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> I've yet to see any "uncomfortable truth" from psychometric research that wasn't relatively easily explained as culturally tied. So you're not aware of race

> I've yet to see any "uncomfortable truth" from psychometric research that wasn't relatively easily explained as culturally tied. So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? If you're not aware of this, it's literally because it's an uncomfortable truth that is deliberately obfuscated and underreported to avoid controversy. Nevertheless, it persists as a datapoint. > The point is that neither this study nor the homosexuality study have a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality. You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. There's also no reason to immediately discount early research in this direction; you run the risk of being like Minsky, fighting against the utility of the Perceptron, which has become the basis of these shiny new ML systems after a long hiatus. > And "predicting" some arbitrary social attribute based on social conditioning is just encoding social bias into the model, which is bad. This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). Sure, such things are hard to predict totally accurately and are highly context specific, but not out of the question for reasonable predictions given a big enough dataset. Again, I won't pretend these things have been trained on really solid, representative data, yet... but that's only a matter of time, and when it does happen, it has to be data that represents reality _as it is_, not some dreamed up reality where the social issues and complexities we have today aren't included. You can look at a person and tell me a lot about them and you can be pretty confident; you can guess their background, gender, how much they take care of themselves, what their likely socioeconomic status is, maybe even more just from looking at them. Not perfectly, but enough to inform predictions that have evolutionary consequences - otherwise, Nature would not have wasted massive amounts of neural wetware on them to start with. You do this every day whether you'd like to admit it or not; depending on where you live your personal safety may highly depend upon it, too. Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? I'm certainly aware of such studies, I'm also aware that pretty much every study that has found some difference in IQ between races has been found to contain social conditioning issues. Whether that was early on issues like nutrition that caused entire standard deviation jumps in IQ, or more recent discoveries like how the race of the test proctor can impact IQ and similar studies, or that if you pay someone more prior to an IQ test, they'll perform better. Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. > You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. That's okay. > This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). No, I am well aware that society exists and people can have outward indications of traits. My point is that we should not build systems that discriminate based on those things. And there's no point in building a system that can recognize a person's gender or social class or whatnot if we won't use it, and any use of such a system will be discriminatory and harmful, you're welcome to try and provide a counterexample though. > Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes. This doesn't follow. If it's not underground it will also only be used for bad purposes, but be developed more quickly. And social pressure to not work on or be involved with such tools means that it will be used for significantly fewer bad purposes. Using facial recognition for policing is a bad purpose. We were going that direction, now we're not, not because the police don't want to, but because social pressure against researchers, by other researchers, caused them to stop developing the products in that realm. That's a clear win.
- User23 6y ago
  > Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. This is deeply unfair to psychometrics researchers. For it to be racist the claim would have to be that group differences in mean psychometric differences are overwhelmingly hereditary and so far as I know absolutely nobody with any education on the subject is making that claim. They allow that it could be nutrition, toxin exposure, cultural, or any number of other factors. Nobody credible says it's just heredity because the evidence doesn't support that. Nonetheless, the differences are measurable and persistent.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? I'm certainly aware of such studies, I'm also aware that pretty much every study that has found some difference in IQ between races has been found to contain social conditioning issues. Whether that was early on issues like nutrition that caused entire standard deviation jumps in IQ, or more recent discoveries like how the race of the test proctor can impact IQ and similar studies, or that if you pay someone more prior to an IQ test, they'll perform better. Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. > You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. That's okay. > This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). No, I am well aware that society exists and people can have outward indications of traits. My point is that we should not build systems that discriminate based on those things. And there's no point in building a system that can recognize a person's gender or social class or whatnot if we won't use it, and any use of such a system will be discriminatory and harmful, you're welcome to try and provide a counterexample though. > Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes. This doesn't follow. If it's not underground it will also only be used for bad purposes, but be developed more quickly. And social pressure to not work on or be involved with such tools means that it will be used for significantly fewer bad purposes. Using facial recognition for policing is a bad purpose. We were going that direction, now we're not, not because the police don't want to, but because social pressure against researchers, by other researchers, caused them to stop developing the products in that realm. That's a clear win.

User23 6y ago
> Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. This is deeply unfair to psychometrics researchers. For it to be racist the claim would have to be that group differences in mean psychometric differences are overwhelmingly hereditary and so far as I know absolutely nobody with any education on the subject is making that claim. They allow that it could be nutrition, toxin exposure, cultural, or any number of other factors. Nobody credible says it's just heredity because the evidence doesn't support that. Nonetheless, the differences are measurable and persistent.