4 ms·

I have a task for you. I'm going to send you data on US real estate areas completely scrubbed of any racial or location indicator. All you'll have is important

I have a task for you. I'm going to send you data on US real estate areas completely scrubbed of any racial or location indicator. All you'll have is important impartial data like crime rates, income rates, development rates, foreclosure rates, etc. Your job is now to take this information and rank areas in grade A-D in terms of investment security and desirability. Now, unless you intentionally hamstring your measurements, some guy is going to be able to run around declaring you're a "redlining" racist. Race is not a facet here. Most people, and absolutely most companies let alone banks, could not care less about race but they do care deeply about other things. And those other things are not equally distributed. Focusing on race is, at best, going to be divisive and counter productive.

detcader 8y ago
> banks ... could not care less about race I have a task for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...
lifeformed 8y ago
Race and socioeconomics are inextricably linked in this country. A lot of white families in the past did not want to live next to black people. The banks knew that and factored that into their "desirability" metrics. This, along with countless other challenges, results in perpetuating the feedback loop of poverty and racism: Keeping people disadvantaged confines them to crime and poverty, which results in stereotypes and biases (including unconscious ones) against them, which results in more biased decisions that keep them disadvantaged. Keep running that cycle and you've strengthened the link between race and income and crime. Keep running that cycle more and you end up maintaining the racist results of yesterday without having to be racist oneself. This country was built on racism, which has naturally codified itself into the system. This means that racial biases have become an emergent property of the system when applied to this society. If you give this system to a mindless computer to run and optimize for economic output, you'll end up with very similar results compared to if you gave it to a racist person to run. Our legal and economic neural network was trained on biased data and it's no surprise that it produces biased output. We're trying to solve an optimization problem without having social inequality as one of the dimensions. It's easy to get good results with the function we have if we don't care about that metric. I agree that race is definitely not the only angle from which to approach these problems. But if we ignore it completely, the ugly ghosts of our past will continue to haunt our society.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but the one area we sharply differ is in the reason for the ongoing inequities. I, like many people, grew up in poverty and managed to get out without all that much trouble. I did well in school in spite of lovely things like semi-regular drive by shootings and a mostly absent parent. Doing well in school meant I was able to get into college and, for better or for worse, the current predatory system of loans means there are practically no limits to the extent of 'free money' available to ensure that money was never an issue. I got a degree in a STEM major knowing I needed to make money to live a decent life, and suddenly the world was my oyster. Nothing I did was particularly remarkable. And many of my peers had literally the exact same opportunities laid before them. Yet many of them failed to take advantage of them. One guy I was good friends with in school I ended up bumping into at a restaurant where he was waiting tables having ended up getting into drugs and also getting a girl pregnant. He was a smart kid and had a decent and supportive family. He was certainly more than able to know about the consequences of the lifestyle choices he was making. Yet he made them. What can you do? There are definitely some cases where people fail to achieve because of things completely outside of their control, but in the vast majority of cases it's going to come down to these bad decisions. So why are people making these bad decisions? It doesn't even make sense to attribute it to race since the exact same problem expands outside of race. It even expands outside of class. Look a the Waltons for some of the biggest wastes of air on this planet, in spite of having more opportunities available to them than nearly every single living person today. Or even look at other issues. Consider obesity. Everybody knows obesity is horrible for your health and isn't exactly going to do great things for your sex life. Yet people, of all classes, are eating and drinking themselves into obesity at rates like never before. And then lying to themselves. By contrast, I noticed myself getting a bit porky, significantly cut down my calorie intake, increased my physical activity, and now I'm in better shape than ever. Again something hardly unique, but why does it seem like so few people are doing these things? You see a problem - you formulate a solution - you execute. You fail, reformulate, and repeat until success. The point of this all is that I do not think being disadvantaged is a significant cause of anything in and of itself. We live in a world that is not only more color blind than ever, but also has more opportunities than ever before. This is why I think that thinking based on working from the result backwards is going to lead to fundamentally broken solutions.

detcader 8y ago

> banks ... could not care less about race I have a task for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...

lifeformed 8y ago

Race and socioeconomics are inextricably linked in this country. A lot of white families in the past did not want to live next to black people. The banks knew that and factored that into their "desirability" metrics. This, along with countless other challenges, results in perpetuating the feedback loop of poverty and racism: Keeping people disadvantaged confines them to crime and poverty, which results in stereotypes and biases (including unconscious ones) against them, which results in more biased decisions that keep them disadvantaged. Keep running that cycle and you've strengthened the link between race and income and crime. Keep running that cycle more and you end up maintaining the racist results of yesterday without having to be racist oneself. This country was built on racism, which has naturally codified itself into the system. This means that racial biases have become an emergent property of the system when applied to this society. If you give this system to a mindless computer to run and optimize for economic output, you'll end up with very similar results compared to if you gave it to a racist person to run. Our legal and economic neural network was trained on biased data and it's no surprise that it produces biased output. We're trying to solve an optimization problem without having social inequality as one of the dimensions. It's easy to get good results with the function we have if we don't care about that metric. I agree that race is definitely not the only angle from which to approach these problems. But if we ignore it completely, the ugly ghosts of our past will continue to haunt our society.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I mostly agree with you, but the one area we sharply differ is in the reason for the ongoing inequities. I, like many people, grew up in poverty and managed to get out without all that much trouble. I did well in school in spite of lovely things like semi-regular drive by shootings and a mostly absent parent. Doing well in school meant I was able to get into college and, for better or for worse, the current predatory system of loans means there are practically no limits to the extent of 'free money' available to ensure that money was never an issue. I got a degree in a STEM major knowing I needed to make money to live a decent life, and suddenly the world was my oyster. Nothing I did was particularly remarkable. And many of my peers had literally the exact same opportunities laid before them. Yet many of them failed to take advantage of them. One guy I was good friends with in school I ended up bumping into at a restaurant where he was waiting tables having ended up getting into drugs and also getting a girl pregnant. He was a smart kid and had a decent and supportive family. He was certainly more than able to know about the consequences of the lifestyle choices he was making. Yet he made them. What can you do? There are definitely some cases where people fail to achieve because of things completely outside of their control, but in the vast majority of cases it's going to come down to these bad decisions. So why are people making these bad decisions? It doesn't even make sense to attribute it to race since the exact same problem expands outside of race. It even expands outside of class. Look a the Waltons for some of the biggest wastes of air on this planet, in spite of having more opportunities available to them than nearly every single living person today. Or even look at other issues. Consider obesity. Everybody knows obesity is horrible for your health and isn't exactly going to do great things for your sex life. Yet people, of all classes, are eating and drinking themselves into obesity at rates like never before. And then lying to themselves. By contrast, I noticed myself getting a bit porky, significantly cut down my calorie intake, increased my physical activity, and now I'm in better shape than ever. Again something hardly unique, but why does it seem like so few people are doing these things? You see a problem - you formulate a solution - you execute. You fail, reformulate, and repeat until success. The point of this all is that I do not think being disadvantaged is a significant cause of anything in and of itself. We live in a world that is not only more color blind than ever, but also has more opportunities than ever before. This is why I think that thinking based on working from the result backwards is going to lead to fundamentally broken solutions.