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> ... people with the skin color in question signed off on the product. > ... if you otherwise deploy that model in production without so much as checking to s
by sprayk 6y ago
> ... people with the skin color in question signed off on the product.
> ... if you otherwise deploy that model in production without so much as checking to see if your model generalized well to dark-skinned faces, or without attempting to add some post-hoc bias correction, etc
Neither of these would rule out systemic racism in either case, though, since, as you said, the problem is that "the outcome is biased against a certain group of people". Regardless of whether there were BIPOC people signing off or whether you had a perfect training set/etc, the only thing that matters is the outcome.
- nerdponx 6y agoThat's right. My example stated two very different outcomes. One outcome: an academic result is published. Other outcomes: something is put into production.
- sprayk 6y agoso you agree that attributing an outcome to systemic racism is unfalsifiable?
- nerdponx 6y agoI see what you're saying. Mind you, I'm not a sociologist, so anything I say here is going to be a suboptimal paraphrasing. Systemic racism is not a cause of something, but a description of a state of existence. Systemic racism is itself the existence of inequitable outcomes in the context of a society that was literally founded on overt racism. That something "is" systemic racism is falsifiable by demonstrating that one or both of those criteria is not met. So this particular outcome will always be definitionally systemic racism until the outcome is no longer inequitable, or the USA has moved meaningfully past its white supremacist origins to the point where individual cases of accidental bias are truly individual cases and not part of a pattern. Personally, I am okay with that. Ceteris non paribus sunt.