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Superficial judgement is kind of where intelligence starts. It's really only people where you can't tell what it does/is from the outside. Cars, trees, animal

Superficial judgement is kind of where intelligence starts. It's really only people where you can't tell what it does/is from the outside. Cars, trees, animals, mountains... everything else, if it looks a way it acts that way. Early AI will probably have just as much trouble with this as people have historically. I really wish people would start viewing Racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command, rather than a binary attribute you either have or don't. Like, nobody is 100% not racist. There will always be slip ups, over-simplifications, snap judgements, subconscious or not.

ALittleLight 7y ago
A car could look fast, but be slow, or have latent problems, software on the car's computer could be fooling emissions tests... Looking at a tree tells you nothing about photosynthesis, tree pheromones, deep relationships with symbiotic insects or bacteria... You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look. That holds for humans and inhumans alike.
- deogeo 7y ago
  But you can make a pretty good guess: http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...
- seph-reed 7y ago
  Ultimately we know nothing, so one can always nit-pick any statement into an oversimplified oblivion. There are also cakes that look like cars, model sets which have miniature mountains, on and on. But in typical nature, it works well enough to breed and see what comes next.
  - desert_boi 7y ago
    Tactical Nihilism sounds a lot like solipsism. "We can't ever not make generalizations, so we shouldn't even try to make statements."
- core-questions 7y ago
  This is a perfect example of Tactical Nihilism. You're basically denying the existence of a massive amount of reproducible psychometrics and anthropological research because it makes you uncomfortable, and you're declaring that heuristic analysis of available, salient facts is not worthwhile because "you can't understand very much at all based on how things look." When an arborist "looks" at a tree, they identify the kind of tree it is, and that connects to all of the research they know about that species of tree. It's reasonable to suppose that a new instance of a known kind of tree is going to have properties in common with all the other known instances.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    The claim wasn't that people are harder to understand than trees based on appearance - it was that people are harder to understand than anything based on appearance. It seems like a poorly articulated reference to people having an interior mind - but so do animals. Can you identify a friendly or sick or lazy dog just by looking? No.
    - ars 7y ago
      > Can you identify a friendly or sick or lazy dog just by looking? No. ?? Obviously you can. Why do you think you can't?
      - rolltiide 7y ago
        they're talking about the times when you can't. you can't identify every friendly dog just by looking at it, you'll identify dogs that are also acting friendly and doing things people have found preceded positive experiences. you can't identify every sick dog just by looking at it, otherwise the vet would never find additional issues. and so on
        PeterisP 7y ago
        This is a case of "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. " Yes, it's wrong to assume that you can tell everything about that dog by looking at it - but it's so much more uncomparably wrong to consider that you can tell nothing about friendly or sick dogs based on looking at them! Observating the behaviors and dog breeds correlating with previous friendly and unfriendly experiences is a very useful, somewhat reliable predictor of how likely this particular dog is to be (un)friendly. Sure, if you know this particular dog, then that should supercede any group information, but if not, then that's all the information you have, it is useful information that correlates with (future) reality that matters to you, and so it's prudent to use it. Appearing "nonjudgmental" by throwing away information and judgment is simply stupid, and bound to get you bitten at least in the metaphorical way.
- didericis 7y ago
  Empiricism is basically the art of inference based on outward appearance in different contexts. I’d argue we learn everything based on appearance. You have to do more than just observe things superficially and take context into account, but for something to be measurable it has to have some sort of outward appearance, whether that be direct, as in something you can see with your naked eye, or indirect, as in something we need to measure through some other instrument.
- sershe 7y ago
  You can, probabilistically. If you randomly sample cars from all the street-legal models in the US (for example), and sort them by how fast they are based on appearance only, you would not be 100% correct, but you'd probably do much better than if you claim that "You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look" and sort them randomly (the prior being that each car is equally likely to be anywhere in the distribution).
dfsegoat 7y ago
> I really wish people would start viewing Racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command, rather than a binary attribute you either have or don't. This. Some Childhood development studies have born out that children preferentially treat their own 'ingroup' preferentially over those of an 'outgroup' [1]. This is before they really are "impressionable" as I understand it, so it shows something of an inbuilt mechanism. Though they made this distinction: “Racism connotes hostility and that’s not what we studied. What the study does show is that babies use basic distinctions, including race, to start to cleave the world apart by groups of what they are and aren’t a part of.” [2] 1 - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01752/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0175... 2 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10770563/Babies-show-racial-bias-study-finds.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/107705...
