4 ms·

This caused glorious meltdowns on Twitter. Some people just don't want to face reality.

by soundnote 5y ago

lostlogin 5y ago
What reality is that? I haven’t seen the thread sorry, have you a link?
- soundnote 5y ago
  That race is a physically real thing that goes beyond skin color and means pervasive differences in all parts of human biology, some meaningful, some not so much. The AI community is very invested in making a colorblind AI that can't or won't use racial characteristics in doing its job, which at least in medicine seems completely idiotic to me. We know that even at the rough proxy level of race that populations sometimes need different treatment for best results, and not building for that just leaves easy value at the table. But the ideologues building things really, really, really want it all to be totally arbitrary categories and all differences to stem from society's treatment of people. Actual biological differences are verboten.
  - mlnewb2 5y ago
    The only Twitter meltdowns were from your ilk. Racist Twitter exploded for some reason. It didn't seem like they (or you) even read the paper. At no point do the authors suggest making AI colorblind.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The disquieting factor is that the network is identifying race of patients using signal that humans can't see. It's one thing if there are actual biological differences that should be factored into treatment... It's another if the AI is observing race differences that a human can't explain but as a result the AI might give different answers to other questions because it's factoring in a race signal that we can't see. We wouldn't trust "If this patient were white, I'd give this answer, but since this patient is black I'm going to give that answer... Can't tell you why, my experience just indicates to me that's correct" coming from a human doctor, so we definitely won't accept it coming from a machine. Not without a concrete reason the answer should be different if the patient is black. If I understand correctly, the paper's recommendation is for follow-up research to understand what signal the network is actually keying in to. There might be an actual biological difference. This paper wasn't able to identify it.

This caused glorious meltdowns on Twitter. Some people just don't want to face reality.

lostlogin 5y ago

What reality is that? I haven’t seen the thread sorry, have you a link?

soundnote 5y ago
That race is a physically real thing that goes beyond skin color and means pervasive differences in all parts of human biology, some meaningful, some not so much. The AI community is very invested in making a colorblind AI that can't or won't use racial characteristics in doing its job, which at least in medicine seems completely idiotic to me. We know that even at the rough proxy level of race that populations sometimes need different treatment for best results, and not building for that just leaves easy value at the table. But the ideologues building things really, really, really want it all to be totally arbitrary categories and all differences to stem from society's treatment of people. Actual biological differences are verboten.
- mlnewb2 5y ago
  The only Twitter meltdowns were from your ilk. Racist Twitter exploded for some reason. It didn't seem like they (or you) even read the paper. At no point do the authors suggest making AI colorblind.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The disquieting factor is that the network is identifying race of patients using signal that humans can't see. It's one thing if there are actual biological differences that should be factored into treatment... It's another if the AI is observing race differences that a human can't explain but as a result the AI might give different answers to other questions because it's factoring in a race signal that we can't see. We wouldn't trust "If this patient were white, I'd give this answer, but since this patient is black I'm going to give that answer... Can't tell you why, my experience just indicates to me that's correct" coming from a human doctor, so we definitely won't accept it coming from a machine. Not without a concrete reason the answer should be different if the patient is black. If I understand correctly, the paper's recommendation is for follow-up research to understand what signal the network is actually keying in to. There might be an actual biological difference. This paper wasn't able to identify it.