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That is not my understanding of the ethical dilemma. People are different, and belonging to groups is highly predictive, and that is what ML algorithms depend u

That is not my understanding of the ethical dilemma. People are different, and belonging to groups is highly predictive, and that is what ML algorithms depend upon to classify you (every feature is a group). The ethical dilemma is, should you be doomed to be assessed based on your belonging to an arbitrary set of groups? It is highly predictive, but also by definition, discriminatory. Business entities benefit, because on average the predictions are right, but individuals are being discriminated against, and btw, besides the protected categories, other types of discrimination are also unfair.

biasedbrain 5y ago
You should be allowed to think and perceive and notice things, and use tools to help you do so. It is ridiculous to mandate algorithms should be modified to hide statistical facts about the world. by all means, educate people that just because some population is perhaps on average more criminal, it doesn't imply any individual belonging to that population is also more criminal. To hide the statistics would also hurt efforts to find solutions. That can not be a good thing. Edit: if you don't like the criminal example, what about noticing some populations are on average poorer than others? Would that be a good thing, because government money could be diverted their way, or a bad thing, because banks would be less inclined to lend them money, and landlords would be less likely to rent them a home?
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  The point of contention is not whether ugly statistical data should be hidden away. That is a stupid conspiracy theory. Sociologists have no problem publishing all kinds of ugly statistical data. The problems start when for profit entities or governments, start deciding to discriminate against individuals because they belong to certain groups. Statistical data applied to individuals is always going to result in injustice. The thought of the economy at large, or the government reducing an individual to a few datapoints and deciding their fate based on group statistics is just about the scariest communist dystopian nightmare, as far as I am concerned. It robs people of their own humanity.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    You can't just call everything you don't like a conspiracy theory. I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. Why not just work on fixing the causes of the unflattering statistics in real life, rather than inventing a new framework to make ML models provide less accurate predictions? How do you know these manual override techniques aren't introducing inequity somewhere else in the model? Pareto optimality seems like it should be a very real concern here.
    - nl 5y ago
      > I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. I've never seen this. Can you link some examples?
      - chroem- 5y ago
        I invite you to spend lots of time digging through search results, which I myself decline to do since these conversations are rarely productive, however this frequently comes up whenever there's a thread discussing declining white demographics in the US. There is usually someone who says we should stop collecting these statistics altogether because it gives fuel to white nationalists. There are more examples beyond that, but those stick out in my mind because they were so blatant. And while people will surely respond to this post with "Ha, got him! He can't link to a specific example!", I don't believe it's a reasonable expectation of me to catalogue the thousands of comments I read on this website.
        nl 5y ago
        I'm interested in those threads (I do a lot of work with demographics), but I've never noticed that. Searching for "US demographics collection nationalists" finds one result (your comment above - and presumably soon this one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I tried "US data collection nationalists" but that only found one page of results none of which supported your assertion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Do you have a better set of search terms?

biasedbrain 5y ago

You should be allowed to think and perceive and notice things, and use tools to help you do so. It is ridiculous to mandate algorithms should be modified to hide statistical facts about the world. by all means, educate people that just because some population is perhaps on average more criminal, it doesn't imply any individual belonging to that population is also more criminal. To hide the statistics would also hurt efforts to find solutions. That can not be a good thing. Edit: if you don't like the criminal example, what about noticing some populations are on average poorer than others? Would that be a good thing, because government money could be diverted their way, or a bad thing, because banks would be less inclined to lend them money, and landlords would be less likely to rent them a home?

mustafa_pasi 5y ago
The point of contention is not whether ugly statistical data should be hidden away. That is a stupid conspiracy theory. Sociologists have no problem publishing all kinds of ugly statistical data. The problems start when for profit entities or governments, start deciding to discriminate against individuals because they belong to certain groups. Statistical data applied to individuals is always going to result in injustice. The thought of the economy at large, or the government reducing an individual to a few datapoints and deciding their fate based on group statistics is just about the scariest communist dystopian nightmare, as far as I am concerned. It robs people of their own humanity.
- chroem- 5y ago
  You can't just call everything you don't like a conspiracy theory. I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. Why not just work on fixing the causes of the unflattering statistics in real life, rather than inventing a new framework to make ML models provide less accurate predictions? How do you know these manual override techniques aren't introducing inequity somewhere else in the model? Pareto optimality seems like it should be a very real concern here.
  - nl 5y ago
    > I have seen plenty of people on HN arguing for censorship of unflattering statistics to achieve social justice goals. I've never seen this. Can you link some examples?
    - chroem- 5y ago
      I invite you to spend lots of time digging through search results, which I myself decline to do since these conversations are rarely productive, however this frequently comes up whenever there's a thread discussing declining white demographics in the US. There is usually someone who says we should stop collecting these statistics altogether because it gives fuel to white nationalists. There are more examples beyond that, but those stick out in my mind because they were so blatant. And while people will surely respond to this post with "Ha, got him! He can't link to a specific example!", I don't believe it's a reasonable expectation of me to catalogue the thousands of comments I read on this website.
      - nl 5y ago
        I'm interested in those threads (I do a lot of work with demographics), but I've never noticed that. Searching for "US demographics collection nationalists" finds one result (your comment above - and presumably soon this one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I tried "US data collection nationalists" but that only found one page of results none of which supported your assertion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=US%20demographic%20collection%20nationalists&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Do you have a better set of search terms?