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "preferentially treat their own 'ingroup' preferentially" It might make interesting reading to learn about people who don't have an ingroup or who don't prefer their ingroup. Or then again, it might just be depressing.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    From what I remember from pop-psychology books, people create their in-groups on the spot when the situation allows them to also identify an out-group. This was the classical experiment I remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robbers_cave_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb....
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    People who don’t have an ingroup are called psychopaths. I know at least one person who (claims to have) reasoned themselves into something resembling utilitarianism from that starting point but that’s a minority end point to not having a capacity for group loyalty.
  - spangry 7y ago
core-questions 7y ago
What we're rapidly heading towards is someone being smart enough to implement an AI that detects if something is racist, and then everyone else who has an AI that is trained on a random-sampling dataset from reality, which we all know will have Uncomfortable Conclusions (tm), will have to filter their AI through the censorship to be sure that it doesn't accidentally notice any crimethink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop We basically need this in software so that AI researchers can stop getting lambasted with claims of racism
- falsedan 7y ago
  please, won’t someone think of the racists
  - seph-reed 7y ago
    well, they're not going to think for the minorities and SOMEONE is going to have to be the bigger person here. Empathy is an important part of resolution, as much as that sucks.
  - core-questions 7y ago
    So you didn't learn the lesson of the 20th century dystopian future predictions, and you'd rather implement your own and learn the hard way?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- concordDance 7y ago
  That's needlessly confrontational.
sp332 7y ago
Sure but people are shipping this stuff in production without questioning how good it is or even what kind of problems it might have.
Enginerrrd 7y ago
>It's really only people where you can't tell what it does/is from the outside. Thing is, that's not even true in that it doesn't fully acknowledge the problem. You often CAN tell information from people's outward appearance, albeit probabilistically. Therein lies the problem: you can very easily train an algorithm to be maximally right according to your cost function, but end up biased because the underlying distributions aren't the same between groups. The issue is that as a society we've (mostly) decided that unfairly classifying someone based on correlated but non-causal characteristics is wrong, EVEN in the extreme that you're right more often than you're wrong if you make that assumption.
- um_ya 7y ago
  In many cases, being logically correct is more important than being politically correct. For example: It may be politically correct to drive down a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night, but it isn't logically correct.
  - seph-reed 7y ago
    True, but poorly stated. Which is to say, you aren't wrong, but you're missing the indications of nuance which are really, really important to the personal liberty of not being defined by superficial traits.
  - munificent 7y ago
    It logically correct to do that when it's your neighborhood and you're driving home. But note the implicit bias in your own comment: you assume yourself and all the readers of the comment are not people who live in bad neighborhoods.
    - serf 7y ago
      >But note the implicit bias in your own comment: you assume yourself and all the readers of the comment are not people who live in bad neighborhoods. that assumption results simply from the need for 'bad neighborhood' to be a negative scoring action. if you oversimplify it to get rid of 'implicit bias' (which I don't agree exists in the example), the results turn into near-meaningless babble. "For example: It may be politically correct to do something that ignores statistical dangers in favor of the promise of human goodness, which may result in the possibility for more personal endangerment than other choices, but it isn't logically sound to ignore such statistics for the hope of a less biased personal experience." The example requires the person driving to be detached from the bad neighborhood that they have a choice to drive through. How that isn't an obvious requirement for the example to have merit is beyond me.
underwater 7y ago
Unconscious Bias training tries do teach that, but I've always found the framing and delivery to be counter-productive. They give everyone tests which reveal that primitive part of your brain. Essentially they want to shock you by forcing you to fail. It is almost like they are trying to shame people, which is a terrible way to teach.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Well yeah, step one is showing that there is a problem. Bias training has to do something for the not insignificant amount of people that don’t believe that they have a noticeable bias. If you actually want the training to be effective you have destroy the “but I can’t be racist because...” There’s nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to having bias: women think other women are less competent than their male coworkers, trans women struggle with thinking of other trans women as men, black men find other black men threatening. Your first thought is the one you’ve been conditioned to think and is broadly speaking shared by everyone. It’s when you don’t stop to have the second thought — your own thought that’s the problem. “No, that’s silly. I’ve seen her work — she absolutely knows what she’s talking about.” “She’s a woman. Full stop.” “That guy is just minding his own business and given zero actual signs of being a threat.”
