5 ms·

Hire more minorities in ML. One of the few industries where forced diversity is a good thing since your models will be better (wider range of opinions and sourc

by aiaiai 6y ago

Hire more minorities in ML. One of the few industries where forced diversity is a good thing since your models will be better (wider range of opinions and sources). See, it's not actually hard. Gebru is just correct in saying you are not listening.

tinyhouse 6y ago
You give too much credit to the people who build those systems. Having more minorities in ML is a good thing, but I don't think it's gonna change anything regarding bias in ML systems.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
ML, like most programming fields, has quite a few minorities - many organizations are majority-minority.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Yes, but that doesn't mean representative of all minorities. Very few Black people and Native Americans, for instance, even if Asian people are represented well.
  - jcims 6y ago
    This is immaterial. What about blind folks or quadriplegics or folks with chromosomal defects. Adding a black person to a team and expecting them to somehow fix anything beyond what they are trained at working on is unfair and unrealistic. I mentioned before but this is the team that created the PULSE algorithm that made Obama look like a white guy from Arizona - https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Authors-of-pulse.jpg https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Au...
    - mlyle 6y ago
      When the rationale is that having someone with an experience of being disadvantaged might be particularly inclined to help build a less biased system, one hardly refutes it by pointing out there are a lot of [not very disadvantaged] minorities on the team. But one might earn some pedantry points with the argument.
      - jcims 6y ago
        What's the chance that a black engineer on an ML team doing work like this isn't also from the 'corporate(or educated) class'. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697472 Black cops shoot black men all day long. I don't see why black ML folks are going to be completely immune to all of the pressures that have allowed the domain to get to its current state. While I'm sure many would accept the challenge, it's waaay too much to ask or expect of them. Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations.
        mlyle 6y ago
        > Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations. It sounds like we mostly agree. It certainly doesn't hurt to have someone who's been the subject of unfair profiling before to get his spidey sense going at the implications of the system, but it isn't a cure-all.
        jcims 6y ago
        Yep!
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Sure, and in some cases that does matter. But it seems unlikely that the PULSE model was biased towards white people because of latent racism, given that 3 of the 5 researchers who built it weren't white.
jcims 6y ago
The underlying (racially biased) superresolution algorithm was called PULSE and the code was released as an artifact of this paper: Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03808v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03808v1.pdf Here are the authors: Sachit Menon, Alexandru Damian, Shijia Hu, Nikhil Ravi, Cynthia Rudin They conveniently captured an image of them all in one place for us here - https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Authors-of-pulse.jpg https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Au... Pretty diverse team if you ask me. Sprinkling underrepresented (and therefore 'underpowered') representation into engineering teams will solve a lot of issues, but I think it has yet to be proven that it's going to help ML bias.

by aiaiai 6y ago

tinyhouse 6y ago

You give too much credit to the people who build those systems. Having more minorities in ML is a good thing, but I don't think it's gonna change anything regarding bias in ML systems.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

ML, like most programming fields, has quite a few minorities - many organizations are majority-minority.

mlyle 6y ago
Yes, but that doesn't mean representative of all minorities. Very few Black people and Native Americans, for instance, even if Asian people are represented well.
- jcims 6y ago
  This is immaterial. What about blind folks or quadriplegics or folks with chromosomal defects. Adding a black person to a team and expecting them to somehow fix anything beyond what they are trained at working on is unfair and unrealistic. I mentioned before but this is the team that created the PULSE algorithm that made Obama look like a white guy from Arizona - https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Authors-of-pulse.jpg https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Au...
  - mlyle 6y ago
    When the rationale is that having someone with an experience of being disadvantaged might be particularly inclined to help build a less biased system, one hardly refutes it by pointing out there are a lot of [not very disadvantaged] minorities on the team. But one might earn some pedantry points with the argument.
    - jcims 6y ago
      What's the chance that a black engineer on an ML team doing work like this isn't also from the 'corporate(or educated) class'. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697472 Black cops shoot black men all day long. I don't see why black ML folks are going to be completely immune to all of the pressures that have allowed the domain to get to its current state. While I'm sure many would accept the challenge, it's waaay too much to ask or expect of them. Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations.
      - mlyle 6y ago
        > Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations. It sounds like we mostly agree. It certainly doesn't hurt to have someone who's been the subject of unfair profiling before to get his spidey sense going at the implications of the system, but it isn't a cure-all.
        jcims 6y ago
        Yep!
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Sure, and in some cases that does matter. But it seems unlikely that the PULSE model was biased towards white people because of latent racism, given that 3 of the 5 researchers who built it weren't white.

jcims 6y ago

The underlying (racially biased) superresolution algorithm was called PULSE and the code was released as an artifact of this paper: Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03808v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03808v1.pdf Here are the authors: Sachit Menon, Alexandru Damian, Shijia Hu, Nikhil Ravi, Cynthia Rudin They conveniently captured an image of them all in one place for us here - https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Authors-of-pulse.jpg https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Au... Pretty diverse team if you ask me. Sprinkling underrepresented (and therefore 'underpowered') representation into engineering teams will solve a lot of issues, but I think it has yet to be proven that it's going to help ML bias.