6 ms·
Racism is discrimination based on race, everything else is not racism.
by jstanley 8y ago
Racism is discrimination based on race, everything else is not racism.
- danso 8y agoHow does that address the parent commenter’s assertion? Discrimination, whether intended or not, has the same outcome for the discrimated party.
- 50656E6973 8y agoStatistical differences in outcome cannot be automatically attributed to discrimination, though they frequently are
- hannasanarion 8y agoYes they can, because that's what "discrimination" means: differences in outcome due to uncontrollable irrelevant factors like race. Discrimination is an effect, not an intent. Racist intent is called "prejudice". Discrimination can be caused by prejudice, or it can be caused by something else, like a poorly considered algorithm.
- 50656E6973 8y agoNo, that's pseudo-social-science because it falsely assumes outcomes are solely determined by external variables and is completely ignorant of internal variables, such as differing cultural values. Some cultures value family life over money, others value money over family life, for example.
- hannasanarion 8y agoI'm sorry, this reply doesn't make sense to me. What does "different cultures are different" have to do with whether computer systems can be discriminatory or not?
- billy_beef 8y agoyou should ignore that comment, it's an incredibly disingenuous claim intended to mask the racist sentiment that 'non-white people are over-represented in american prison populations because they don't value not being in prison as much as white people do'.
- hannasanarion 8y agoThat's what I thought, but I'm trying hard lately to be less angry on the internet, so I took the most charitable interpretation possible. Which still didn't make any sense, of course, because the person is a racist jerk.
- 50656E6973 8y agoPlease don't do that here. HN is a place for civil debate, not ad hominem attacks.
- 50656E6973 8y agoI agree, of course computers extend and amplify our prejudices. But as the article states in it's conclusion: >Just because something is expressed in numbers doesn’t make it right Many statistical social differences are often automatically attributed to discrimination based solely on "numbers".
- fiter 8y agoThe FICO example from another thread shows a different outcome based on race without any data in the computer system about race. If the computer system doesn't have access to race, like in the FICO example, then can it be discriminating based on race (racist)?
- billy_beef 8y agoYes, if the data contains proxies for race and/or unexamined racialized bias, then yes it can. Police presence has often been kept higher in zipcodes with mostly non-white residents. This results in higher arrest rates in an area because of increased eyes, not necessarily because of increased rates of law-breaking. If an algorithm were to be designed to determine where to allocate police officers using this data, it could contain no racial data, but it would dictate that more officers should be placed in the zipcode with more non-white residents, as those areas have more arrests. Perhaps you don't want to call this racist because you have a narrow definition of that word, but I don't know what other word to use.
- StellarTabi 8y agoIt is racist if the data is built on 100s of years of racism and the ML is trained on a dataset poisoned by racism.
- cmiles74 8y agoI think it's important to note that there is no algorithm that can have an "intent". If we are to agree that racism is a feature of intent, then there will never be a racist algorithm. Yet the outcome will still be discriminatory.