  - underwater 7y ago
    What I'm talking about is the difference between telling people they're inherently flawed ("you have unconcious biases you'll never defeat") instead of that they have a choice to make (”racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command").
  - Chris2048 7y ago
    How about the fact that things like IAT might be junk science: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/12/05/psychologys-favourite-tool-for-measuring-implicit-bias-is-still-mired-in-controversy/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/12/05/psychologys-favourite-t...
- Vinnl 7y ago
  What would you say is a pedagogically better way to help people consciously compensating for that part of your brain, and especially what's the best way to make someone aware of it without shaming them?
empath75 7y ago
> Cars, trees, animals, mountains... everything else, if it looks a way it acts that way. Well there’s all kinds of mimicry in nature to exploit exactly this assumption.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xwdv 7y ago
There are people who are aware of this and are training AI that are allowed to become racist if that’s the direction they take. You won’t hear much about it though because: 1) it’s a sensitive topic that is easily misunderstood by those who aren’t researchers 2) when everyone else is trying to scrub racism out of their models for politically correct reasons, having a “racist” AI can actually produce a competitive advantage in some industries, and it can be a difficult advantage for competitors to get similar performance if they don’t allow for natural racism to emerge. In short, it’s not a big deal, humans have some amount of racism whether they admit it or not. What matters is that you treat people equally and without prejudice, regardless what you may think of their race. Judgements about a group and judgements about an individual are two different things. Racist results don’t even need to be about negative things, it could be as simple as “a person of this race prefers this kind of food over that one”
- esyir 7y ago
  That is most definitely not racist though. Once we go there, we're basically trying to force ourselves to take a worldview that does not accurately represent reality. If my classifier predicts that an Asian guy would probably eat rice, if it's accurate, is it racist? The issue I'd have here isn't racism, it's when race dominates other features resulting in, in this case, poor recommendation quality/variety for Asians who prefer non-rice dishes or vice versa.
groby_b 7y ago
>There will always be slip ups, over-simplifications, snap judgements, subconscious or not. Absolutely. The mark of intelligence is to recognize them and correct for it. And the people who just permanently slip up, and never correct themselves, and somehow always make the same snap judgments? 100% racist.
- seph-reed 7y ago
  I don't think anyone has achieved 100% un-racism, or 100% racism.
Causality1 7y ago
Not to mention that there are different kinds of racism we lump together under one label. Someone can think a certain race is, say, bad at math and still be racist even without disliking that race. Someone can also hate a race without believing they have some inherent inferiority, and that's racist. Similarly, you could simply decide to support your own race at the expense of others out of a sense of loyalty without even disliking other races and that's racism too.
Iv 7y ago
That... what? "And when one user uploaded an image of the Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Joe Biden, Yang who is Asian American, was tagged as “Buddhist” (he is not) while Biden was simply labeled as “grinner.”" They are not removing images that categorize blacks as blacks. They are removing images that are incorrect.
xenocyon 7y ago
It is incorrect that inanimate objects are handled in a bias-free way. For instance, yellow bananas are (by human labelers, and consequently by AIs) labeled 'bananas', while green bananas are labeled 'green bananas' (similar to how a male doctor may be labeled 'doctor' while a female doctor may be labeled 'female doctor'). Even aside from labeling, the choice of data itself may be prone to bias, for example most pictures in an image set may be taken from a camera at human height pointed horizontally, etc. The biases that are racist are simply a subset of the manifold human biases that pervade data and consequently pervade AIs. There is no unbiased algorithm, all are hopelessly contaminated by humans.
- gambiting 7y ago
  >>(similar to how a male doctor may be labeled 'doctor' while a female doctor may be labeled 'female doctor') Isn't that just a bug in the English language though? English very rarely employs variations of the same word based on gender - but that's not true of many other languages. If the labeling was done in say Polish or German suddenly it wouldn't be biased at all, a male doctor would be labeled Lekarz/Artz while a female one would be labeled Lekarka/Ärztin - it's just what it is, no bias here.
hubert1234 7y ago
