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Any product is going be a poorer fit for customers fitting a less common profile than those fitting a more common one. You will never get rid of that. Even if p

Any product is going be a poorer fit for customers fitting a less common profile than those fitting a more common one. You will never get rid of that. Even if performance between races equalized due to a disproportionate amount of resources being expended on adapting the product to fit those belonging to minority racial groups, performance between unusual and common facial types or minority and majority ethnic groups within the races would exist. There will always be some minority group that the product fits less well with, because you can divide people into an infinite number of groups based on an infinite number of traits. This is a consequence of R&D resources being finite and the complexity of the world being unbounded. It's not sign of a moral failing or mis-placed priorities.

externalreality 8y ago
I agree with you. However, without trying to take your points down a slippery slope, your points don't apply to safety concerns. We can't have robo-cars hitting black people because the designers neglected to test the pattern recognition libraries on dark-skinned people. That, you can probably admit, is different from a bar of soap making peoples' skin a bit dry, or lotion not taking into account melanin, or the game designer neglecting the Linux community.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  The accident rate should be decreased in the most efficient way possible, to save as many lives as possible. That might not mean targeting R&D resources at reducing the accident rate for one minority group that experiences a higher-than-average malfunction rate. Here's a thought experiment to illustrate the principle I'm trying to get across: if we find out that members of a very small ethnic group suffer disproportionately from some deficiency in software that does a poor job at recognizing features common to them, and this leads to an extra 50 people dying each year, and that the resources it would take to fix this deficiency would allow the software to be improved to reduce the accident rate by 5%, leading to 5,000 fewer people dying each year, but only 5 fewer members of that ethnic group dying each year, should we target the resources at reducing the accident rate for the ethnic group, just because the group they find themselves in happens to be ethnic?
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    You did not really have to demonstrate the scope for tendentious arguments, we got that already, but seeing as you raised the issue, human rights is not a strictly utilitarian concept. If it costs a bit more to do the right thing, so be it.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      My argument is not tendentious. You're not addressing it. And software not working as well with a particular group as a result of the group having less common features is not a violation of human rights. It's an unfortunate reality of the finiteness of our resources and the limitations of our technology. Expanding the performance of the softare by focusing on how it performs with some arbitrarily selected subset of the group, rather than the whole of it, is misguided. >>If it costs a bit more to do the right thing, so be it. In this case, the cost is more lives being lost, and the right thing is only the right thing according to an arbitrary and flawed value system that you are submitting as the ideal.
      - mannykannot 8y ago
        > ...arbitrary and flawed value system All ethical guidelines are, in some sense, arbitrary, but the one that says one should try to treat people equally is a pretty good one, and better than any that needs tendentious arguments to make. One of the reasons that it is a good one is that there is, as you have pointed out, an almost unlimited range of variation from which to fabricate tendentious arguments. Slippery-slope arguments are not, in general, very good ones, but in this case, the number of times that various factions have actually gone down the slope from "these people are not the same as us" to "it's better if we get rid of them" (just in the 20th. century, even) is good reason to stay away from it. And your argument is, indeed, tendentious -- too much for its own good, in fact. As, in your view, saving the most lives for a given expenditure is the only thing that matters, then all expenditure on facial recognition should immediately be redirected into life-saving activities that save more lives for the buck, of which there are plenty. But this is moot, because your arguments are just armchair pedantry, devoid of real-world relevance.
mannykannot 8y ago
It certainly seems that there are infinite ways of making tendentious arguments against fixing something that should be fixed.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  Resources are finite. The objective should be to maximize the number of lives that are saved with the resources available, not ensure that the number of people who die is equal across racial groups. I have no problem with more resources being spent to "fix a problem", if that doesn't mean it comes at the expense of resources being spent to fix more serious problems. There is nothing inherently more unfair about members of a particular race suffering from a poorer experience with a particular software program than members of a particular psychological profile or height or distance between-the-eyes group facing a poorer-than-average experience with the software.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    And if you have any actual evidence that the other groups you name are being measurably affected, make your data known, so we can make corrections in those cases as well.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      That can be trivially done for the reason I mentioned before: you can divide people into an infinite number of groups based on an infinite number of traits. Showing the software is discriminatory thus becomes a pointless exercise of arbitrary human categorization scheme creation. The objective should be to reduce how many people in total die as a result of the software's flaws. Showing what particular groups are "measurably affected", meaning have traits that the software does less well with, does not provide any valuable information. It ignores the whole to focus on an arbitrarily elevated part deemed more important than other parts. Because if the software fails in 7% of cases with anti-race-disparity development priorities, and 5% of cases when development prioritizes population-wide performance, you are sacrificing more people of other groups to get better results with a favored group. As for unfairness: we can slice and dice the statistics to show less or more disparity between the average and a disadvantaged group, by selectively manufacturing group categorizations that produce more or less disparities (a group can be anything: people with dark skin, people with wide-set eyes, people with small chins). It's impossible for the software to perform equally well with all people, unless it is perfect. Getting to perfection is more efficiently done by focusing on improving the statistics in relation to the whole of the population, rather than any subset of it. So to summarize: choosing race or skin-color as the categorization determinant is not objectively any more moral than choosing any other trait, and trying to find groups that are exceptionally disadvantaged is an impossible feat because an infinite number of groups can be created using an infinite number of trait combinations.

externalreality 8y ago

I agree with you. However, without trying to take your points down a slippery slope, your points don't apply to safety concerns. We can't have robo-cars hitting black people because the designers neglected to test the pattern recognition libraries on dark-skinned people. That, you can probably admit, is different from a bar of soap making peoples' skin a bit dry, or lotion not taking into account melanin, or the game designer neglecting the Linux community.

