5 ms·

> Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more wi

> Iirc there are even physical reasons why it is more difficult to identify black faces than white faces. Is that then racist, if an algorithm struggles more with identifying black faces? Unless there is some physics based reason it is orders of magnitude more difficult to do feature detection against black skin, then yes something racist is going on. The tools/cameras that we've designed have historically been metered and measured on their ability to detect white features/skin. This was a holdover from film that translated to digital photography. (Some info from an NPR interview https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251/light-and-dark-the-racial-biases-that-remain-in-photography https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251...). The tools that perform this feature detection contain this same biases and reproduce it in the data that they collect. If an algorithm struggles more with identifying black skin, it's because the data that was used to the produce the algorithm contained unexamined racial bias that was never corrected for in a serious way.

adlkjnndnnd 8y ago
Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. I think it's an important point. For example, if I were a writer and I would write a novel, I would perhaps only feature white people in it. But not because I have anything against black people, but simply because I don't really know any black people and would therefore be hard pressed to write about them. Doing that wouldn't make me racist - I would simply write a novel from "my" world. It would in fact probably be impossible to write a novel that accounts for all possible human experiences. Edit: would it even have been possible to calibrate chemical film to work equally well for black and white skin? What if it would have been necessary to have different film rolls for white and black skin, for optimal result. Would those have been racist film rolls? Or what about makeup for different skin tones? Is that racist?
- billy_beef 8y ago
  > Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. No it doesn't. You just made that up. Either way, it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening. Call it racism or call racialized bias, if it results in a disproportionately high murder rate for that group by the police, a disproportionately high poverty rate, a disproportionately high imprisonment rate, then it is a bad thing. It doesn't matter how pedantic you want to be about it. > It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds. (See the european scramble for africa, the colonization of India and of south east asia to name the first three that come to mind out of so many examples). If the unit of analysis you're using for a society is an individual, then it is hard to grasp the way modern racism operates. This is why the term 'systemic racism' is applied and used readily. It is a helpful term for understanding the ways that people of a certain race (usually non-white) receive non-equal treatment by societal structures.
  - adlkjnndnnd 8y ago
    "it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening." It's fine to strive for preventing it. Google surely learned from the Gorilla mistake and improved their algorithm. But it is too much to blame them of racism for that error, and demand all such errors are prevented. That is simply impossible. You now think of the simple example of "white vs black", but there are many, many more facets to it. There may be races that are not even discovered yet. You may now have accounted black people in your algorithm. Have you included Tibetan monks, Inuit, native Americans? People with facial deformities? Bad lighting? It is simply impossible to take into account all possibilities, because you can not predict them all. You can only try to improve your algorithm as much as possible. You can't demand perfect algorithms. People have "gamed" image recognition algorithms, adding some noise to make them yield completely silly results. The algorithms are simply not perfect yet. "Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds" Ugh, spare me. If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves). And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things. The PoC you are trying to protect might only be alive because his ancestors killed off their neighboring tribe, women, children and all. I don't think it even makes sense to somehow try to disentangle that. Just treat the people living today in a fair way.

adlkjnndnnd 8y ago

Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. I think it's an important point. For example, if I were a writer and I would write a novel, I would perhaps only feature white people in it. But not because I have anything against black people, but simply because I don't really know any black people and would therefore be hard pressed to write about them. Doing that wouldn't make me racist - I would simply write a novel from "my" world. It would in fact probably be impossible to write a novel that accounts for all possible human experiences. Edit: would it even have been possible to calibrate chemical film to work equally well for black and white skin? What if it would have been necessary to have different film rolls for white and black skin, for optimal result. Would those have been racist film rolls? Or what about makeup for different skin tones? Is that racist?

billy_beef 8y ago
> Then I would say racial bias is not the same as racism. You can not really blame the people who developed those tools for not being surrounded by people of all races, or for the use case of, say, white people. It's not a malicious intent, whereas racism implies malice. No it doesn't. You just made that up. Either way, it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening. Call it racism or call racialized bias, if it results in a disproportionately high murder rate for that group by the police, a disproportionately high poverty rate, a disproportionately high imprisonment rate, then it is a bad thing. It doesn't matter how pedantic you want to be about it. > It seems to me many US citizens think the whole world is like the US. It isn't. There are many countries where there are not as many "races" living together as in the US. Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds. (See the european scramble for africa, the colonization of India and of south east asia to name the first three that come to mind out of so many examples). If the unit of analysis you're using for a society is an individual, then it is hard to grasp the way modern racism operates. This is why the term 'systemic racism' is applied and used readily. It is a helpful term for understanding the ways that people of a certain race (usually non-white) receive non-equal treatment by societal structures.
- adlkjnndnnd 8y ago
  "it should be clear to anyone with any semblance of a moral imagination that having a group of people receive worse treatment and outcome on the basis of their race is immoral and should not be happening." It's fine to strive for preventing it. Google surely learned from the Gorilla mistake and improved their algorithm. But it is too much to blame them of racism for that error, and demand all such errors are prevented. That is simply impossible. You now think of the simple example of "white vs black", but there are many, many more facets to it. There may be races that are not even discovered yet. You may now have accounted black people in your algorithm. Have you included Tibetan monks, Inuit, native Americans? People with facial deformities? Bad lighting? It is simply impossible to take into account all possibilities, because you can not predict them all. You can only try to improve your algorithm as much as possible. You can't demand perfect algorithms. People have "gamed" image recognition algorithms, adding some noise to make them yield completely silly results. The algorithms are simply not perfect yet. "Not having many different racial groups living together does not mean that a nation has not significantly benefitted from or perpetuated massively destructive, often times genocidal projects on racialized grounds" Ugh, spare me. If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves). And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things. The PoC you are trying to protect might only be alive because his ancestors killed off their neighboring tribe, women, children and all. I don't think it even makes sense to somehow try to disentangle that. Just treat the people living today in a fair way.