So what happens if I have genuinely made the experience that black people are less competent on average than white people? I must be shut down, fired, silenced? My judgement must be superficial, must be wrong? Racism is a disgraced subset of pattern matching. Western society is telling me that I'm simply not allowed to pattern match based on race. I think that any form of suppression of truth is ultimately going to backfire.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  edit: I mean, hypothetically, if you were to think black people are less competent on average than white people, why would that be the case?
  - Double_a_92 7y ago
    He's not really thinking that. He is just concerned about society being to politically correct about specific things. I.e. you could probably completely discriminate someone by height, hair color, ... but not by race specifically for some reason.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      Good example - we do have statistical data that proves beyond doubt that men have more automotive accidents than women. Yet in the EU it's illegal for insurance companies to charge men more for car insurance than they would charge a woman for the same insurance, because apparently that's sexist. But somehow no one has any problems with charging a younger driver more than an older driver, even if they both have identical amount of experience, because data supports that younger drivers have more accidents regardless of their experience behind the wheel - and yet that's not ageist and isn't banned.
      - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
        I doubt that there are so many "older drivers" with comparable levels of experience to "younger drivers" that such an evaluation of risk could be beyond doubt. Are you sure such data exists?
alexis_fr 7y ago
Wait, no, that is not how racism starts. Racism starts out of preferential treatment of some people. Most racist people have a « root event », where the other party didn’t get condemned. It may even have happened several times, with various consequences (rape, molestation, repeat racket, etc). Then they proceeded to denounce the rape/molestation/racket to the police. The police doesn’t act because they suspect you are racist. Which has the opposite effect than desired: It doesn’t condemn the criminal, and puts the burden on the victim. Then they seek security in their lives. Therefore, if the probability is high to experience rape, molestation, racket or crime, enough that the racist has been confronted to it in his life, then the first best approximation of judging whether someone might be a criminal is whether he’s free or in jail. That’s in well-functioning societies. In non-functioning societies where criminals are not in jail, the second approximation to protect yourself is secondary indicators, inferred from grossly racist statistics. Here racism is born. It also explains why racist people often still have various friends of the group they are supposed to mistrust. It’s because they were able to assess their probity and trustworthiness in some opportunity. That’s why mixing people by compulsory rules works. But mixing people is a poor palliative. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem if a non-functioning society, so it doesn’t make the people less racist, despite giving the appearance that people work together. Racism is often used with regret by those who exert it. But it is the second best approximation to seek security. Racism is the result of a non-functioning society which is caused by being more lenient on criminals of chosen category. I’m pretty sure it is possible to engineer racism by letting a made-up group get away with crimes.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Ehm care to cite some sources for your well generalized and arbitrary claims, especially regarding "root events"?
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    I thought about it, but if I cite sources, I will be citing racist people. Not something people enjoy reading. But you can find the same discourse in most famous racists of the world, at least currently living. If I have to cite a source, Tommy Robinson (here comes the downvotes) constantly talks (and breaks) about the omerta surrounding the trials he reported on, which made that the rape gangs could proceed for so long with so few hindrances. Go through the list of people recently suppressed from Youtube and you’ll find the same (unadressed) logic. Concerning root events, they are often private, so you have to know the person personally. But go ask around you when people became racist, they’ll often tell you one specific event. It’s interesting to go interviewing an enemy.
ragazzina 7y ago
>I really wish people would start viewing Racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command It this were the case, babies would be racist by default, but they are not. Racism is taught.
solinent 7y ago
As someone who has lived as quite an extreme minority (only 4 people out of 1500 at my high school looked even remotely like me), it's hard to imagine a world where these small slip ups don't happen at all. I wouldn't want to live in that world. I'm guilty as well, to some extent. Our minds are literally categorical machines--in order to fight entropy we find stable states through classification of the world into categories. So literally any form of thought is a form of discrimination between many categories. Every word can be thought of as a category.
Grustaf 7y ago
I think it’s unfortunate that the word “racism” is used both for evil things like apartheid or Jim Crow, and for unconscious bias. Especially when the bias isn’t even to view certain races negatively, just differently. I mean it doesn’t seem like people tended to label some races with negative labels, just that they labeled their race at all, and didn’t do that for white people. At least in the example. I don’t think it is useful to lump these two concepts together.

