3 ms·

> It would be like calling a correctness bug "systemic fraud" - how are the authors of the system supposed to avoid taking that as a personal attack? Perhaps t

• nerdponx 6y ago
  Anecdata: At work one time I created a machine learning "algorithm" that turned out to be systemically biased in a way that was both unintended and distasteful. I'm sure I've done it other times, but this is the one time that we actually realized it. The issue was flagged internally and the model was improved until we felt like we were no longer producing bigoted results. I certainly did not take offense at the suggestion that my model might be racist. On the contrary, I considered it a very important and serious problem that needed to be resolved. It's worth mentioning that part of the reason we even caught the problem is that some of my colleagues at the time would have been affected by the adverse outcome, had they been subject to the judgement of the model. If I didn't personally work with people who fell into the affected group, I might never have noticed the problem in the first place.