CryptoPunk 8y ago
The accident rate should be decreased in the most efficient way possible, to save as many lives as possible. That might not mean targeting R&D resources at reducing the accident rate for one minority group that experiences a higher-than-average malfunction rate. Here's a thought experiment to illustrate the principle I'm trying to get across: if we find out that members of a very small ethnic group suffer disproportionately from some deficiency in software that does a poor job at recognizing features common to them, and this leads to an extra 50 people dying each year, and that the resources it would take to fix this deficiency would allow the software to be improved to reduce the accident rate by 5%, leading to 5,000 fewer people dying each year, but only 5 fewer members of that ethnic group dying each year, should we target the resources at reducing the accident rate for the ethnic group, just because the group they find themselves in happens to be ethnic?
- mannykannot 8y ago
  You did not really have to demonstrate the scope for tendentious arguments, we got that already, but seeing as you raised the issue, human rights is not a strictly utilitarian concept. If it costs a bit more to do the right thing, so be it.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    My argument is not tendentious. You're not addressing it. And software not working as well with a particular group as a result of the group having less common features is not a violation of human rights. It's an unfortunate reality of the finiteness of our resources and the limitations of our technology. Expanding the performance of the softare by focusing on how it performs with some arbitrarily selected subset of the group, rather than the whole of it, is misguided. >>If it costs a bit more to do the right thing, so be it. In this case, the cost is more lives being lost, and the right thing is only the right thing according to an arbitrary and flawed value system that you are submitting as the ideal.
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      > ...arbitrary and flawed value system All ethical guidelines are, in some sense, arbitrary, but the one that says one should try to treat people equally is a pretty good one, and better than any that needs tendentious arguments to make. One of the reasons that it is a good one is that there is, as you have pointed out, an almost unlimited range of variation from which to fabricate tendentious arguments. Slippery-slope arguments are not, in general, very good ones, but in this case, the number of times that various factions have actually gone down the slope from "these people are not the same as us" to "it's better if we get rid of them" (just in the 20th. century, even) is good reason to stay away from it. And your argument is, indeed, tendentious -- too much for its own good, in fact. As, in your view, saving the most lives for a given expenditure is the only thing that matters, then all expenditure on facial recognition should immediately be redirected into life-saving activities that save more lives for the buck, of which there are plenty. But this is moot, because your arguments are just armchair pedantry, devoid of real-world relevance.

mannykannot 8y ago

It certainly seems that there are infinite ways of making tendentious arguments against fixing something that should be fixed.

CryptoPunk 8y ago
Resources are finite. The objective should be to maximize the number of lives that are saved with the resources available, not ensure that the number of people who die is equal across racial groups. I have no problem with more resources being spent to "fix a problem", if that doesn't mean it comes at the expense of resources being spent to fix more serious problems. There is nothing inherently more unfair about members of a particular race suffering from a poorer experience with a particular software program than members of a particular psychological profile or height or distance between-the-eyes group facing a poorer-than-average experience with the software.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  And if you have any actual evidence that the other groups you name are being measurably affected, make your data known, so we can make corrections in those cases as well.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    That can be trivially done for the reason I mentioned before: you can divide people into an infinite number of groups based on an infinite number of traits. Showing the software is discriminatory thus becomes a pointless exercise of arbitrary human categorization scheme creation. The objective should be to reduce how many people in total die as a result of the software's flaws. Showing what particular groups are "measurably affected", meaning have traits that the software does less well with, does not provide any valuable information. It ignores the whole to focus on an arbitrarily elevated part deemed more important than other parts. Because if the software fails in 7% of cases with anti-race-disparity development priorities, and 5% of cases when development prioritizes population-wide performance, you are sacrificing more people of other groups to get better results with a favored group. As for unfairness: we can slice and dice the statistics to show less or more disparity between the average and a disadvantaged group, by selectively manufacturing group categorizations that produce more or less disparities (a group can be anything: people with dark skin, people with wide-set eyes, people with small chins). It's impossible for the software to perform equally well with all people, unless it is perfect. Getting to perfection is more efficiently done by focusing on improving the statistics in relation to the whole of the population, rather than any subset of it. So to summarize: choosing race or skin-color as the categorization determinant is not objectively any more moral than choosing any other trait, and trying to find groups that are exceptionally disadvantaged is an impossible feat because an infinite number of groups can be created using an infinite number of trait combinations.