ALittleLight 7y ago

A car could look fast, but be slow, or have latent problems, software on the car's computer could be fooling emissions tests... Looking at a tree tells you nothing about photosynthesis, tree pheromones, deep relationships with symbiotic insects or bacteria... You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look. That holds for humans and inhumans alike.

deogeo 7y ago
But you can make a pretty good guess: http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...
seph-reed 7y ago
Ultimately we know nothing, so one can always nit-pick any statement into an oversimplified oblivion. There are also cakes that look like cars, model sets which have miniature mountains, on and on. But in typical nature, it works well enough to breed and see what comes next.
- desert_boi 7y ago
  Tactical Nihilism sounds a lot like solipsism. "We can't ever not make generalizations, so we shouldn't even try to make statements."
core-questions 7y ago
This is a perfect example of Tactical Nihilism. You're basically denying the existence of a massive amount of reproducible psychometrics and anthropological research because it makes you uncomfortable, and you're declaring that heuristic analysis of available, salient facts is not worthwhile because "you can't understand very much at all based on how things look." When an arborist "looks" at a tree, they identify the kind of tree it is, and that connects to all of the research they know about that species of tree. It's reasonable to suppose that a new instance of a known kind of tree is going to have properties in common with all the other known instances.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  The claim wasn't that people are harder to understand than trees based on appearance - it was that people are harder to understand than anything based on appearance. It seems like a poorly articulated reference to people having an interior mind - but so do animals. Can you identify a friendly or sick or lazy dog just by looking? No.
  - ars 7y ago
    > Can you identify a friendly or sick or lazy dog just by looking? No. ?? Obviously you can. Why do you think you can't?
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      they're talking about the times when you can't. you can't identify every friendly dog just by looking at it, you'll identify dogs that are also acting friendly and doing things people have found preceded positive experiences. you can't identify every sick dog just by looking at it, otherwise the vet would never find additional issues. and so on
      - PeterisP 7y ago
        This is a case of "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. " Yes, it's wrong to assume that you can tell everything about that dog by looking at it - but it's so much more uncomparably wrong to consider that you can tell nothing about friendly or sick dogs based on looking at them! Observating the behaviors and dog breeds correlating with previous friendly and unfriendly experiences is a very useful, somewhat reliable predictor of how likely this particular dog is to be (un)friendly. Sure, if you know this particular dog, then that should supercede any group information, but if not, then that's all the information you have, it is useful information that correlates with (future) reality that matters to you, and so it's prudent to use it. Appearing "nonjudgmental" by throwing away information and judgment is simply stupid, and bound to get you bitten at least in the metaphorical way.
didericis 7y ago
Empiricism is basically the art of inference based on outward appearance in different contexts. I’d argue we learn everything based on appearance. You have to do more than just observe things superficially and take context into account, but for something to be measurable it has to have some sort of outward appearance, whether that be direct, as in something you can see with your naked eye, or indirect, as in something we need to measure through some other instrument.
sershe 7y ago
You can, probabilistically. If you randomly sample cars from all the street-legal models in the US (for example), and sort them by how fast they are based on appearance only, you would not be 100% correct, but you'd probably do much better than if you claim that "You can't understand very much at all just based on how things look" and sort them randomly (the prior being that each car is equally likely to be anywhere in the distribution).

dfsegoat 7y ago

> I really wish people would start viewing Racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command, rather than a binary attribute you either have or don't. This. Some Childhood development studies have born out that children preferentially treat their own 'ingroup' preferentially over those of an 'outgroup' [1]. This is before they really are "impressionable" as I understand it, so it shows something of an inbuilt mechanism. Though they made this distinction: “Racism connotes hostility and that’s not what we studied. What the study does show is that babies use basic distinctions, including race, to start to cleave the world apart by groups of what they are and aren’t a part of.” [2] 1 - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01752/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0175... 2 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10770563/Babies-show-racial-bias-study-finds.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/107705...

