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This is really interesting - thanks for posting. What strikes me is that a court ruling implicitly took a view on the meaning of “fairness”. But fairness is a d
by GreeniFi 8y ago
This is really interesting - thanks for posting. What strikes me is that a court ruling implicitly took a view on the meaning of “fairness”. But fairness is a deeply subjective concept, something courts in a lot of countries would avoid going anywhere near! What’s interesting is that concepts of fairness vary greatly across cultures - and it makes me wonder how in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Europe we will arrive at newly-agreed definitions of fairness and what that will be.
- riquito 8y agoFairness in statistic is not not a subjective concept, it's a property of an algorithm.
- Thiez 8y agoFairness is absolutely a subjective concept. E.g. in the context of school choice, which is fair? Let's say there are 20 students applying to a school, and there are 10 spots available. a) All students applying to the school have the same chance to get a spot: 50% b) The best 10 students (by some definition of 'best', e.g. grades or an entry exam) get in. c) The 10 students with the richest parents get in. d) The 10 students that live closest to the school get in. We could go further: when 15 of the applicants are boys and 5 are girls (or vice versa), wouldn't it be more fair when 5 of each are chosen? How about racial distributions? Ultimately how you define fairness is subjective. Obviously once you have defined fairness you can attempt to measure it using mathematics / statistics.
- zwily 8y agoThe person you responded explicitly said “fairness in statistics”.
- Thiez 8y agoWhat does "fairness in statistics" even mean? Perhaps there is a very obvious definition that I don't know about? Would you please define it for me, and (if this is non-obvious) explain how it relates to the school choice problem?
- gowld 8y agoFairness is measured relative to a choice of equivalence classes and a choice of loss function. In all of optimization theory, the objective function is subjectively chosen.
- hobbyjogger 8y agoTrue, judges often don't come right out and say it in so many words, but many, many courtroom decisions involve an underlying assessment of the "fairness" of the situation presented. The concept of fairness is a fundamental component of scores of legal doctrines and it simply isn't possible--in either the analytical sense or the psychological sense--to make these sorts of decisions without taking a view on what is "fair" or "just", etc. For example, "unconscionable contracts" are unenforceable [1], custody disputes are resolved based on the "best interests of the child" test [2], and a cop's reasonable suspicion is judged by the "totality of the circumstances" [3]. All of these and many more require (some more explicitly than others) the judge to determine what is "fair" so that he or she can fairly apply law and precedent to a specific set of facts. This is much more common than you might think (and than many in the legal community would like to admit). If you find this topic interesting, I would encourage you to read about the differences between deductive reasoning (like math) and inductive reasoning (like fairness). Some court decisions truly are deductive, but most are not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability [2] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/134/Supplement_2/S111 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/134/Supplement... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totality_of_the_circumstances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totality_of_the_circumstances