admit that a line even exists. I will admit that the line exists, and that an incident like this is a clear example where removing hurtful associations is proper. This was a case where a ML model reinforced a loaded and racist stereotype, and the harm of removing that from the model is almost zero: https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8880363/google-apologizes-photos-app-tags-two-black-people-gorillas https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8880363/google-apologizes-...

paganel 9y ago
> You didn't answer my question. I asked it because I want to know if the people most vocally arguing that de-biasing is a moral imperative will admit even one case where there might be a compelling reason to see the world as it is, even if that association is considered "problematic". I didn't find those questions to be that smart, to be honest, they're more on the scare-mongering side, and I find that a smart question should have half of the answer included in it and a scare-mongering question doesn't look like it contains anything smart (at least to me). But if you really want to know my answer is "yes" to all of your questions. To get into more details: I grew up as a kid into a middle-class-ish family and back then I had no issues going to the "ghetto"/dangerous area of the town I grew up in (I grew up in Eastern Europe, so that the "dangerous" area was populated by the local gipsy community instead of the AfroAmerican/Latino communities now associated with the "dangerous" areas of US cities). I turned up fine. > If people will admit this, then we can argue over where the line should be. But many don't appear to admit that a line even exists. I know of that line, I was just trying to say that further reinforcing it using ML techniques will only aggravate things at a societal level (so that "dangerous" areas will become even more "dangerous"). At least when the discrimination happens out of our (us, humans) own volition there are ways to fix it, but once we "outsource" our racist-tendencies to ML-like tools the voice inside of us telling us that this is all wrong will become even weaker. After all, the algorithms/machines are more "right" then us, humans, that's what we like to think.
- haberman 9y ago
  If we're trading anecdotes, I grew up in a small town where I didn't worry about where I went. Then as an adult in a big city I was mugged at knife-point for obliviously walking through a bad part of town at night. If you want to dismiss people's concerns for their own safety as "scaremongering", don't be surprised when people don't find much use for your ideology.

paganel 9y ago

> You didn't answer my question. I asked it because I want to know if the people most vocally arguing that de-biasing is a moral imperative will admit even one case where there might be a compelling reason to see the world as it is, even if that association is considered "problematic". I didn't find those questions to be that smart, to be honest, they're more on the scare-mongering side, and I find that a smart question should have half of the answer included in it and a scare-mongering question doesn't look like it contains anything smart (at least to me). But if you really want to know my answer is "yes" to all of your questions. To get into more details: I grew up as a kid into a middle-class-ish family and back then I had no issues going to the "ghetto"/dangerous area of the town I grew up in (I grew up in Eastern Europe, so that the "dangerous" area was populated by the local gipsy community instead of the AfroAmerican/Latino communities now associated with the "dangerous" areas of US cities). I turned up fine. > If people will admit this, then we can argue over where the line should be. But many don't appear to admit that a line even exists. I know of that line, I was just trying to say that further reinforcing it using ML techniques will only aggravate things at a societal level (so that "dangerous" areas will become even more "dangerous"). At least when the discrimination happens out of our (us, humans) own volition there are ways to fix it, but once we "outsource" our racist-tendencies to ML-like tools the voice inside of us telling us that this is all wrong will become even weaker. After all, the algorithms/machines are more "right" then us, humans, that's what we like to think.

haberman 9y ago
If we're trading anecdotes, I grew up in a small town where I didn't worry about where I went. Then as an adult in a big city I was mugged at knife-point for obliviously walking through a bad part of town at night. If you want to dismiss people's concerns for their own safety as "scaremongering", don't be surprised when people don't find much use for your ideology.