perl4ever 7y ago
"preferentially treat their own 'ingroup' preferentially" It might make interesting reading to learn about people who don't have an ingroup or who don't prefer their ingroup. Or then again, it might just be depressing.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  From what I remember from pop-psychology books, people create their in-groups on the spot when the situation allows them to also identify an out-group. This was the classical experiment I remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robbers_cave_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb....
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  People who don’t have an ingroup are called psychopaths. I know at least one person who (claims to have) reasoned themselves into something resembling utilitarianism from that starting point but that’s a minority end point to not having a capacity for group loyalty.
- spangry 7y ago

core-questions 7y ago

What we're rapidly heading towards is someone being smart enough to implement an AI that detects if something is racist, and then everyone else who has an AI that is trained on a random-sampling dataset from reality, which we all know will have Uncomfortable Conclusions (tm), will have to filter their AI through the censorship to be sure that it doesn't accidentally notice any crimethink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop We basically need this in software so that AI researchers can stop getting lambasted with claims of racism

falsedan 7y ago
please, won’t someone think of the racists
- seph-reed 7y ago
  well, they're not going to think for the minorities and SOMEONE is going to have to be the bigger person here. Empathy is an important part of resolution, as much as that sucks.
- core-questions 7y ago
  So you didn't learn the lesson of the 20th century dystopian future predictions, and you'd rather implement your own and learn the hard way?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
concordDance 7y ago
That's needlessly confrontational.

sp332 7y ago

Sure but people are shipping this stuff in production without questioning how good it is or even what kind of problems it might have.

Enginerrrd 7y ago

>It's really only people where you can't tell what it does/is from the outside. Thing is, that's not even true in that it doesn't fully acknowledge the problem. You often CAN tell information from people's outward appearance, albeit probabilistically. Therein lies the problem: you can very easily train an algorithm to be maximally right according to your cost function, but end up biased because the underlying distributions aren't the same between groups. The issue is that as a society we've (mostly) decided that unfairly classifying someone based on correlated but non-causal characteristics is wrong, EVEN in the extreme that you're right more often than you're wrong if you make that assumption.

um_ya 7y ago
In many cases, being logically correct is more important than being politically correct. For example: It may be politically correct to drive down a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night, but it isn't logically correct.
- seph-reed 7y ago
  True, but poorly stated. Which is to say, you aren't wrong, but you're missing the indications of nuance which are really, really important to the personal liberty of not being defined by superficial traits.
- munificent 7y ago
  It logically correct to do that when it's your neighborhood and you're driving home. But note the implicit bias in your own comment: you assume yourself and all the readers of the comment are not people who live in bad neighborhoods.
  - serf 7y ago
    >But note the implicit bias in your own comment: you assume yourself and all the readers of the comment are not people who live in bad neighborhoods. that assumption results simply from the need for 'bad neighborhood' to be a negative scoring action. if you oversimplify it to get rid of 'implicit bias' (which I don't agree exists in the example), the results turn into near-meaningless babble. "For example: It may be politically correct to do something that ignores statistical dangers in favor of the promise of human goodness, which may result in the possibility for more personal endangerment than other choices, but it isn't logically sound to ignore such statistics for the hope of a less biased personal experience." The example requires the person driving to be detached from the bad neighborhood that they have a choice to drive through. How that isn't an obvious requirement for the example to have merit is beyond me.

underwater 7y ago

Unconscious Bias training tries do teach that, but I've always found the framing and delivery to be counter-productive. They give everyone tests which reveal that primitive part of your brain. Essentially they want to shock you by forcing you to fail. It is almost like they are trying to shame people, which is a terrible way to teach.

Spivak 7y ago
Well yeah, step one is showing that there is a problem. Bias training has to do something for the not insignificant amount of people that don’t believe that they have a noticeable bias. If you actually want the training to be effective you have destroy the “but I can’t be racist because...” There’s nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to having bias: women think other women are less competent than their male coworkers, trans women struggle with thinking of other trans women as men, black men find other black men threatening. Your first thought is the one you’ve been conditioned to think and is broadly speaking shared by everyone. It’s when you don’t stop to have the second thought — your own thought that’s the problem. “No, that’s silly. I’ve seen her work — she absolutely knows what she’s talking about.” “She’s a woman. Full stop.” “That guy is just minding his own business and given zero actual signs of being a threat.”
- underwater 7y ago
  What I'm talking about is the difference between telling people they're inherently flawed ("you have unconcious biases you'll never defeat") instead of that they have a choice to make (”racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command").
- Chris2048 7y ago
  How about the fact that things like IAT might be junk science: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/12/05/psychologys-favourite-tool-for-measuring-implicit-bias-is-still-mired-in-controversy/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/12/05/psychologys-favourite-t...
Vinnl 7y ago
What would you say is a pedagogically better way to help people consciously compensating for that part of your brain, and especially what's the best way to make someone aware of it without shaming them?

empath75 7y ago

> Cars, trees, animals, mountains... everything else, if it looks a way it acts that way. Well there’s all kinds of mimicry in nature to exploit exactly this assumption.

deleted 7y ago
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xwdv 7y ago

There are people who are aware of this and are training AI that are allowed to become racist if that’s the direction they take. You won’t hear much about it though because: 1) it’s a sensitive topic that is easily misunderstood by those who aren’t researchers 2) when everyone else is trying to scrub racism out of their models for politically correct reasons, having a “racist” AI can actually produce a competitive advantage in some industries, and it can be a difficult advantage for competitors to get similar performance if they don’t allow for natural racism to emerge. In short, it’s not a big deal, humans have some amount of racism whether they admit it or not. What matters is that you treat people equally and without prejudice, regardless what you may think of their race. Judgements about a group and judgements about an individual are two different things. Racist results don’t even need to be about negative things, it could be as simple as “a person of this race prefers this kind of food over that one”

esyir 7y ago
That is most definitely not racist though. Once we go there, we're basically trying to force ourselves to take a worldview that does not accurately represent reality. If my classifier predicts that an Asian guy would probably eat rice, if it's accurate, is it racist? The issue I'd have here isn't racism, it's when race dominates other features resulting in, in this case, poor recommendation quality/variety for Asians who prefer non-rice dishes or vice versa.

groby_b 7y ago

>There will always be slip ups, over-simplifications, snap judgements, subconscious or not. Absolutely. The mark of intelligence is to recognize them and correct for it. And the people who just permanently slip up, and never correct themselves, and somehow always make the same snap judgments? 100% racist.

seph-reed 7y ago
I don't think anyone has achieved 100% un-racism, or 100% racism.

Causality1 7y ago

Not to mention that there are different kinds of racism we lump together under one label. Someone can think a certain race is, say, bad at math and still be racist even without disliking that race. Someone can also hate a race without believing they have some inherent inferiority, and that's racist. Similarly, you could simply decide to support your own race at the expense of others out of a sense of loyalty without even disliking other races and that's racism too.

Iv 7y ago

That... what? "And when one user uploaded an image of the Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Joe Biden, Yang who is Asian American, was tagged as “Buddhist” (he is not) while Biden was simply labeled as “grinner.”" They are not removing images that categorize blacks as blacks. They are removing images that are incorrect.

xenocyon 7y ago

It is incorrect that inanimate objects are handled in a bias-free way. For instance, yellow bananas are (by human labelers, and consequently by AIs) labeled 'bananas', while green bananas are labeled 'green bananas' (similar to how a male doctor may be labeled 'doctor' while a female doctor may be labeled 'female doctor'). Even aside from labeling, the choice of data itself may be prone to bias, for example most pictures in an image set may be taken from a camera at human height pointed horizontally, etc. The biases that are racist are simply a subset of the manifold human biases that pervade data and consequently pervade AIs. There is no unbiased algorithm, all are hopelessly contaminated by humans.

gambiting 7y ago
>>(similar to how a male doctor may be labeled 'doctor' while a female doctor may be labeled 'female doctor') Isn't that just a bug in the English language though? English very rarely employs variations of the same word based on gender - but that's not true of many other languages. If the labeling was done in say Polish or German suddenly it wouldn't be biased at all, a male doctor would be labeled Lekarz/Artz while a female one would be labeled Lekarka/Ärztin - it's just what it is, no bias here.

hubert1234 7y ago

So what happens if I have genuinely made the experience that black people are less competent on average than white people? I must be shut down, fired, silenced? My judgement must be superficial, must be wrong? Racism is a disgraced subset of pattern matching. Western society is telling me that I'm simply not allowed to pattern match based on race. I think that any form of suppression of truth is ultimately going to backfire.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
edit: I mean, hypothetically, if you were to think black people are less competent on average than white people, why would that be the case?
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  He's not really thinking that. He is just concerned about society being to politically correct about specific things. I.e. you could probably completely discriminate someone by height, hair color, ... but not by race specifically for some reason.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Good example - we do have statistical data that proves beyond doubt that men have more automotive accidents than women. Yet in the EU it's illegal for insurance companies to charge men more for car insurance than they would charge a woman for the same insurance, because apparently that's sexist. But somehow no one has any problems with charging a younger driver more than an older driver, even if they both have identical amount of experience, because data supports that younger drivers have more accidents regardless of their experience behind the wheel - and yet that's not ageist and isn't banned.
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      I doubt that there are so many "older drivers" with comparable levels of experience to "younger drivers" that such an evaluation of risk could be beyond doubt. Are you sure such data exists?

alexis_fr 7y ago

Wait, no, that is not how racism starts. Racism starts out of preferential treatment of some people. Most racist people have a « root event », where the other party didn’t get condemned. It may even have happened several times, with various consequences (rape, molestation, repeat racket, etc). Then they proceeded to denounce the rape/molestation/racket to the police. The police doesn’t act because they suspect you are racist. Which has the opposite effect than desired: It doesn’t condemn the criminal, and puts the burden on the victim. Then they seek security in their lives. Therefore, if the probability is high to experience rape, molestation, racket or crime, enough that the racist has been confronted to it in his life, then the first best approximation of judging whether someone might be a criminal is whether he’s free or in jail. That’s in well-functioning societies. In non-functioning societies where criminals are not in jail, the second approximation to protect yourself is secondary indicators, inferred from grossly racist statistics. Here racism is born. It also explains why racist people often still have various friends of the group they are supposed to mistrust. It’s because they were able to assess their probity and trustworthiness in some opportunity. That’s why mixing people by compulsory rules works. But mixing people is a poor palliative. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem if a non-functioning society, so it doesn’t make the people less racist, despite giving the appearance that people work together. Racism is often used with regret by those who exert it. But it is the second best approximation to seek security. Racism is the result of a non-functioning society which is caused by being more lenient on criminals of chosen category. I’m pretty sure it is possible to engineer racism by letting a made-up group get away with crimes.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
Ehm care to cite some sources for your well generalized and arbitrary claims, especially regarding "root events"?
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  I thought about it, but if I cite sources, I will be citing racist people. Not something people enjoy reading. But you can find the same discourse in most famous racists of the world, at least currently living. If I have to cite a source, Tommy Robinson (here comes the downvotes) constantly talks (and breaks) about the omerta surrounding the trials he reported on, which made that the rape gangs could proceed for so long with so few hindrances. Go through the list of people recently suppressed from Youtube and you’ll find the same (unadressed) logic. Concerning root events, they are often private, so you have to know the person personally. But go ask around you when people became racist, they’ll often tell you one specific event. It’s interesting to go interviewing an enemy.

ragazzina 7y ago

>I really wish people would start viewing Racism as a willingness to let that primitive part of the mind be in command It this were the case, babies would be racist by default, but they are not. Racism is taught.

solinent 7y ago

As someone who has lived as quite an extreme minority (only 4 people out of 1500 at my high school looked even remotely like me), it's hard to imagine a world where these small slip ups don't happen at all. I wouldn't want to live in that world. I'm guilty as well, to some extent. Our minds are literally categorical machines--in order to fight entropy we find stable states through classification of the world into categories. So literally any form of thought is a form of discrimination between many categories. Every word can be thought of as a category.

Grustaf 7y ago

I think it’s unfortunate that the word “racism” is used both for evil things like apartheid or Jim Crow, and for unconscious bias. Especially when the bias isn’t even to view certain races negatively, just differently. I mean it doesn’t seem like people tended to label some races with negative labels, just that they labeled their race at all, and didn’t do that for white people. At least in the example. I don’t think it is useful to lump these two concepts together.